Hope

As is the case with most of her writings, I really enjoyed Rev. Lisa Caine's column regarding charity and societal change. I think it strike a nice balance between the necessity of charitable actions for not just the Christian community, but the global one as well, as well as making an educated case for challenging the societal status quo (i.e. asking 'why' do we have so many poor people?).

As one would expect, such honest discussions of faith, responsibility and Biblical context are almost instantly 'refuted' in the comments ...

When Jesus walked on earth, the Roman Empire, "the most affluent nation in the world" governed Judea. The poor were everywhere. Jesus in his own words said "the poor are with you always."

As long as human beings work their will on earth, the poor will be among us.

The Church (Christian members of the body of Christ) are admonished to care for the poor. Jesus nor any word of the New Testament ever encouraged anyone to force or even ask any government or army to care for the poor.

I see this a lot, and what this is, actually, can be simply described ... it's the Americanization of the message of The Gospel. It's ignorance of the context surrounding the events of both the Old and New Testaments, and, instead, an attempt to neatly fit the message into a preconceived concept or worldview that makes sure everything stays nice, comfortable and non-threatening.


As Rob Bell put it in Jesus Wants To Save Christians ...

Most of the Bible is a history told by people living in lands occupied by conquering superpowers. It's a book written from the underside of power. It's an oppression narrative. The majority of the Bible was written by a minority people living under the rule and reign of massive, mighty empires, from the Egyptian Empire to the Babylonian Empire to the Persian Empire to the Assyrian Empire to the Roman Empire.

Knowing this, I've always wondered how we - living in the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world - can truly comprehend what the Biblical writers were talking about it. Because from our perspective, where everything is warm and cozy, it's difficult to imagine where this narrative comes from.

So we rationalize that when Jesus says that we'll always have the poor with us, we assume that means it's OK to strive for the status quo ... and we don't particularly care about the fact that He was also making a strong statement about what an inclusive church should look like, as well as responding to a specific question at a specific time regarding a specific incident (his annointing of oil, thus symbolically preparing him for crucifixion).

So we theorize that when Jesus told us to give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's it must mean that government should be left alone to do as it wished ... rather the recognize the powerful political statement He was making. As Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan argued for in their collaborative work The Last Week, Jesus's brilliant response proved to be an indictment of the Pharisees since he requested to see what the coin looked like ...

In the Jewish homeland in the first century, there were two types of coins. One type, because of the Jewish prohibition of graven images, had no animal or human images. The second type (including Roman coinage) had images. Many Jews would not carry or use the coins of the second type. But Jesus's interrogators in the story did. The coin they produced had Caesar's image along with the standard and idolatrous inscription heralding Caesar as divine and Son of God. They are exposed as part of the politics of collaboration.

The Bible isn't an argument for a particular type of political ideology or philosophy, and Jesus didn't come to say that conservatism or liberalism is the best course of action. Those are constructs of the human mind, and we have debates and discussions, coupled with real life experiences, to see what works and what doesn't.

The Bible is, however, a powerful narrative that challenges the existing political, economic and religious thought of the day ... and today. To not properly research and understand the context of what Jesus said or who was in charge or what was going on in that particular land is to only glean a surface knowledge of the Scriptures.

And that lack of context is how we get an entire profit-driven industry built around the propagation of things like Left Behind that speak of a future apocalypse and Anti-Christs and New World Orders and raptures. It leads to fear-mongering, rather than embrace Revelation as the brilliant letter of hope to an oppressed church that it rightfully is.

So, yes, Jesus said that we'd always have the poor with us. The real question, then, is what did He mean by that? Judging by His repeated requests that we care for the least of these, I'm going to assume the message focused more on community rather than poverty.