How Would Jesus Spend? (TAW063)

Articles Published August 26, 2026

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Episode 063 – How Would Jesus Spend? (With Dr. Marlena Graves)

It seems that there is a separation for many Christians between their faithful lives and social or economic justice. Why is this? How does the question of economic justice impact the priorities and wallets of Jesus’ followers?

Show Notes

In this interview, I ask Dr. Marlena Graves why spiritual formation and justice are often treated as separate concerns, and we often limit spiritual discipline to things like prayer, Bible study, and other spiritual practices, while treating money, status, and security as unrelated areas of life. Dr. Graves makes the case that spiritual practices are meant to move us toward God in ways that deepen love for neighbors and enemies, and that the way we hold and use our money is a key indicator of our conversion.

Key takeaways

  • Spiritual formation is not just private devotion; it is meant to produce concrete love.
  • Righteousness is personal faithfulness, and justice is public action.
  • Slaveholder theology helped separate faith from justice in American Christianity.
  • Money often becomes a stand-in for control, security, and predictability.
  • The rich young ruler is a warning about being too attached to wealth.
  • Jesus’ ministry was funded by women and other supporters; money itself is not the issue.
  • The real question is whether money serves God or becomes an idol.
  • Christian responsibility extends beyond biological family to neighbors, strangers, and enemies.
  • The means matter just as much as the ends.
  • Open-handed generosity is a Christian posture, not just a financial strategy.
  • A conscience shaped by Jesus may cost you financially.
  • “How much money can I give away?” is the better question.

References and links

More about My Conversation Partner

Dr. Marlena Graves

Dr. Marlena Graves is a professor of spiritual formation, speaker, and author who teaches and writes from a deeply justice-centered Christian perspective. Her work connects prayer, contemplation, Bible study, and the classical disciplines with advocacy for the poor and the immigrant, insisting that spiritual formation is meant to shape how we live in the world. Dr. Graves is presently an Assistant Professor of Spiritual Formation at Northeastern Seminary, Rochester, New York, and a writer whose work sits at the vital intersection of faith, culture, and justice. Marlena is the author of five books.

Find Dr. Graves Here

Today’s Sponsor

Transcription

Marc Schelske 0:00
Hey friends, I’m Marc Alan Schelske. This is the Apprenticeship Way, a podcast about spiritual growth following the way of Jesus. This is episode 63. How would Jesus spend?

SPONSOR

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INTRODUCTION TO OUR CONVERSATION

Other-centered co-suffering love — that’s the phrase I’ve been using to describe the way of Jesus. Some theologians call this kenosis. It’s the pouring out of self for others. And if Jesus is our example, then it seems like in some way the life of a Christian is meant to be like this — poured out for others. When it comes to service or kindness, to a welcoming attitude towards other people, that all makes sense, right? If the way of Jesus is love, then his followers will treat others with respect and dignity, and will speak up for those on the margins. Many Christians nod their heads when I say stuff like this, but things get sticky when we start talking about how this applies to our money.

If I’m supposed to give myself away in service towards others, what does that mean for the way that I handle my finances? Pretty quickly, we fall into this binary thinking that there’s what’s practical and wise. There’s the way of Jesus, but when it comes to such practical things as college funds and retirement accounts and home equity, well, we need to be practical. Honestly, this is one of the areas that is the biggest struggle for me personally in my life of faith.

Now, some years back, I ran into the writing of Dr. Marlena Graves. Marlena is one of those rare good gifts the internet has brought me. Her gentle but pointed questions about the church and advocating for those at the bottom and on the edges challenged and taught me. That led me to her book, The Way Up Is Down: Becoming Yourself by Forgetting Yourself. In this book, Marlena, in her pointed and gentle way, invites the church to a life that is more about others. And I love the whole book except for chapter seven, which she titled “Rich Toward God.” The epigraph of this chapter was a verse from my favorite hymn, Be Thou My Vision. If you know the song, you could probably guess the verse: “Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise. Thou mine inheritance, now and always, thou and thou only, first in my heart, high King of Heaven, my treasure thou art.” I love singing that verse, but on the stark page, what are we really talking about? Riches I heed not, really? How is that possible? Riches, the little I have, pay for my groceries, my mortgage, my bills-they give me some sense of security. Can we really heed not that stuff?

