“Jesus said to his disciples: Amen, I say to you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

I wonder what Jesus would think about the latest American shopping trend.

A recent issue of “Vogue” magazine urged readers to “harness the power of fashion to change the way the nation shops.” The magazine recommended shoppers replace the plastic shopping bags, which are choking the country’s landfills, with reusable designer bags.

Naturally, fashion designers seized this new opportunity. For a mere $960, the truly affluent can purchase a Hermes shopping bag made of hand-wrought silk, which folds up into a wallet-size calfskin pouch. Or, the thrifty types can bag their groceries in a Castiglioni fold-able nylon tote that retails for only $843. Better yet, for the budget-conscious there is a chic and stylish Stella McCartney organic canvas shopping bag for just under $500.

One more practical minded handbag designer has come out with a reusable, canvas, shopping tote imprinted with the words “I’m not a plastic bag.” It sells for $15 in supermarkets. According to “Time” magazine, 20,000 of the totes were bought by 9 am of the first day it went on sale. The bag became an instant collector’s item with people bidding ten times as much for it on Ebay.

Of course, you would need more than one canvas tote to handle a week’s worth of groceries. So the total price tag for the cheapest eco-friendly bags could come to at least $60.

Apparently the fashion editors have never shopped Costco where they don’t bag your groceries; they expect you to use old shipping boxes or to roll your shopping cart out to your car trunk. Nor, it seems, have the designers shopped in the growing number of supermarkets that have plastic bag recycling bins. And what about simply reusing plain old brown paper shopping bags? Duh.

What would Jesus think of the glamor bags? I suspect that He’d see them as a sign of distorted values. For the $60 it would take to buy enough tote bags for a week’s groceries, you could feed a starving child in a third world country for almost a year.

America ranks fourth in the world in economic aid to less developed countries. We trail the United Kingdom, France and Japan - - yet our economy is 46% larger than the combined total of those three nations.

On a per capita basis, we rank 18th in the world in financial aid at $22.91 per year per person. . . just ahead of Iceland.

When Jesus sent out His apostles on their first mission, He told them not to carry a purse. When He told a rich young man to care for the poor and needy, the man couldn’t bear to part with his money and left. On seeing him walk off, Jesus said, “It will be hard for one who is rich to enter the Kingdom of heaven.”

What would Jesus say about the way we care for the world's poor and needy? I suspect He’d say, “Loosen your purse strings.”