Uncovering The Economic Lessons Of Jesus Christ

In early September, The Washington Post featured an innocent public interest story about pawpaws, a fruit indigenous to the mid-Atlantic region that tastes like a fusion of bananas and mangoes and that some Washington-area residents happily forage for in their wooded communities.

Even this, in our activist age, elicited outrage from some readers. “I was shocked to hear that groups of people are hiking to collect pawpaw fruit,” wrote Washington resident Myriam Piers, who accused pawpaw foragers of greed. “Let us leave this ‘treat’ to opossums, foxes, squirrels, raccoons and birds,” she urged.

I’m no longer surprised by such absurd comments, which elide simple questions such as “are any of those animals endangered or starving for food?” (The answer, of course, is no). And if we applied this risible logic to all the crops we share with the rest of the animal kingdom, we’d be the endangered ones. Nevertheless, that such blinkered thinking makes it into one of the most prominent newspapers in the country suggests a deeper stupidity: We are a civilization thoroughly confused about the role of initiative to better ourselves and even the natural world.

Robert Sirico, co-founder of the Acton Institute and a Catholic priest, has thought a lot about the role of creative enterprise as it relates to human flourishing. In his new book “The Economics of the Parables,” he identifies a surprising source of economic wisdom: Jesus’s parables in the New Testament. “I suspect it is precisely because so many of the parables draw from the enduring realities of economics and commercial life that provide lasting lessons,” writes Sirico. “This book, then, seeks to enhance the higher truths the parables contain by investigating the more practical ends of economics, commerce, and business ethics that can be overlooked.”

It might sound a bit cynical and self-serving for the founder of a pro-capitalist organization to argue that the Gospels promote private ownership, free enterprise, and prudential money management, as if Jesus didn’t come so much to save mankind as to free them to participate in a market economy. Yet Sirico is sincere in his claim that transcendent truth is what matters most about Scripture, and that any economic principles we can glean from it are secondary in importance. In every chapter that discusses a different parable, he ensures that the spiritual lesson, not the economic one, remains in the foreground.

Moreover, Sirico’s approach is not inclined to interpretive overreach, but simple observations of the implicit economic principles underlying the first-century world in which the parables were first presented. Whatever wisdom Jesus seeks to impart in parables contextualized by farming, commerce, employment, or inheritance, the presumption must be that the audience would infer certain economic ideas about what He describes. In that sense, Sirico’s approach is comparable to that of Adam Smith, whose writings were based on his observations of market activities, rather than an attempt to create an economic system out of whole cloth, contra Karl Marx.

For example, in the parable of the hidden treasure

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