Something In It for Me

I. The question, without the piety

You are about to do something, and you would like to know whose idea it was.

Take the job, or turn it down. Write the thing, or keep quiet. Stay in the room with the person who is hard to be in a room with. Make the call you have been not making for three weeks. Underneath it is a question you probably do not say out loud in these words, because out loud it sounds either grandiose or unwell: is this mine, or is this Theirs?

You have been offered three ways to settle it, and you have probably tried all three.

It felt right. So does everything you want. That is what wanting feels like from the inside — not a craving with a label on it, but a quiet sense that this is the sensible thing, the generous thing, the thing a person in your position would obviously do.

It bore fruit. Some of the worst decisions of your life bore fruit, and some of the best ones cost you for years, and you cannot run the other version to compare. You get one pass through, and the results come in mixed, late, and attached to four other causes.

It was hard. Difficulty is the cheapest of the three. The empty self will pay a great deal for a good story about itself, and a hard road is the best story on the shelf. People have crossed continents and ruined their health in service of something they wanted very badly and had decided to call a calling.

If you are reading this from outside the faith, none of that is unavailable to you. The question translates without losing anything: am I doing this because it is right, or because I want the thing at the end of it? You have the identical problem. What you may not have is anyone who talks about it in a vocabulary built for it, because the people who use that vocabulary tend to use it to end conversations rather than start them.

And if you were handed a version of the faith that runs on fear, you were probably taught to check the act against a rule. Is it permitted. Is it on the list. That method has one flaw, and it is not a small one: a rule cannot see a motive. Every rule you have ever been given can be kept perfectly by somebody doing it for the wrong reason, and most of them can be broken by somebody doing it for the right one. The rule is looking at your hands. The question is about your eyes.

So here is the trouble. It is not that the answer is hidden. It is that you are the instrument, and nobody told you the instrument has a known failure mode — known, named, written down, and sitting in the middle of your own scriptures, in a passage you have read as a rule about corrupt judges.

II. The gift blinds

The tradition already found the failure mode. It named it, and it named it as blindness, not as wickedness.

Four passages, and they are stranger than their reputation.¹

And thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous. (Exodus 23:8)

Thou shalt not wrest judgment; thou shalt not respect persons, neither take a gift: for a gift doth blind the eyes of the wise, and pervert the words of the righteous. (Deuteronomy 16:19)

Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad; and a gift destroyeth the heart. (Ecclesiastes 7:7)

And Samuel, standing in front of the whole nation at the end of his working life and inviting them to audit him, states the mechanism in five words: of whose hand have I received any bribe to blind mine eyes therewith?²

Read what those verses are not saying.

None of them says a gift makes a judge unjust. None of them says it makes them a liar, or a thief, or someone who did not believe their own ruling. What they say is that a gift makes a wise man unable to see, and makes a righteous man's words come out bent. The damage is upstream of the verdict, in the faculty that produced it. Which means the honest man is not exempt from this. The honest man is the one being addressed. You do not warn a thief that their eyesight may be affected.

Thou shalt take no gift is usually filed as a purity law, a thing you keep so as to stay clean. It is not. It is a maintenance instruction for an instrument, written for people who need the instrument to work.

And once you have seen it that way you cannot unsee where it goes. If that is true of a judge ruling on a dispute between two other people, consider your own position when you sit down to decide whether the thing you are about to do is yours or God's. In the courtroom version there are three parties: the judge, the interested party, and whoever collects at the end. In yours there is one chair, and you are sitting in it wearing all three hats, and the fee is already in your pocket, and you were planning to rule before lunch.

So the verse reaches further than it was written for. Exodus and Deuteronomy are addressed to men judging cases between other people; extending them to someone auditing their own motives is an analogy, and an analogy has to earn its keep. This one earns it by being worse. Everything that makes a bribed judge unreliable is present in the self-audit, and the separation that protects the judge — the case is not about them, the money came from outside, somebody is watching — is gone.

And none of it says the paid verdict was wrong. Samuel's neighbors, asked to testify, did not say your rulings were good. They said ye have not found ought in my hand. What he submitted to examination was the record of what had come in. Not his judgments. His inputs. He offered the one fact about the case that anyone in his position could establish, and he left the other one to God.

III. Five things, and what each one buys

Something in it for me sounds like one thing. It is at least five, and the five do different damage, and you can only watch for what you can name.

Money buys the deliberation itself. Not the decision — the deliberating. Where there is money in it you will generally find that you did not experience weighing the thing at all; you experienced having weighed it, some time ago, with a thoroughness you cannot now reconstruct. Micah describes a city where the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money, and then puts in the word that makes it terrible: yet will they lean upon the LORD, and say, Is not the LORD among us? The yet says these men were not frauds. They were leaning. They believed they were leaning on God, and they were paid by the hour to reach the conclusion they reached, and both of those were true at once, which is the arrangement it almost always comes in.

