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The Gap We’ve Learned to Live With

  • May 2
  • 5 min read

Throughout his earthly ministry, Jesus did not simply describe the Kingdom of God—he enacted it. He preached, “The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news,” and then he lived it: healing the sick, forgiving sin, welcoming the overlooked, confronting what dehumanises, and laying down his life in self-giving love. This Kingdom—the reign of God—is not removed from the real world. It presses into it. It speaks into how we order our common life—socially, politically, economically, standing over and against systems that crush and exclude, and gathering a people shaped by mercy, justice, and compassion. Jesus has inaugurated this Kingdom and will bring it to completion—a world without domination, without injustice, without tears, where there is a tree whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. But for now, we live in the tension of the now and not yet, and in that tension, allegiance to Jesus is worked out in the real.


There is something in Jesus’ ministry that is often softened, or quietly set aside. He did not only comfort the poor; he also confronted the accumulation of wealth. In his opening sermon—the Nazareth manifesto—Jesus reaches back to Jubilee, not as metaphor but as memory: debts released, land restored, lives reset—a loosening of the grip of accumulation so that the poor might breathe again. This thread does not sit at the edges of his teaching; it runs through it. 'Blessed are the poor.' 'Woe to you who are rich.' The man building bigger barns while others go without, the rich man stepping over Lazarus at the gate, the call to relinquish, to give, to release. This is not a side note in the Gospel; it is part of its centre of gravity.


To be clear, this is not an argument against profit, nor against differences in pay that reflect responsibility, skill, or risk. It is a question of scale. At what point does the gap become so wide that it is no longer incidental, but revealing? At what point does it begin to tell the truth about what we value—and who we do not? We tend to avoid that question, because once you see it clearly, it is difficult to unsee.


Take something ordinary. I saw a post recently about someone going into a supermarket, filling a basket, walking out without paying, and then taking it all straight to a food bank before handing themselves in at a police station. I’m not sure what to do with that, if I’m honest. I’m not against protest, and there are times when civil disobedience matters, but this kind of thing doesn’t quite sit right with me. Still, it made me stop and look again.


It got me thinking about supermarkets—Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s—the kind of places most of us move through every week without really thinking about how they are put together. If you look into it even a little, the gap is hard to ignore. Someone on a checkout might be earning £13 or £14 an hour. It is steady work, necessary work—the kind that kept things going when everything else slowed. And yet it is not uncommon for people in those roles to rely on Universal Credit just to make it through the month. Some will visit a food bank; they don’t always say they’re going—sometimes it just becomes another errand you don’t explain. A person can spend an entire afternoon scanning a week’s worth of food for others—the steady beep, item after item—and still go home unsure how they will pay for their own.


Working—and still not enough.


Then you look at the other end. Tesco’s CEO was paid about £9.9 million last year, and Sainsbury’s CEO around £4.9 million—figures you almost read twice just to be sure. Tesco’s own reporting puts the pay ratio at roughly 400:1, which is difficult to picture in any meaningful way, but it effectively means a CEO can earn in a year what a typical worker would not earn across a lifetime, or several. The issue is not that these roles are identical; they are not. The issue is the distance between them. Because beyond a certain point, disparity does more than differentiate—it distorts. It begins to signal whose contribution really counts, and whose does not, quietly shaping our sense of what is normal.


And then there is profit. Tesco made around £2.8 billion in operating profit last year, and Sainsbury’s just under £1 billion. These are large, successful businesses doing what they are designed to do. But set alongside that is something harder to ignore. The Trussell Trust distributed just over 3.1 million emergency food parcels in 2023/24—the highest number on record, with many going to families with children. More and more, those needing this support are in work.


That is the part that lingers.


Not just poverty, but in-work poverty—people earning, contributing, showing up, and still not quite managing to get by. You begin to notice the overlap: the same towns, the same high streets, supermarkets that are busy and functioning, and nearby—often closer than you’d think—food banks trying to keep pace with demand. I don’t think profit, in itself, is the issue. But when profits are measured in billions, and at the same time millions of food parcels are being handed out, it becomes difficult to pretend those realities sit easily together.


Or perhaps more honestly, that they do—and that’s the problem.


Jesus spoke into a world marked by inequality too. The structures were different, but the patterns are familiar: wealth concentrated among elites—landowners, tax collectors, those aligned with imperial power—while many lived close to the edge, vulnerable to debt, loss, and hunger. Into that world, Jesus speaks plainly. He names the poor as blessed, warns the rich, and imagines an economy shaped not by endless accumulation but by release, restoration, and enough.


When we look at our own world, the parallels are difficult to ignore. The language has changed and the mechanisms are more complex, but the gap remains—and in many places it is widening. In the UK, we have normalised a quiet contradiction: people in work who are still poor, food banks woven into the fabric of communities, hardship that rarely makes headlines but is felt in kitchens, in compromises, in sleepless nights. Alongside this sits extraordinary accumulation at the top. Again, the question is not whether business, enterprise, or reward are good—they can be—but whether the scale of inequality we are living with can be squared with the Kingdom that Jesus announces.


At a certain point, it is not simply a tension to manage.


It is a contradiction to face.


This is not separate from the wider crisis we are living through. The same patterns—accumulation without limit, growth without restraint—are shaping not only our economies but our relationship with the earth itself. We are already living with the consequences: floods, fires, instability. And again, it is the poorest who bear the heaviest weight, those with the least margin absorbing the greatest shock.


So the question returns—not as abstraction, but as invitation. What does it mean to take Jesus seriously here—not as an idea or a slogan, but as Lord?


It begins with seeing clearly, refusing to look away from the scale of inequality we have learned to call normal. It means allowing the words of Jesus to land with their full weight, even where they unsettle us. And then, in ways both small and costly—and sometimes inconvenient in ways we would rather avoid—it means learning to live otherwise: with generosity that interrupts accumulation, with attention to those being edged out, with communities that measure worth differently.


Because we are not neutral in this.


We are being formed—by the market, or by the Kingdom.


  • Rev'd Jon Swales


Sources


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