This tension is worth digging into. If we are committed to the way of Jesus, what does that really mean for this most practical part of our lives? Marlena is presently an assistant professor of spiritual formation at Northeastern Seminary in Rochester, New York. She’s a writer whose work sits at the vital intersection of faith, culture, and justice. Marlene is the author of five books, including two award-winning titles. She publishes frequently in outlets like Christianity Today, Sojourners, and The Christian Century. Her PhD research explored how cultural forces shape evangelical views on immigration, race, and poverty. From her time laboring alongside migrant farmworkers to her current role in the academy, Marlena has remained a passionate advocate for the belief that spiritual formation and justice are inseparable. A self-described dweller of the borderlands, she joins us to discuss bridging the gap between the faith we profess and the way we live in the world.

So I started this conversation by asking Marlena about the link between spiritual formation and social justice.

INTERVIEW

All right, you’re a professor of spiritual formation. That brings up things like prayer and contemplation, Bible study, the classical disciplines, stuff like that, and yet your personal area of focus includes social justice, advocacy for the poor, the immigrant. Help me deconstruct a little bit right now. Why do you think that I and many others have not always connected the dots between spiritual formation and social justice?

Dr. Marlena Graves 6:14
Thank you, Marc. From knowing you personally now, I would not say that is the case with you, but you give your own honest self-assessment. I’m not going to argue with your assessment of yourself. Prayer and Bible study and silence and solitude for what? Why are we doing that? In my mind, it is so that we become closer to God, right? Communion with God, or like the Eastern Orthodox say, theosis, becoming more like God, and then the more we become like God, the more we love our neighbors and our enemies. It is not sufficient just to pray and read our Bibles for self-actualization in the Christian life, whatever that looks like, because you cannot call yourself a devout Christian and not love the poor and your enemies in concrete ways.

So, what do I mean by that? When we’re thinking about righteousness and justice, the word justice in the Bible is mishpat, and the word — and I’m not a Greek scholar and Hebrew scholar, but I know these things — is Tsadakah, is righteousness. This is how God calls us to act. Righteousness is right relationship with God and other people, and it means we’re generous and we’re socially responsible. However, here’s the key: justice, mishpat, means we actively take steps to correct injustices. So we’re generous. You know, we might give to the poor because we’re righteous people, but justice, mishpat, requires that we go a step further to correct injustices, and we see this throughout Scripture. Now, you may argue with me on this point, Marc, but I think I got receipts on this.

I believe they were separated in American culture: righteousness and justice, because of slaveholder theology. They would tell the enslaved people to obey their masters, to be good, upright people, while many of the enslavers were raping them and not being good, upright people. “Do as I say, not as I do.” So they would tell their slaves, read your Bible, but don’t get too caught up in the Exodus and being set free. You’ve got to think of the by-and-by after your misery. Be a good slave here, because then you’ll get to heaven. There were certain verses in Scripture that the enslavers did not want their slaves to read. So I think that was one of the foundational reasons that in the American, let’s say, white evangelical psyche, that way of teaching and being was ingrained not only in the South. You could be a Christian and say you love God, but commit genocide against the indigenous, be an enslaver, and any number of things. There was no cognitive dissonance about going to church and teaching Sunday school and committing genocide. There should have been great cognitive dissonance.

I had another student who recently brought something up. We were talking about, I believe, J.D. Rockefeller with the railroads. He was a Baptist Sunday school teacher, and he gave millions and millions of dollars away. He was very generous that way, but the acquisition of his money came through hook and crook and manipulation and extortion of smaller businesses. I’m glad that he gave money away; we have many scholarships. The Rockefellers, all the Carnegies, all these very rich tycoons back in the day, but how did they gain their riches? Through corrupt means. And so I’m wondering about their character and their formation, also that of the enslaver, where you could do great harm to other people. Still, you know, give money and do things for the infrastructure in towns and be lauded, and you could teach Sunday school while being very corrupt and making billions off of it. I think in our day the money would be billions. But they were still considered good Christians.