Recognition buys the reason, and it is the only item on the list that reaches backward. Once you have been seen doing a thing, you can no longer recover why you started it, because the memory now has an audience in it. The version you can reach has people in the room. All their works they do for to be seen of men (Matthew 23:5) is normally read as a charge of hypocrisy, but the more alarming reading is the ordinary one — that being seen quietly rewrites the story of why you began, and the rewrite does not feel like a rewrite. It feels like remembering.

Status buys something the others do not touch: it removes options from the set before you get to them. It does not corrupt your reasoning about the choice. It deletes the choice, silently, a step earlier, because some things are not available to a person who is who you have become. Jesus puts this as a question, and the verb in it is the whole matter: How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that cometh from God only? Not how dare you. How can you. He is describing a capacity, not issuing a reprimand — and He is saying it to people in a specific argument, and the heat in it belongs there. The mechanism travels. The indictment does not.

Appetite — for a body, a comfort, a person's closeness — buys your reading of a particular person. Their needs, their readiness, what they are actually asking you for and what you have decided they are asking you for. This is the item with a human being on the other end of it, which is what makes it the one where being wrong costs somebody else the most, and it is also the one you are least likely to run this check on, because in the moment it does not feel like an interest. It feels like attention.

Stuff is the slowest and the quietest. Each thing you own is a thing you now cannot walk away from, and no single acquisition ever feels like a constraint. They arrive as security. What accumulates is an inventory, and past a certain point the inventory starts answering questions on your behalf and you experience its answers as prudence.

The inventory is not a new observation, and one verse is enough to say so: John itemizes the same territory under three heads — the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life — and the sentence after it lands on exactly the question you started with, he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.³

So run the check. Is there anything in it for me?

There is always something in it for you. There is something in it for you right now, in the reading of this, and there was something in it for me in the writing. That is not a let-off, and it is not the cheap move where everyone is guilty so nobody is. It is the diagnosis. You are never going to find the clean case, because there isn't one, which means a test that requires one is not a test — it is a way of feeling examined without being examined.

IV. They have their reward

Jesus states the accounting three times in one chapter, and there is no wrath anywhere in it.

Alms, prayer, fasting. Three practices, three descriptions of people performing them where they can be seen, and after each one the identical line, delivered about the hypocrites: Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

Nobody is punished. Look for it — it is not there. No one is called a liar; nothing is confiscated; the alms were real and the poor who received them ate. The account is not overdrawn. The account is closed. You were working for the seeing, and you were seen, and you have been paid in full, and there is nothing outstanding on either side. That is an arithmetic, not a scolding. A scolding would have been the same offense in a different suit.

Then comes the instruction, and it reads better as engineering than as modesty.

But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: that thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret [Themselves] shall reward thee openly. (Matthew 6:3–4)

Secrecy is not humility's costume. It is how you keep the instrument clean. What the left hand does not know, it cannot bill you for. An account that was never opened cannot be settled, and the reward that arrives at a closed account has nowhere to be put. Enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret. The door is not there to keep you humble. The door is there so that nothing else is in the room with you while you are asking.

And notice what is not being withheld from anyone. The reward is not denied to whoever is standing in the synagogue with the trumpet. It is delivered — promptly, in full, and in the currency requested. The ask was to be seen; the seeing arrived. That transaction closed the moment it was made. Nothing else was ordered.

V. The strongest objection, and it is Paul

Here is where any flat rule about payment dies, and it should.

Before Paul, one story, because it holds the whole thing inside a single afternoon.

Naaman is a Syrian general and a leper, and he has just come up out of the Jordan with his skin restored. He goes back to the man who told him to wash, and he says something enormous: Behold, now I know that there is no God in all the earth, but in Israel. Then, in the same breath, he offers to pay for it. Now therefore, I pray thee, take a blessing of thy servant.

Elisha will not touch it. As the LORD liveth, before whom I stand, I will receive none. Naaman presses him — he urged him to take it; but he refused.

This is not a man with a rule about gifts. He eats at other people's tables elsewhere in the same book, and takes bread when it is carried to him.⁴ He refuses this one, at this moment, from this man, because Naaman has just credited the healing to God out loud, and an invoice arriving into that silence would have made the healing Elisha's. One cure, one bill, and the bill is the thing that changes whose it was.

