It’s fascinating to read that David Green, worth 4.5 billion dollars, is upset about the mandate to pay for birth control and believes that somehow an IUD covered with spermicide is against God’s will. Apparently, the company pays above minimum wage–and closes on Sundays (though the employees stock shelves on those days). As corporations go, Green seems to be about as concerned about the poor as anyone. And of course, he has the right to his beliefs. However, it’s always interesting to me how much pride we often take in our ability to follow Christ (Green believes his wealth is a sign of God’s favor and has said so) when Jesus himself put the bar for goodness at a height where the only reasonable response is humility. And it’s also interesting that we want to equate our own goodness to our ability to control what other people do.

In his response to the rich young ruler, Jesus couldn’t have been clearer in articulating the distance between wealth and virtue:

[18] A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

[19] “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good — except God alone. [20] You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’”

[21] “All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said.

[22] When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

[23] When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was a man of great wealth.

[24] Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! [25] Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

And then there is, of course, the story of the Good Samaritan, who asked no questions about the wounded stranger whose care he paid for: not, what was he doing on a road among robbers, not, what did he do to bring this upon himself.

Pretty radical. Impossible. But it’s what he said, and it’s in the Bible that Green quotes in his employee handbook and reads at staff meetings, the Bible he focuses on in a traveling display of which he is especially proud.

And it’s the kind of selflessness, alas, that most of us are incapable of. I know I am. The question becomes, can a corporation or even a nation be Christ-like? It can behave ethically, of course. But can it show the kind of radical generosity, the full measure of grace, the kind of humility that the man who healed the Roman soldier who came to arrest him, who did not fight back, who did not establish a kingdom and expressly refused an earthly kingdom as not being what he was about? After all, such a kingdom is based upon love, a love that is not puffed up, not insistent upon its way. And since we’re all like that to some extent, perhaps we should recognize it as part of our human condition, and try not to label it Christian?