The Rust on the Gold

What's happening

A May Day report from Oxfam and the International Trade Union Confederation, released April 30 and reported by CNBC, finds that U.S. CEO compensation grew 25.6% from 2024 to 2025, while inflation-adjusted hourly wages for private-sector workers grew 1.3%. CEO pay grew roughly twenty times faster than worker pay over the same period.

The CEO-to-worker pay ratio in the United States now stands at 281 to 1, up from 60 to 1 in 1990 and 21 to 1 in 1965, according to Economic Policy Institute data. Average S&P 500 CEO compensation reached $22.98 million in 2024.

The same window saw 65% of U.S. consumers report that price increases are outpacing their income, according to a February J.D. Power survey. 59% of Americans say they live paycheck to paycheck. The federal minimum wage has lost 21% of its purchasing power since 2019.

Globally, the report finds CEO pay rose 54% in real terms since 2019 while real wages fell 12%.

What the Text says

James 5 is one of the few places in the New Testament where the language climbs to prophetic intensity. The author is not addressing his congregation. He turns and addresses the rich directly, by apostrophe, as if they were in the room.

James 5:1-21Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming on you.2Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten.

The image is strange on purpose. Gold does not rust. The Greek katiōtai insists on it anyway. Wealth withheld from the people who produced it does something unnatural to the wealth itself. It corrodes its own substance. The rust will be evidence in court.

James 5:3-43Your gold and your silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be for a testimony against you, and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up your treasure in the last days.4Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you have kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Armies.

Then the cry. The Greek is boē, the cry of the oppressed. It is the same word the Septuagint uses for the Hebrew slaves crying out under Pharaoh in Exodus. James says these cries have entered the ears of the Kyrios Sabaōth, the Lord of Armies, the warrior epithet for God.

The text is doing something specific. It is not building a policy. It is not balancing employer and employee interests. It is reporting what God hears when wages are kept back. The verbs are passive and direct: the gold rusts, the cries enter, the harvesters are unpaid. James tells the rich what their wealth is becoming while they hold it.

The reflection

The American Christian conversation about CEO pay has been thinner than the topic deserves. One side has argued that markets reward what they should. The other has argued the structures need policy correction. James does neither. He addresses the rich directly and tells them the gold is already rusting in their vaults.

281 to 1 is a number. Boē is a sound. The text is interested in the second one.

Whether God still hears that cry the way Exodus says he heard it is the question every reader of James eventually has to answer.