Cornel West has a very famous saying that he actually got from Reinhold Niebuhr that justice is what love looks like in public. Let me repeat: justice is what love looks like in public. So there’s personal righteousness. We want to obey the Lord, pray, do the spiritual practices, try to be an apprentice in that way so that we can become closer to Christ, and that we should better love our neighbor and our enemies. But again, Mishpat justice, it’s taking actions to correct injustices. So I tell my students if we think of righteousness as maybe personal piety, becoming like Christ, and justice is public piety to correct wrongs. Does that make sense?

Marc Schelske 11:16
Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I think the two scenarios you talk about — American antebellum slavery, chattel slavery, and then the train tycoons — both of those are really good examples of compartmentalization. There’s an impenetrable wall between things in my life that have to do with finances, power, position. All of those things are associated with where I find myself on the pyramid, right? So Rockefeller can give millions of dollars for libraries and scholarships and all of that because he’s at the top of the pyramid, and those are sort of a hand-down kind of service, not like I’m serving someone out of love that’s next to me. I certainly don’t think of the compartmentalization in my life as so dire as justifying slavery or exploitation. However, I still have that compartmentalization in my life at the scale of my finances. It’s very easy to feel like there’s this wall between my life of faith and even stuff that has to do with… I don’t know… I kind of… I’m kind of feeling right now it has to do with a kind of sovereignty or control that money and what money affords me feels like a kind of security.

Dr. Marlena Graves 12:32
Listen, when Jesus talked to the rich young ruler, the rich young ruler said I’ve kept all the commandments, the personal piety. I’ve done everything, everything, everything. Jesus says, “One thing you lack: go sell everything and follow me.” Jesus was telling him that you are too married to your money and the benefits it brings. That doesn’t mean that would be Jesus’s word to me or you. It doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be. The young man wanted to have his cake and eat it too. You know, how may I take salvation? What should I do? One thing you lack: go sell everything and follow me. And at the time, he went away sad because he knew what would happen if he sold everything he had and followed Jesus. Loss of status, loss of control, loss of comfort, loss of predictability, all the things that come with following Jesus, anyways.

But I also tell people: Jesus depended on women in Herod’s household to fund his ministry. Joanna and other members of Herod’s household would provide the financial means for Jesus and his disciples to go around and be itinerant preachers and teachers. How are they going to feed themselves while they’re out and about? Well, they had people that gave to them, and also Joseph of Arimathea with Nicodemus. He must have had some kind of street credibility, some kind of high status, that he could go to Pilate and ask for Jesus’s body with Nicodemus without fear. It makes sense.

It’s not that God necessarily tells us all to take a vow of poverty, but He does say you either serve God or money. You either serve God, money, status, or yourself. He said God or money. There are two things. That’s because a lot is wrapped up with money, and we often depend on money instead of God. We make it an idol, and so the question for you and me, and I think it has to be an ongoing question in our life, is this: Is money calling the shots? Am I making this decision because of money or because of God? But we have to hold our money and our status very loosely, and I am preaching to myself. I am preaching to myself. So I did talk about it in The Way Up is Down. My friends who were going to give their house away instead of selling their house because they felt they had to do that.

Marc Schelske 14:54
This is in The Way Up is Down, and it’s just such a jarring, compelling story, considering the kind of social standards that we kind of expect, certainly, in the way I was raised. I was raised that there was a sort of railroad track for how to secure your life that you get on. I was raised white middle class, raised in Ohio, with conservative values, and part of that trajectory for securing your own life (but really, it’s always framed like providing for your family, taking care of your children, being responsible). That path leads ultimately toward home ownership. Everything in your early financial life is so that you can ultimately be a homeowner. That is the stake in the ground, the basis of your family security going forward. If you ask an economist that’s not having this spiritual conversation, they would probably say, “Yeah, that is how you build generational wealth.” So, that’s kind of the mindset I was inculturated in, and so then you tell the story that sort of rattles that.

Dr. Marlena Graves 15:55
Yeah, these friends were thinking about not selling their house but giving it away. The catch was they weren’t wealthy friends. They had a modest house in a good place. The price of the house rose. I’m not going to talk about the end of the story and what happened, but my point is that to even bring that up in American culture seems crazy, right? Like who does that or even thinks about doing that? And I could honestly say these friends really depend on God for their provision, and I think that’s why they could do that.

