“Charity begins at home.” It is the polite answer to an appeal for help: we have our own to look after first. The words are not in the Bible, though the King James comes close at 1 Timothy 5:4, “let them learn first to shew piety at home,” and the same chapter says why: so that the church can care for widows who have no one.
Thomas Browne quoted it in 1642, in Religio Medici, as a saying already current in his day, and called it a “worldly principle.” The question is whether Scripture agrees with him, or with the saying.
The chapter it borrows from
The verse usually brought in to defend it is real, and it is blunt.
But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.
1 Timothy 5:8 (KJV)
The saying is often meant gently, by parents worried about their own children. Providing for your own household, your children included, falls inside what this verse asks, though in its chapter the person in view is a widowed mother or grandmother, and nobody should feel guilty for it. Paul’s point is family first. It is never family only.
The verse is part of a practical passage about widows. The church kept a list of widows it supported, with conditions for getting on it, and Paul begins with the families: “if any widow have children or nephews, let them learn first to shew piety at home, and to requite their parents.” Nephews, in the English of 1611, could mean grandchildren, and does here, and at home meant toward their own family.
First is a word about order. A thing you do first is not a thing you do only, and Paul gives the reason for the order before the section ends.
If any man or woman that believeth have widows, let them relieve them, and let not the church be charged; that it may relieve them that are widows indeed.
1 Timothy 5:16 (KJV)
A widow indeed, he has said in 1 Timothy 5:5, is one “desolate,” who “trusteth in God, and continueth in supplications and prayers night and day.” Families take their own so that the church’s help is free for the women who have nobody. The verse is a rule about not putting your mother on a fund that somebody else’s mother needs.
Who got on the list
The conditions point outward too. In verses 9 and 10, a widow on the list had to be “well reported of for good works; if she have brought up children, if she have lodged strangers, if she have washed the saints’ feet, if she have relieved the afflicted, if she have diligently followed every good work.” Hospitality to people not her own was on the application form. The church cared for her partly because she had spent her care beyond her own walls.
The same letter, one chapter later, warns that “the love of money is the root of all evil,” and that warning is aimed at the love, not the coins. Read together, the two chapters put money below people: a family looks after its own so that the church can look after the widows who have nobody.
A harder verse
1 Timothy 5:8 is in the Bible, though, and it is harsh: worse than an infidel. That much the proverb has right. Paul does put family first in order in this chapter, and he does not soften it: children and grandchildren are to “requite their parents,” to pay back what they were given. A believer who leaves a parent to strangers has done something serious.
What the proverb can add is the stopping. Luke, in 9:61-62, has its own “first… at home,” in a scene that runs the other way. A man tells Jesus, “Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell, which are at home at my house,” and Jesus answers, “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” Home can be the place you begin, and it can also be the place you use to keep from going.
Do good to all
Paul gives the Galatians two circles of his own, and the proverb keeps only the smaller one.
As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.
Galatians 6:10 (KJV)
The duty is to all, and the household of faith comes inside it, especially, which there means the church, a wider house than your family. The proverb keeps the word especially and quietly loses the word all. When someone asks for help, the question Paul leaves is whether you have the opportunity, not whether the person asking is yours. For a family saving for its own, that can mean a small amount set aside for others, so the answer is never simply no.
Jesus widened the word family himself. Stretching out his hand toward his disciples, in Matthew 12:49-50, he said, “Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.”