Then Gehazi, his servant, watches it walk away and goes after it. And when he comes back, his master does not ask him why he stole. He asks him about timing, and about sight: Went not mine heart with thee, when the man turned again from his chariot to meet thee? Is it a time to receive money, and to receive garments, and oliveyards, and vineyards, and sheep, and oxen, and menservants, and maidservants?

Not is it lawful. Not is it yours. Is it a time. The same silver an hour earlier, or a year later, would have been unremarkable, and everyone in the story knows it. What was wrong was where it landed — in the gap between what God had just done and anybody saying so.

Paul makes the case for being paid, and he makes it at full strength before he does anything else with it. Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? Then the law: Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Then the temple: they which minister about holy things live of the things of the temple. And then the sentence that ends the argument, if the argument were about permission: Even so hath the LORD ordained that they which preach the gospel should live of the gospel.⁵

Ordained. Not tolerated.

So the paid pastor is not a simoniac, and nothing here says they are. The person who takes a salary to preach is doing a thing the LORD ordained, and if you came looking for a verse to hold over your minister's head you have picked up the wrong argument entirely. The gift is not the problem. The blindness is the problem. Someone can be paid for holy work and be telling you the truth, and the verses in §II say so in their own construction, since they are addressed to the wise and the righteous rather than to the corrupt.

Then Paul declines it. I have used none of these things. And the reason he gives is the whole thesis in his own hand — that when I preach the gospel, I may make the gospel of Christ without charge, that I abuse not my power in the gospel. Not lest I be tempted. Not lest I become greedy. He is protecting the thing from being bent by the fact that he is the one holding it.

And then he took money anyway, and wrote it down. I robbed other churches, taking wages of them, to do you service.⁶ The free gospel at Corinth was funded from Macedonia. He was not living on air and he never claimed to be. The rule, then, is about the eye at a particular transaction and not about a life of managed poverty — because the man who declined a fee in one city was, in the same season, drawing support from another, and he saw no contradiction to resolve.

Now the objection that actually has teeth, and it is not aimed at the paid preacher. It is aimed at the one who refuses.

A refusal can be the most expensive thing the empty self ever buys. I don't take money for this is a sentence you can say. You can say it at a dinner, in an interview, in a footnote. It buys a better reputation than the fee would have, and it buys it at a discount, because a fee is taxed and a reputation is not.

Paul concedes this himself, and he does not squirm. Asked what is my reward then?, he answers that the free preaching is the reward — that, when I preach the gospel, I may make the gospel of Christ without charge — and he calls the arrangement my glorying: it were better for me to die, than that any man should make my glorying void. The man who refused the money is on record calling the refusal his reward and his boast, in the same letter where he refused it.

Either that is as honest as anyone has managed to be about this, or it is a warning label on the practice. I do not think you have to decide, and I do not think the text lets you.

Which leaves the regress, and it is a fair one. If any benefit disqualifies you, nothing qualifies, because you benefit from obedience itself — you benefit from being the kind of person who obeyed, and if the whole thing is done for love then you have gotten the thing you most wanted, which by this standard is the worst case yet.

Granted. Completely granted, and it is the reason nothing here is a disqualifier.

Here is what a judge actually does. A judge with an interest in a case does not rule that they are unbiased. That ruling is the one thing the position makes them least able to make, and everybody in the room knows it, themselves included. They do not defend their impartiality, or promise to be careful, or disclose the interest and decide anyway. They step down without deciding, and the case is heard by someone who can see it.

That is the move, and it is smaller than a rule and harder to perform. Where there is something in it for you, you have not learned that you are wrong. You have learned something more useful and less flattering: your reading does not count here. Not the answer is no. Not the answer is yes, carefully. The answer has to come from somewhere you are not standing — from the one who sent you, from people who owe you nothing, from waiting, from the thing itself as it plays out with nobody managing the story. You are still allowed to act. You are just no longer allowed to be the one who certifies it.

VI. I am not passing this test

This is the place where an essay like this gets paid.

Everything true about my position is also cheap. Nobody wants these essays. They make no money. Nothing here is building a reputation worth the name. The tools I write them with are given away, under a license that fits on one page.⁷ Every one of those facts is verifiable and none of it is evidence of anything, because it describes my circumstances rather than my character. I have not refused money. I have not been offered any. An untested honesty is a claim about the weather.

So the only thing I can honestly do from here is decide while it is cheap — because a decision made in front of money is made by the one the money is talking to, and I would like the decision to be older than the offer. Stated as mine, for my eyes, legislating for nobody:

Wherever I am inside the thing I am pointing people to, I take nothing from it. No pay, no royalty, no fee, to me or to anything I own; expenses at cost and on the record, if at all. Paid work out in the world that happens to bring somebody toward it is ordinary, and I will take that.

