It was a sunny day in Paris. Our family was just leaving the Champs de Mars, the big grassy park between the Eiffel Tower and the national military academy, when a woman greeted us. In English, which immediately put us on guard. You know how it is.
“Look at that,” she said, pointing at the ground. I didn’t look.
“Look, look,” she said, bending over to pick something up. Or drop something which she then picked up. It was a ring, made to fit the finger of some enormous sausage-fingered man. Some guy maybe six times my size.
“Is it yours,” she asked. I said that it was not. “Look, look,” she continued. ”Is it it gold? I think it’s gold.” It wasn’t gold. It was brass. I mean, I’m no metallurgist, and even if I had been, I didn’t have my spectrometer handy. But the thing looked like brass. ”It’s gold,” she insisted.
Then she held it up, offering it to me. “Your lucky day,” she said. ”Take it.” I backed away, urging my wife and son to back up too. This was obviously a scam, and although we weren’t quite sure how it was supposed to play out, none of us particularly wanted to find out the hard way.
In some countries, you might take the thing and ten minutes later be “arrested” by the “police” for carrying a stolen item. Usually, the contents of your wallet would be just equal to the customary fine. In more law-abiding nations, a pickpocket might be watching to see where you put your newest valuables. Or any of a dozen other cheesy criminal tricks.
France is a remarkably law-abiding country, because a little quick web research explained to us how the scam usually works there. You take the ring, and the person who “found” it for you asks for a few euros as a finder’s fee. After all, you can sell the thing for — who knows? – two hundred dollars. So why not buy the poor woman a couple of pains au chocolat, just to be nice?
It’s a wildly popular dodge, practically a local tradition. Rumor has it that the streets of Paris are paved with these golden rings. Several people describe having been hit up two, three, even five times in rapid succession, occasionally even by the same person. And of course there is the natural temptation to respond. A woman says One guy says that when the con artist handed him the ring, he simply hurled it away. (I’m thinking somebody hadn’t had his cafe-au-lait that morning.)
It’s a fairly gentle con, and you even get a little trinket out of it, a souvenir of the time you got cheated in Paris.
Still, it makes me think. People are cheated most easily when they get greedy, and try to get something for nothing. Because of this, other people get suspicious. When somebody offers them something for free, they are immediately on guard, trying to figure out how they are being lied to. I am one of those people myself — just ask the lady with the ring.
So what does this mean for the Church and its mission? After all, the Gospel is an offer of salvation, a free gift of grace. You can’t put a price on it, and so you can’t earn it or buy it. But does that very fact make people less likely to believe? Do they think it must be some sort of scam, just a little more sophisticated than a brass ring in Paris?
I think that may be exactly what happens. Throughout the history of Christianity, there have been some people, and some movements, which presented salvation not as a gift but as a reward for doing something right. From Simon Magus to Pelagius, from the abuse of papal indulgences to some of the modern TV preachers, there is a long tradition of putting salvation up for sale. And these guys are very successful. They can fill churches, amphitheaters, even football stadiums — fill them up with people ready to buy the product. People know that it’s a good thing, and reason that it must be worth whatever it costs.
So here’s the paradox. The same instinct that helps us to avoid one kind of scam can make us fall victim to another. We cannot bring ourselves to believe that anything worthwhile could actually be free. Or at least many of us can’t. Which gives preachers a strange choice: Preach the Gospel as a free gift, knowing that many people cannot believe it; or dilute the message, and offer righteousness in exchange for good works, or right faith, or some other verbal formula that lets people contribute to their own salvation. The second choice will always be popular. Too bad it is really just another scam.
