Genesis 13.14-17 (CEB): After Lot separated from him, the Lord said to Abram, “From the place where you are standing, look up and gaze to the north, south, east, and west, because all the land that you see I give you and your descendants forever. I will make your descendants like the dust of the earth. If someone could count the bits of dust on the earth, then they could also count your descendants. Stand up and walk around through the length and breadth of the land because I am giving it to you.”
John 14.1-4: Don’t be troubled. Trust in God. Trust also in me. My Father’s house has room to spare. If that weren’t the case, would I have told you that I’m going to prepare a place for you? When I go to prepare a place for you, I will return and take you to be with me so that where I am you will be too. You know the way to the place I’m going.
After God gives land as far as the eye can see to Abram, God tells him that billions of people will be his descendants—if not directly, then through the creative source of God. Even thousands of years ago, great spiritual minds were beginning to realize we are all a part of the same thing. In some way we still have difficulty describing, we are more like parts of an interconnected being than the disconnected individuals we perceive ourselves to be.
This realization is important because it is the only way we begin to fulfill our promise to God as stewards of this reality. We are created from God to care for everything God creates, which is everything. Every person, bee, blade of grass, bird in the sky, fish in the ocean, even every politician is the flesh of God.
The Jewish people of the First Testament understood this as a commitment to care for each other and the planet. They believed that God commands us to care for one another by understanding nothing on the earth belongs to any one of us. Everything is God’s, and we are given the awesome, terrifying responsibility of being God’s caretakers.
Who’s the boss?
Early Jews, like other ancient peoples, were agrarian. Small villages consisted of subsistence farmers working to provide for their families. Farmers were expected to donate extra yields to the communal pot—quite literally. To ensure that everyone could provide and was provided for, land was often rotated amongst families yearly. For these ancient people, work was considered a social duty that must be performed.
Long before anybody ever thought of market economies, people were communal. I urge you to consider that some form of communal living is not only biblical, it is logical, even today.
Make room for new ideas. That are actually old ideas.
Now, I don’t mean to romanticize community life in the late-8th Century BCE. Even with all the sharing of stuff and respect for God, the world was harsher and more unforgiving than our own. In some ways, people cooperated more because their survival was more interdependent. And of course, not everyone thought as idealistically as our ancient Jewish ancestors, nor did this cooperative era last very long.
As villages formed into cities, which grew into kingdoms and empires, rich and powerful people began to take control of the systems of production and labor.
Even the Jewish perspective of land ownership changed. While God was still the ultimate owner of all we can see, in practice, the society itself began to mimic that of other early superpowers like Assyria (who would later turn Israel into a vassal state).
In this new world, the King was the owner of all the land and the people merely his subjects. God—the Supreme God of the Universe, the God of all other gods, the God in covenant with the Jewish people—was nowhere to be found in any of these Imperial systems.
The process of land ownership becoming centralized in the hands of a small, elite class of people to the detriment of everyone else is known as latifundialization.
Whereas in the pre latifundialization era working the land was considered one’s social duty, now, one worked the land for the landlord, who had either inherited it or been given it by a bureaucratic aristocracy (who had at some point come into power by merely proclaiming themselves in charge and eliminating any disagreement).
I believe that before the age of empires, the Jewish people correctly understood that all the land belonging to God meant all the land belongs to God. Could there be stewards appointed to oversee how the land is worked? Absolutely. Should those people have absolute power over the land and the people working it? Absolutely not.
Private land ownership not only caused power and wealth to be concentrated in the hands of a few elite families, but it also meant there was a new working class that had no right to anything. The land they had worked, sometimes for generations, was no longer theirs, no longer the community’s, even, but instead the exclusive domain of the self-proclaimed ruler.
As these hereditary monarchies turned into nations, the gap between the elites and everyone else widened. Because land ownership was inaccessible and renting caused people to go into eternal debt, an inequitable system of haves and have nots developed that continues to this day. This sort of travesty only happens when we ignore our covenant with God. We need to recapture the reverence of our ancestors and remember that all things belong to God.
Discarding, abusing, or neglecting any portion of creation is an affront to the very being of God. The only reason we exist is to take care of each other and our planet. As we know, this is easier said than done.
Humans are tribal, out of necessity. We inherently distrust anyone who isn’t part of our tribe. This is because, while we might be the dominant species on the planet now when we first started walking upright, we were more hunted than hunter. We quickly learned that banding together could help us not only survive, but also thrive.
Once mere survival was out of the way, tribes started fighting with each other. Once thriving, we discovered we could dominate. This tribal mindset that pits us against each other perpetuates today and is exacerbated by a culture that encourages mindless zealotry.
Jesus confronts this issue head-on throughout his ministry. Whether excoriating the Jewish leadership or condemning the cruelty of Rome, Jesus asks us to stop thinking tribally and begin thinking in terms of Oneness. One God. One people. One family, in covenant with each other through God.
As it did for the earliest people of the Bible, perhaps a re-commitment to our divine covenant would help us remember what it means to live in community—in our case, global community, with a sense of duty to each other.
Once recommitted to God, we’ll remember to credit God for the incredible blessing it is to be a conscious part of creation. In that awe, in that connecting flow of a universe passionately urging us to boundlessly care for each other, I know we’ll find room—and love—to spare.