That line is about role, not purpose, and the difference is the difference between this argument and its counterfeit. A rule about purpose would say: take no money for anything meant to bring people to Jesus. It sounds more rigorous. It is in fact the flat rule, and it would quietly convict every paid pastor alive one page after I said it does not. A judge who steps down does not refuse all income. What they refuse is income from the case they are ruling on, and they go on being paid for everything else, and nobody thinks them compromised for it.

What must never be for sale is the standing. Not the labor — the standing: the position from which you tell somebody what God wants. That is the instrument, and it is the only thing here a gift can blind, and a fee from a publisher does not touch it while a wage from the thing itself goes straight through it.

And nothing here vouches for it. You have a sentence from someone with nothing at stake, which is worth about what that sounds like. A refusal you can produce evidence of is a refusal you have already spent. What I have is the deciding, made early, against a situation that has not arrived.

Which is worth exactly what you would expect a promise about money to be worth from someone with none. I argued in In Vain that anything done in service of the self that stands apart is done for nothing, and I have no reason to think I am outside my own argument. Writing under a byline is already a bid. This paragraph is a bid. The most I can claim is that I have written the rule down somewhere it will be inconvenient later, and told you what it is, so that the version of me who is being offered something has to get past the version who was not.

VII. Free and quiet

So the safest arrangement is the readable one.

Not the holiest. The word that belongs here is safest, and it is a comparative, and it is doing exactly the work a comparative does. Free and quiet is not a higher state. It is a lower-interference one. It does not make the work good and it does not make you good, and it certainly does not mean you have heard correctly.

It means there is nothing standing in the light while you look.

You still will not know for certain whose will you did. That does not resolve, and I have not resolved it — The Highest Peak argued that what you get is a route rather than a map and a step rather than a plan, and this does not upgrade the equipment. What the free, quiet version of the work gets you is one confound removed from an instrument that has several. That is a small claim. It is also the only one I can hold.

And it will not stay cheap. That is the part worth sitting with. Right now, for me, this costs nothing at all, which is precisely why the decision is available — and the day anything in it turns valuable is the day I stop being able to see whether I am deciding or being paid to have decided. You are in the same position about something. There is a room in your life that is still free and still quiet, and you have not thought about it in years, because nothing has ever been offered for it.

Samuel asked his question at the end. He had the whole nation in front of him, a lifetime of rulings behind him, and witnesses on every side, and he could say whose ox have I taken? and wait for the answer.

You get to ask it forward. Of the next thing, with nobody watching, about a fee nobody has mentioned yet.

Which is much easier, and it is the only version anybody actually gets.

Scripture throughout is the King James Version, quoted with its own wording, spelling and archaisms untouched. Two house conventions apply to the type rather than the text: pronouns for God take a capital — They/Them for the Father, He/Him for the Son — and LORD is set in capitals wherever it names God, in quoted scripture and in my own sentences alike, so that the name does not change its dress between the two. Where a word is substituted rather than recased, it appears in brackets: thy Father which seeth in secret [Themselves] is Matthew 6:4, which reads himself. The King James's own capitals stand as its own — its They have their reward names the hypocrites of Matthew 6, not God. ↩
1 Samuel 12:3–5. The full audit: whose ox have I taken? or whose ass have I taken? or whom have I defrauded? whom have I oppressed? or of whose hand have I received any bribe to blind mine eyes therewith? and I will restore it you. The people's answer is 12:4–5, and the verdict they return is about his hands and not his judgments: ye have not found ought in my hand. ↩
1 John 2:16–17. The three heads are not a procedure and John is not writing one — he is contrasting two loves — but the inventory is his, and the verse that follows it asks whose will is being done. ↩
2 Kings 4:8 and 4:42 — the Shunammite constrained him to eat bread, habitually, and a man from Baalshalisha brings him twenty loaves of barley, which he takes and redistributes. Elisha is not an ascetic and his refusal of Naaman in 2 Kings 5:16 is not a policy about gifts. It is about that gift, at that moment, from that man — who has just said now I know that there is no God in all the earth, but in Israel, which makes a fee at that instant into an invoice for what God did there. Gehazi, who runs after it, is not asked why he stole; he is asked Is it a time to receive money? (5:26). ↩
1 Corinthians 9:7–18. The right asserted at 9:7–14, declined at 9:15 (I have used none of these things), and the reason given at 9:18. My glorying is 9:15, with the clause that he would rather die than have it made void. ↩
2 Corinthians 11:8–9. The support he is describing came from Macedonia: that which was lacking to me the brethren which came from Macedonia supplied. ↩
The writing tools are at github.com/ericgarcia/scriptorium, under the MIT license. How these are written describes what they do. ↩