A lot of spiritual writing seems to come from people who’ve never had to make rent. It talks about letting go and renouncing the world, and then you close the book and there’s an invoice due Friday and a manager who wants the report by noon.
The Gospel of Thomas has a reputation for being that kind of book, mystical and otherworldly, a string of riddles about light and solitude. But scattered through its 114 sayings is a handful that talk about money with almost no metaphor at all. They mention merchants, rent, loans, and a man planning his investments. I’ve been reading them as a set, and they add up to something I didn’t expect, which is advice for people who still have to go to work in the morning.
The Man With a Plan
Saying 63 is four sentences long. A rich man decides to invest his money so he can “sow, reap, plant, and fill my storehouses with produce, that I may lack nothing.” Then the gospel adds, flatly, that “these were the things he was thinking in his heart, but that very night he died.”
Luke has a version of this story, and it’s louder. In Luke, God speaks to the man directly: “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you.”
Thomas cuts the speech, and nobody calls him a fool. He makes his plan and then he’s gone, and the saying closes with its usual line, “Whoever has ears should hear.”
I find the quiet version harder to shake. The man’s plan isn’t wicked. Wanting to “lack nothing” is about as reasonable a goal as a person can have, and it’s the goal behind most of my own budgeting. What the saying points at is where the plan lived, which was entirely in his heart, with nothing else in there next to it.
Four Excuses, All of Them Business
Saying 64 is one of the longest parables in Thomas. A man prepares a dinner and sends his servant out to the guests. Every one of them has a reason to stay home:
“Some merchants owe me money; they are coming to me tonight. I must go and give them instructions. Please excuse me from dinner.”
The second has bought a house and been called away. The third is arranging a friend’s wedding banquet. The fourth has bought an estate and is “going to collect the rent.”
Put that next to Luke’s version and something jumps out. Luke’s guests have bought a field and some oxen, and one has just gotten married. In Thomas, nearly every excuse is a transaction, with debts coming due and rent waiting to be collected. Even the wedding guest is working the event instead of attending it.
So the host sends his servant into the streets to bring back whoever he finds. Then the saying ends with a line that has no parallel in Luke:
“Buyers and merchants [will] not enter the places of my Father.”
Read fast, that sounds like a condemnation of anyone who’s ever sold anything. Read slowly, and look at what actually kept those guests out. Nobody barred the door. They were each invited, and each one said “tonight is bad” for a reason that sounded responsible.
The house of the Father stays closed to them because they were busy.
That one lands on me, because my own excuses never sound sinful. They sound like adulthood.
Money You Don’t Get Back
Saying 95 is the bluntest financial advice in the gospel. It runs two sentences, and the second is the hard one:
“If you have money, do not lend it at interest. Rather, give [it] to someone from whom you will not get it back.”
I’m not going to pretend I live this one. I have a savings account that earns interest, and I suspect you do too.
But the second half of the saying is doable on a small scale, and it’s stranger than it looks. Thomas doesn’t say to give money to people who need it, or to people who deserve it. The instruction is to give it where it won’t come back.
Most of my generosity, if I’m honest, comes with a ledger attached. I remember who owes me a lunch. I notice when a favor isn’t returned. Saying 95 asks for a gift with no ledger at all, the kind you can’t even hold over someone because you’ve arranged never to see a return on it.
Oddly, the gospel itself seems to argue with this a few pages later. In Saying 109 a man buys a field, finds a treasure buried in it, and “began to lend money at interest to whomever he wished.” That’s presented as a picture of the kingdom.
I don’t know how to square the two, and I’m not sure the person who compiled the collection tried to. Maybe the point of 109 is the finding, and the lending is just what a person of that time would do with a windfall. Maybe it’s a joke. I’d rather leave the tension showing than smooth it over.
The One Merchant Thomas Likes
If you came away from Saying 64 thinking Thomas hates business, Saying 76 complicates it. The Father’s kingdom, it says, “is like a merchant who had a supply of merchandise and then found a pearl.” He sells the merchandise and buys the pearl, and the gospel calls him prudent.
So merchants can make it in after all. This one does exactly what merchants do, sizing up value and making a trade. He just recognizes, when it finally shows up, the one thing worth more than his whole inventory, and he doesn’t hesitate.
Saying 110 comes at the same idea from the other side: “Let someone who has found the world and has become wealthy renounce the world.” I used to read that as a demand to give everything away.
Now I notice the order. First you find the world. Then you get rich, maybe in money, maybe in skill or reputation or a career that finally works. Only after that does renouncing it mean anything, because you can’t let go of something you never had in your hand.
That fits with Saying 42, the two-word teaching “Be passersby,” which I wrote about here. A passerby still walks down the street. They see the shops and maybe buy something. They just don’t move in.
What This Looks Like on a Tuesday
None of these sayings asks you to quit your job. What they ask for is smaller and, for me at least, harder.
Start with the dinner invitations. Over the next week, notice every time you decline something because of work, and write down the excuse in the exact words you used. You don’t have to change anything yet. Just look at the list on Sunday and ask which of those would have sounded, to the host in Saying 64, like “I’m going to collect the rent.”
Then try one gift with no ledger. Pick an amount small enough that it won’t hurt, and give it somewhere it can’t come back to you, ideally somewhere you’ll never find out how it was used. Notice how much your mind wants to keep track anyway. That wanting is what Saying 95 is pointing at.
When you sit down to plan, whether it’s a budget or a five-year goal or next quarter’s numbers, ask the question Saying 63 leaves hanging. What else is living in my heart besides this plan? If the answer is nothing, add one thing that has no return on it, like an evening a month with a friend who can’t help your career.
And the next time something goes well at work, try Saying 110 in miniature. Enjoy it fully, then hold it a little more loosely than you want to. You found it. You don’t have to live in it.
If you want to go further into what work is for in the first place, What Is Work For? picks up that question from another angle. And the full tour of Thomas’s sayings will show you how these few sit among the rest.
I keep coming back to the end of the dinner parable, after the invited guests have all sent their regrets. The servant goes out into the streets and brings back whoever he finds. Somewhere in that story there’s a long table full of strangers who had nothing more pressing to do that night, eating a meal that was meant for someone else and turned out to be meant for them.
The Gospel of Thomas is quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translation in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010), with square brackets marking his restorations of damaged text. The parallels to Sayings 63 and 64 follow Meyer’s notes, and Luke 12:16-21 and 14:16-24 are quoted from the NIV.
