A sermon preached by Canon Kenneth Padley.
Sunday 2 August 2026
What is the point of money? Where does it come from and to what ends might it be put? These questions are lurking in the background of today’s first reading, the encounter between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
We heard how the Queen chose to lead a high-level long-distance delegation from her territories on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula to the King of the Hebrews in Jerusalem. It was a trip that put her to considerable cost – we heard about the size of her retinue with its camels, spices, gold and precious stones (v2). And we heard that it was inspired in response to the ‘fame of Solomon’ (v1). This fame was almost certainly a conflation of Solomon’s military success (the Kingdom of Israel reached its greatest geographical reach during his reign), and the wealth which this brought into his capital.
Solomon did not leave his royal visitor disappointed. When she saw the riches of his court and the rituals of his Temple we are told that there was no more spirit in her.
Crucially, the story next proceeds to associate Solomon’s military and economic success with wisdom. Responding to her experiences in Jerusalem, the Queen links Solomon’s accomplishments to his intelligence, saying that ‘your wisdom and prosperity far surpass the report that I had heard; not even half had been told me’ (v7), insisting that this must make his wives and servants very happy.
I suspect that Solomon is associated with wisdom in part because of his success on the battlefield. Later writers will have known about his military prowess and will have attributed this to his wisdom. Whether legend or history, the wealth and wisdom of Solomon are bound up together.
Now there is a strand of Christian thought which seeks similarly crude connections today. It is called the ‘prosperity gospel’. The prosperity gospel associates godliness with worldly success. Become a Christian, it says, and God will bless you in this life. Just as God gave herds to Abraham and concubines to Solomon, so he will reward you if you follow him today. By extension, the prosperity gospel implies that the less fortunate are far from the God of cornucopious blessings.
This message is alluring and misleading in equal measure. Abraham might have had his herds and Solomon his concubines, but Job was left with nothing. The faithfulness of Job to God bore no relation to his earthly success or failings. As the doggerel puts it:
The rain falls on the just and unjust fella.
But mainly on the just because the unjust has the just’s umbrella.
The author of Job knew the truth of this over two thousand years ago. God loves us despite and beyond our achievements and trials in this life.
A shining example of a more honest relationship with money is St Francis of Assisi, preacher and pioneer in medieval Italy. 2026 marks the 800th anniversary of the death of Francis, so it is timely to recall his witness. He was son of a wealthy cloth-merchant but sold his father’s goods (much to his father’s annoyance) having heard Jesus telling him to rebuild his church. Eventually Francis renounced his inheritance and even his clothes as he dedicated his life to alleviating need among the sick and poor.
Few will go to such extremes of sacrifice and dedication. However, Francis illustrates the purpose of riches far more eloquently than the false conflation of wealth and success that we might read out of the story of Solomon. Resources are a gift for us to use wisely.
Just so, money is one of the topics about which Jesus speaks most. The internal obsessions of the Church might suggest that Jesus spent much of his time preaching about good order and relationships. In reality he says remarkably little about such things. But he does say a lot about money.
- Jesus knew the risk of idolising money, insisting that we cannot serve God and Mammon.
- He urges us to store up treasure in heaven, not on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal.
- And he teaches through the parable of the talents that people are stewards not ultimate owners of the resources given to us.
He said these things and more besides. Thus, while the gospel is not party political it is political. It is not about spiritual escape from this world, but it is about material realities that Jesus explores within his vision of God’s Kingdom.
It’s a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.
This poem simply titled ‘The Kingdom’ by the Welsh priest RS Thomas is filled with the paradox of Jesus’ vision for the world, its people and resources. The metre of the verse is consciously irregular and each line begins at a jarring point within its sentence:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; …
The Kingdom is all of that – distant and dissonant – yet seemingly so close as to fire us with a vision of making best use of what has been given to us.
And what is true of us as individuals, agents of choice over our own resources, is also true of society, our corporate identity. Eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke famously defined society as an intergenerational contract, ‘a partnership not only among the living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’. So often our collective greed takes expression in short termism, spending now without thought for the longer run, spending now in a way which does not price in the true cost of consumption – of which climate change is the most egregious example.
So what is the point of money? Why do we have dosh? With great blessings come great responsibility. The historic relationship between the wealth and wisdom of Solomon must remain subject to speculation. However, the deathbed prayer of his father, King David, seems as pertinent as ever: All things come of thee: and of thine own do we give thee (I Chron 29.14).