Marc Schelske 16:28
They weren’t giving their house as an asset to a ministry that they loved or something like that. It was a situation where they had a relationship with people they knew who were in need.

Dr. Marlena Graves 16:38
Yeah, they were considering giving it away, and it wasn’t like they had another house somewhere. That was all they had, right? This wasn’t their second home. So, I think what could be a good guide for us is the teaching of the early church. Saint Basil says this. Saint Chrysostom says this. Saint Macrina said this — who was Basil and Gregory’s sister. They said, “If you have a bunch of shoes in your closet, aren’t you robbing the poor?” You know, that belongs to them; are you hoarding goods in this life? That’s Antichrist. You don’t hoard your wealth; you give it to God. Jesus even talked about the rich fool who wanted to build bigger barns. We don’t understand bigger barns today, but I think it would be building a bigger bank account. You could have security for tomorrow — and I’m wading into territory now that could start to be very convicting for all of us.

But here’s what I want to say: When Paul, when the apostles ordained Paul, they told him something very important. They said, “Remember the poor.” They could have told him a lot of other stuff, but they said, “Remember the poor.” And then Paul turns around in Ephesians 4:28 and says, “Who used to steal should instead work hard with their hands to have something to share with those in need.” And I am not about being legalistic and saying you can only drive a Honda. Or if you have a luxury car, you are not following Jesus because that could be legalistic the other way. But I think the gist of it comes to this: our mentality isn’t “How can I save up what’s best for me?” It’s “I need to work and gain wealth to share with people in need.” John Wesley said, “Make all you can, save all you can, and give all you can.” Paul captures it when he says, work so that you have something to share with those in need.

Some people make way more money than I do, and they fund a lot of good efforts. They’re Christians. They love God, and they’re very generous and kind people. And they don’t usually make a splash about it. They fund ministries and churches. I’m not saying that all of us should take a vow of poverty. I haven’t taken a vow of poverty. But what I want to communicate is that, one, you can’t say you’re a devout follower of Jesus if you are not working to correct injustices in public, and that our attitude towards money should be with open hands. This is basic Christianity 101.

Whatever I have is not mine alone, and so I often think about it like this, Marc. I have a job, so I can generate money eventually to either replace or buy something for me that I need. Let’s say I just give it away or give an amount of money away, but they don’t have the same ability to generate income or money, right? They can’t do it because they’re poor, they’re they’re sick, whatever their state in life is. I think it’s more of a posture: when the woman broke the jar over Jesus’s feet, the expensive jar of oil, and wiped Jesus’s feet. Judas was like, she could have given her money to the poor, right? He was stealing, and Jesus let her do what she did. “She’s anointing me for my burial.” That was an expensive amount of money that she threw away, seemingly gratuitously, to show honor.

I think as Christians, the point of this podcast, as we’ve been talking, is that spiritual formation has been bifurcated, especially, I think, the DNA goes back to enslavers and later on the Gilded Age, where you could teach Sunday school and be an enslaver. You know, personal formation was separated from public piety. It’s not that way in Scripture. Read the Psalms, not just the prophets. Read Jesus. It was never that way, never, never, never. Justice is called woke by some people, then called Jesus woke because he thought that injustices should be corrected, and he did that in his public ministry.

Marc Schelske 20:54
Why do we need to make money, period? Like, just what is the basic purpose of our work? Most of us are not farmers or hunters. We’re not doing our labor every day that directly results in food for our families. So we work in order to earn the money in order to provide for our physical needs and the needs of our family, right? So that’s the starting point. But maybe one of the shifts for us is that as a follower of Jesus, the circle of who counts as family is infinitely expanded. For me to go about my life thinking I’m earning in order to protect my family — well, okay, there’s a seed of goodness in that motive, but the problem is your vision of who your family is is too small.

