Poverty sucks, but....

The Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time

Jer 17:5-8, Blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD.
1 Cor 15:12, 16-20, But Christ has been raised .
Lk 6:17, 20-26, The Beatitudes, and the Woes.



 Ugh!  The Gospel today contains difficult things.  He says that the poor, the hungry, the weeping, the hated and excluded and insulted are all blessed.  And that the rich, the full, the happy and the well-esteemed are cursed.

Uh, Jesus, with all due, don't you have that a little backwards?

And this isn't even the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus says "the poor in spirit," and those "who hunger and thirst for justice."  This is the literally poor, the literally hungry.  Those other passages are much easier...a little buffering goes a long way.

I don't know about you, but as I write this, I am digesting what was a very pleasant dinner, I am warm in my room in a somewhat snowy New York,  WQXR is playing lovely classical music in the background, and I a relatively content, save for a slight cough and cold.  Probably, if you are sitting at a computer reading this, you're are not in all that different a situation, maybe listening to different music, maybe at a different time of day.  But probably not struggling.  So what are we to make of Jesus' words--we, who are not poor, hungry, weeping, hated, excluded, insulted?

Oh, I imagine we could find all sorts of ways to make ourselves into the people Jesus esteems; we could claim little social disadvantages for ourselves, we could dig up a few wounds from childhood, we could find little ways in which we might merit the blessings and dodge the curses--I'm really not that rich...I come from a working class background...I have had it tough...I have come by it all honestly at any rate...

Or we could, I guess, take Jesus at his word.

Once we do that, it is funny how freeing the words become, how much latitude we suddenly find in them.  Jesus is quite serious when he talks about these blessings and curses, as upside down as they may seem to us.  But if we let his words be truth for us, we are suddenly freed, in a marvelous way.

What do I mean?

Well, the truth is that all the things of this world are only blessings if they bring us closer to God.  And all the lacks are only curses if they keep us from God.  But we know that nothing--nothing!--will separate us from the love of God (Romans 8:31-39).  This is his promise to us through Christ; God even took the worst we could offer and made it the means of salvation, if we are willing to accept it.

If then we build our lives on what brings us closer to our God, and not on our own comfort, or on the opinions of others, or on what our advertising culture tells us is necessary for a good life, then the values of the Beatitudes, even as baldly as they are stated by Luke, make great sense.  But if we build our lives on the praise of our friends and our neighbors, if we concentrate on filling our bellies and getting whatever pleases us, if we fill our lives with whatever will amuse us, then we have a number of problems.  First, we will not face the truth of how hard life can be, and probably will be for each of us, or for those whom we love.  Secondly, we will become compulsive about filling our lives with these things; they will become addictions, and we will be slaves to those addictions.  Thirdly, we will never learn the truth about ourselves, the truth that we are terribly contingent creatures.  Even if one does not believe in God, we still all have to face the fact that our lives have been built on the shoulders of many others, and upon a great deal of good fortune.  Fourthly, we will come to regard things as the measure of God's love for us, which they are emphatically not! Finally, we will probably hurt many people--even people we love--along the way, for like addicts we will sacrifice anything to get our fixes, to keep ourselves full, well-liked, happy and comfortable.

And what a shame it would be to find ourselves at the end of the game, having won Monopoly by hook and by crook, but having no one left to play with.  How cursed--how lonely and wretched!  As Jesus asks so directly: "What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what can one give in exchange for his life?" (Mt 16:26).

Now truth be told, once I let Jesus' words mean what they mean, I am hung out to dry.  I am not poor, and I don't think I really could ever be poor; I have all the advantages of an over-educated, pretty well-bred, white, middle class, American male, including the fact that I have time to write a blog.  My health is pretty good because my parents worked very hard to make sure that my brothers and sisters and I ate well; they made sure we were educated well; they held us to very high standards.  Even if I were to lose everything, including my mind, and tossed out on the street, much of that would still probably come through.  I have abundant resources I have never had to rely on; the poor really do not.  In fact, most of us do.  As Lear cries out in his earliest madness, "Our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous!"

But despite what I may think--despite what our culture thinks--all those advantages are not advantages before God.  The fact is that God does not love me for these advantages.  Nor did he give me these advantages because he loves me.  They amount to nothing--indeed they may amount to worse than nothing--on the day of judgment.


There is a wonderful and salutary parable in the Gospel of Luke about a rich fool who, having had a successful crop, decides to pull down his barns and build larger ones to store the abundance of his harvest.  But God calls him a fool (Luke 12:16-21).  The issue is for God is not that the man has much, nor that he was successful or lucky.  Rather, I suspect, it was that the rich fool could have done something greater with his good fortune and his skillful farming: he could have cared for the people around him who were in need.  But it never enters his mind; he is possessed by his possessions and his life, in the end, is a sad waste.  No one to miss him, no one to bless him, no one to pray for him!  He could have done so much--he could have been a blessing.

Perhaps that is what Jesus is trying to correct in us rich fools; perhaps he is trying to help us to rethink our possessions and advantages and privileges; perhaps rather than thinking of it all as a game of Monopoly, we would do better to think of it as Hot Potato--whoever gets caught at the end with the stuff gets burnt.  Perhaps he wants us to understand that the stuff is a curse unless we let it be a blessing--unless we ourselves are blessings--to someone else.

 I always find Jesus' example instructive, and in this scene no less so.  Interesting, isn't it, that Luke places Jesus on a level plane for this discourse (in contrast to the Matthean version, which takes place on a mountain).  Isn't it amazing that the Lord of the heavens and the earth should come sit face-to-face with us.  How much he had to set aside to do that!  In the "Meditation on the Two Standards" in the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius alludes to this scene when he describes Jesus summoning the army of the elect "in a great field of that region of Jerusalem, in lowly place, beautiful and attractive," quite in contrast to Lucifer, "the enemy of our human nature," who is enthroned on a high and fiery throne, inspiring awe and fear.  The message is so clear: Jesus became poor for us; Jesus became poor in becoming one of us.

Years ago, there was a poster with an overdressed guy with his foot on the fender of a limo and a dolled-up babe on his arm; the caption underneath read "POVERTY SUCKS!"  Well, you know, it does--ask any poor person; ask someone from Haiti.  And let's not be romantic about it; poverty can do terrible things to people--degrading them, reducing them, forcing them to do terrible things.  But wealth does not necessarily make us any better.  One needs only to read the papers or watch the news to follow the seriously messed up lives of the rich and the famous.  And the salacious headlines do not even begin to describe the more serious heartbreaks and agonies they experience, just like the rest of us.  We have seen anew in the past few years how hard the rich and powerful have to work to keep themselves on top, often going to terrible lengths in their effort to stay on top, betraying all trust--of family and friends, as well as colleagues and employees--along the way.  Think of the names we have come to know well: Bernard Madoff, Dennis Kozlowski, Kenneth Lay, Elliot Spitzer.  In so many ways, they are more to be pitied.

In the end, then, there is really only one question for us: what will bring us closer to our God?  Jeremiah says that trust is what the Lord asks of us, trust even when our little kingdoms are falling apart, even as Jeremiah experienced as he watched the Kingdom of Judah in its destruction.  Trusting in God's way, even when all the world says that we are fools for doing so.  Jeremiah pointed to this; Jesus lived it, trusting his Father even to the end, when there was barely breath left in him.  His trust, as Paul makes so clear, was vindicated.  Ours, too, if we will but give it.

AMDG