Generous Relationships

The surprising story of the kindness of God

Was Jesus a generous person?

The answer is: well, it’s complicated. Yes, of course, Jesus was generous. But perhaps not in the way we may expect.

The New Testament’s portrayal of Jesus offers us a perplexing set of disparate images about his habits of generosity. On one hand, Jesus taught more about money than just about any other topic. Of the 38 parables Jesus is recorded as publicly teaching, no topic is more central to these stories than that of money, wages, and material wealth. Jesus was always teaching about the physical materials of people’s lives. Yet, ironically, there’s not one single occasion in the New Testament where Jesus is recorded as asking someone directly for their money. He taught extensively about money. But he never used these teachings as a means to grow his own wealth.

Interestingly, though, Jesus is repeatedly recorded as publicly commenting on other people’s acts of generosity. In one instance, Jesus commends a widow for her simple gift of the mite she offers to God at the Temple (Mk. 12:41-44). As he does, he concretely teaches that the mark of one’s generosity is not determined by the amount one has given but by the sacrifice with which it is given. In another instance, Jesus openly critiques his religious contemporaries for giving their money in public that it might be seen by all (Mk. 12:41-44). This, he teaches, is the antithesis of what the Kingdom of God is about. And while Jesus goes on record to offer judgments about other people’s generosity, there remains no single occasion in the Gospels where Jesus himself is described as giving anyone money.¹ Not once. His visible gifts were in other realms: time, attention, thought, and literal life and blood to the people around him.

What Jesus does do, though, is constantly borrow things from other people. Examples of this are endless: Jesus is recorded as taking a boys fish to feed a group of 5,000 (Jn. 6:5-11), using some of the disciples bread to feed another group of thousands (Mt. 15:32-38), borrowing a disciples boat so he can cross a lake (Lk. 5:1-3), taking someone else’s coin to make a point about Caesar (Mt. 22:15–22), and riding using someone else’s donkey into Jerusalem (Mt. 21:1-7). His commitment to borrowing from others is so expansive that in his very death, Jesus was not afforded his own tomb. Jesus is buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, who’d come to care for Jesus’ body (Mt. 27:57-60).

This is generosity? Indeed! In fact, this is generosity with skin on it—the living presence of the God who tells us in the Old Testament to “open your hand....[He] will satisfy the desire of every living thing” (Ps. 145:16). Jesus Christ is the most generous human being who has ever lived. Yet, when we examine his life, we aren’t prone to notice what our eyes expect or want to find. That is to say that godly generosity doesn’t always appear as our expectations would have it.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

The Christian life is to be the generous life. True generosity has a pattern to it—one structured by Jesus himself. The pattern of generosity that we seek to follow is modeled by the Last Supper (Mt. 26:17-30). In their last week together, Jesus gathers his disciples to share a meal. In one single verse, what this meal entailed:

While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.” (v. 26)

Jesus does four things. First, he takes the bread from the disciples. He gives thanks for the bread. He breaks the bread he’s taken. He then gives it back to the disciples. This fourfold pattern has shaped the way Christians for centuries have taken the Lord’s Supper. But it is not just about giving us a pattern for liturgy. It is a pattern for the entire Christian life.

All acts of generosity assume God’s generosity. To receive, we must give away what we have already received. Eugene Peterson, in an early work entitled Living the Resurrection, argues that what we see going on here bookends the entire Christian life. First, Jesus takes from us. Peterson writes:

Jesus takes what we bring to him—our bread, our fish, our wine, our goats, our sheep, our sins, our virtues, our work, our leisure, our strength, our weakness, our hunger, our thirst, whatever we are.²

Then, having given to Jesus what he will take, we receive that very thing back from Jesus. This time, it is transformed. Again, Peterson writes:

Then Jesus gives back what we bring to him, who we are. But it is no longer what we brought. Who we are, this self that we offer to him...is changed into what God gives, what we sing of as Amazing Grace. Transformation takes place…as we eat and drink the consecrated body and blood of Jesus. A resurrection meal. “Christ in me.”³

This illustrates a powerful irony. Because every single thing that we give to Jesus—which he borrows, receives, or takes from us—is and was already his. We never truly give to Jesus something that was ever ours. Instead, we return to him what he has already let us borrow from him.

God only takes from us what he already gave us.

This is why the story of God “taking” from the side of Adam is not considered stealing in biblical literature or theology (Gen. 2:21-23). Sure, God is taking from Adam something from which he will form the woman. But whatever was taken from Adam was never truly Adam’s by ownership. Adam was giving to God what was already owned by God. And in so doing, God returns to the man something even greater: the best friend, helpmeet, and wife of Adam. Even the first relationship was an act of generosity.

What can we learn from this? The economy of God’s generosity entails our willingness to hand back to God what is his. Of letting Jesus Christ hold our time, our relationships, our jobs, our money, our children, our ego, our hopes, our business, our schedule—everything. This will feel like a loss. It always does. But it never is a loss. What once felt like a gain will feel as a loss, Paul would reflect in Phil. 3:8. But what is lost, in God’s hands, is always to our eventual gain.

This understanding of generosity is transformative. In almost every relationship we have, we will be tempted to think of generosity the way that the world thinks of generosity. We will have a default rubric from which we will judge if we have been generous to the people we love. For me, it is this ingrained belief that I am truly being generous to my son if I have saved up money for him to go to college or for him to have after I die. This is a default belief, given to me by the world, not by God.

Jesus invites me to a deeper generosity—one not forged by bottom lines or economics. True generosity is not the money I’ve saved for my son. True generosity is the hours, days, weeks, months, and years that I’ve chosen to be a present parent and friend when I very well could have been doing things the world deems important. The important thing recorded about me in my generosity to my son is not whether I gave him a certain amount of money or not. Rather, it is that I gave myself to him.

Jesus was a generous person. He was the most generous person. But, as with many things, the generosity of God often looks so vastly different from what we humans have come to assume generosity should look like.

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Thanks for reading. You can always find me wasting time on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Or check out my podcast with Dr. Nijay Gupta at Slow Theology. If you found this content helpful to your journey, yay! Consider enjoying my most recent book The Gift of Thorns: Jesus, the Flesh, and the War for our Wants, which was released with Zondervan in February of 2024. Within, I explore the topic of human desire from the perspective of Scripture, theology, and experience—with particular interest to how we can be formed into the image of Christ through our desires. In short, it’s about why our cultural mandate to “you do you” is so profoundly unhelpful to the follower of Jesus. You can support my work by reading it! And sharing about your experience. Click on the image below to get yourself a copy.

1. Perhaps, one could argue, that he did give money away. But that it goes unrecorded must be an inspired gap. Perhaps this is part of the agenda of the Gospel writers to show that Jesus never did his acts of almsgiving and generosity for anyone else to see. Who is to know?

2. Eugene Peterson, Living the Resurrection: The Risen Christ in Everyday Life (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2006), 83.

3. Peterson, 85.