Dr. Marlena Graves 21:43
Brilliant. Yes, you put it really well. Let me say, I think the U.S. church loves money, and this is why I say that a lot of decisions are made about what churches will or won’t do, not necessarily because of what is right, but because of money. So, money calls the shots. Maybe we can’t do things because we don’t have enough money, but money is consulted first. How much do we have or don’t have? And we like to have big, big, big, big, big everything, right? Big sanctuaries, big churches, and we’re like, oh, we need them. Well, you could break your church up into smaller ones, right? It doesn’t have to be huge churches. I may be offending some people, but I think we love money. I think we have a problem loving money. I think Christians in this country have always loved money. That’s why we didn’t have problems with slavery. That’s why we can let injustices go. It doesn’t matter that the data centers are polluting the environment; it doesn’t matter because we get what we want. I have blood on my hands. I’m complicit in many things. I have a smartphone. How many people were mistreated and were paid small wages for my phone? It’s hard not to be complicit, but we do what we can.

So I think our perspective needs to be this: not how much money can I acquire for myself, but how much money — and I’m going to use your words — how much money can I give away, and how am I to expand my definition of family? Because it’s more than just the people you know that are biological family members, or adopted, or you know the people under our roof or our family ties. It’s more than that. It’s our neighbor. It’s our enemies. That’s where Jesus says, “You go ahead, go put more money instead of a barn. Think of your bank account. Go ahead and put more money in your bank account. You fool! Tonight you will die.” That money’s not meant just to be stored for us. It’s meant on behalf of our expanded circles of family. It’s not meant for ourselves. Doesn’t mean you don’t go on vacation. Doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy things. But if you see a persistent kind of posture and attitude in your life, where it’s more self-centered around you, then you’ve got to check yourself.

Marc Schelske 24:06
I think this is the deep waters. I think this is really where conversion happens. It’s so easy to say, you know, “I believe that Jesus died for my sins. Thank God that that’s taken care of,” and so much harder to think that I’ve been called into the family of all of God’s children, and I am a responsible part of that community, invited to care, to love, to live in just relationship, to ensure just relationship. That’s a lot harder, and there’s a lot of our modern Christian culture that doesn’t seem to even want to have that conversation.

Dr. Marlena Graves 24:46
Yeah, because it’ll cost us if we have the conversation, Marc. It means we might have to sell a building and give it away to make sure that other people in our city have a home.

MARC’S REFLECTION

Marc Schelske 24:57
Okay, I’m convicted. I don’t have an easy answer for this stuff. Most of the folks who will hear this conversation live in a capitalist system where individuals are thrown onto their own efforts for all their basic needs, and where there is very little margin of mercy or provision for folks who are in a crisis. That’s the world most of us live in, and I think most of us with Christian backgrounds have read the Acts 2 accounts of the early church, and we see the way they took care of each other, and we think how nice that would be. And then shortly after, most of us think, “That’s not really that practical, is it?”

I don’t know all the reasons we do this, but I can speak for myself. I know that for me, my resistance is about fear — fear that I won’t be able to take care of my family. Fear that I won’t have enough saved up for the next crisis. Fear that I can’t provide to my kids the standard of living that was given to me. Fear of sickness — not because of the illness itself, but because every serious illness in this country comes with the specter of bankruptcy. And then, because this is the system that formed us. Many of us have a finely honed sense of suspicion toward people in need. We don’t want to be taken advantage of. We don’t want to be conned, and so we ought to protect ourselves.

What do we do? How do we do it? Do we become stingy as an act of self-protection? Do we only help through organizations so that we can offload the burden of vetting folks and finding out if the needy people are really telling the truth? What should we do if not that? There are no easy answers to this conundrum, or maybe, maybe it’s more accurate to say there are easy answers that are scary to implement.

The easy answer is that we’re called to be generous. Real generosity-generosity that isn’t an ego move-is always a posture of vulnerability, and that’s what we’re called to: abundant, open-handed generosity, just like how God is generous with us, in actual ways that show up on the calendar and in the to-do list and impact our wallet, but that stuff’s easy to say, and for many of us, it’s painful to do. Part of my regular prayer practice is to pray for the Spirit of Christ to continue the work of conversion in me. Maybe the Spirit is inviting me to let that conversion extend even to my wallet and my financial plans. How about you?

Thanks for listening. May you have the courage to entrust your wallet to the Spirit so that you can join God in the work of reconciliation and restoration in this broken world.

Notes for today’s episode and any links mentioned can be found at www.MarcAlanSchelske.com/TAW063

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