RonRolheiser,OMI

Jesus and The Poor

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I grew up a second-generation immigrant in the outback of the Western Canadian prairies. Our family was poor economically, subsistence farmers, with the necessities but seldom with much more. My father and mother were charitable to a fault and tried to instill that in us. However, given our own poverty, understandably we did not have much of a vision in terms of social justice. We were the poor.

Growing up in this way can deeply ingrain certain instincts and attitudes inside you, some good, some bad. Positively, you grow to believe that you need to work hard, that nothing is given to you free, that you need to take care of yourself, and everyone else should do the same. Ironically, that very ethos can blind you to some major truths regarding the poor.

I can testify to this. It took me many years, work that took me over many borders, some firsthand encounters with people who didn’t have the basic necessities of life, and countless hours in theology classrooms before I even became aware of some of the basic biblical and Christian truths regarding the poor.

Now I am struggling to live them, but at least I accept that they are non-negotiable for a Christian, irrespective of denomination or political persuasion. In brief, as a Christian, we are given a non-negotiable mandate to reach out to the poor in compassion and justice. Moreover, this mandate is just as non-negotiable as keeping the commandments, as is clear most everywhere in Scripture.

Here is the essence of that mandate …

  • The great Jewish prophets coined this mantra: The quality of your faith will be judged by the quality of justice in the land; and the quality of justice in the land will always be judged by how “widows, orphans, and strangers” (biblical code for the weakest and most vulnerable groups in a society) are doing while you are alive.
  • Jesus not only ratifies this; he deepens it, identifying his very person with the poor.  (“Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, you do to me.”). He tells us that we will be judged for eternal life on the basis of how we treated the poor.
  • Moreover, in both Testaments in the Bible, this is particularly true regarding how we treatforeigners, strangers, and immigrants. How we treat them is how we are in fact treating Jesus.
  • Note that Jesus defines his mission with these words: I have come to bring good news to the poor. Hence, any teaching, preaching, or government policy that is not good news for the poor may not cloak itself with either Jesus or the Gospel.

As well, most of us have been raised to believe that we have the right to possess whatever comes to us honestly, either through our own work or through legitimate inheritance. No matter how large that wealth might be, it’s ours as long as we didn’t cheat anyone along the way. By and large, this belief has been enshrined in the laws of democratic countries, and we generally believe that it is morally sanctioned by the Christianity. It is not, as we can see from these truths in Scripture:

  • God loves everyone. There are no favorite ones or privileged ones in God’s eyes, and

God intended the earth and everything in it for the sake of all human beings. Thus, created goods should flow fairly to all.

  • Wealth and possessions must be understood as ours to steward rather than to possess absolutely.
  • No person or nation may have a surplus if others do not have the basic necessities.
  • All people are obliged to come to the relief of the poor.
  • The condemnation of injustice is a non-negotiable aspect of our discipleship.
  • In all situations where there is injustice, unfairness, oppression, grinding poverty, God is not neutral. Rather God wants action against everything and everyone who deals injustice and death.

These principles are strong, so strong in fact that it is easy to believe that Jesus can’t really be asking this of us. Indeed, if taken seriously, these principles would radically disrupt our lives and the social order. It would no longer be business as usual.

To take just one example: there are nearly forty-five million refugees in our world today, most of them looking to cross a border into a new country. Is it realistic for any country today, in biblical terms, “to welcome the stranger”, to simply open its borders and welcome anyone who wants to cross? That’s simply not realistic or socially expedient regarding what it would mean practically in terms of our comfort and security.

While that may be granted, what may not be granted is that our (seemingly) necessary social and political pragmatism in dealing with “the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant” may cloak itself with Jesus and the Bible. It may not. This is antithetical to Jesus. Whether or not this upsets our security and comfort, God is always on the underside of history, on the side of the poor.

Ecumenism: The Imperative for Wholeness Inside the Body of Christ

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For more than a thousand years, Christians have not experienced the joy of being one family in Christ. Although there were already tensions within the earliest Christian communities, it was not until the year 1054 that there was a formal split, in effect, to establish two formal Christian communities, the Orthodox Church in the East and the Catholic Church in the West. Then, with the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, there was another split within the Western Church and Christianity fragmented still further. Today there are hundreds of Christian denominations, many of whom, sadly, are not on friendly terms with each other.

Division and misunderstanding are understandable, inevitable, the price of being human. There are no communities without tension and so it is no great scandal that Christians sometimes cannot get along with each other. The scandal rather is that we have become comfortable, even smug, with the fact that we do not get along with each other, no longer hunger for wholeness, and no longer miss each other inside our separate churches.

In almost all our churches today there is little anxiety about those with whom we are not worshiping. For example, teaching Roman Catholic seminarians today, I sense a certain indifference to the issue of ecumenism. For many seminarians today this is not an issue of particular concern. Not to single out Catholic seminarians, this holds true for most of us in all denominations.

But this kind of indifference is inherently unchristian. Oneness was close to the heart of Jesus. He wants all his followers at the same table, as we see in this parable.

A woman has ten coins and loses one. She becomes anxious and agitated and begins to search frantically and relentlessly for the lost coin, lighting lamps, looking under tables, sweeping all the floors in her house. Eventually she finds the coin, is delirious with joy, calls together her neighbors, and throws a party whose cost no doubt far exceeded the value of the coin she had lost. (Luke 15, 8-10)

Why such anxiety and joy over losing and finding a coin whose value was probably that of a dime? Well, what’s at issue is not the value of the coin; it’s something else. In her culture, nine was not considered a whole number; ten was. Both the woman’s anxiety about losing the coin and her joy in finding it had to do with the importance of wholeness. A wholeness in her life that had been fractured and a precious set of relationships was no longer complete.

Indeed, the parable might be recast this way: A woman has ten children. With nine of them, she has a good relationship, but one of her daughters is alienated. Her nine other children come home regularly to the family table, but her alienated daughter does not. The woman cannot rest in that situation, cannot be at peace. She needs her alienated daughter to rejoin them. She tries every means to reconcile with her daughter and then one day, miracle of miracles, it works. Her daughter comes back to the family. Her family is whole again, everyone is back at the table. The woman is overjoyed, withdraws her modest savings, and throws a lavish party to celebrate that reunion.

Christian faith demands that, like that woman, we need to be anxious, dis-eased, figuratively lighting lamps, and searching for ways to make the Church whole again. Nine is not a whole number. Neither is the number of those who are normally inside our respective churches. Roman Catholicism isn’t a whole number. Protestantism isn’t a whole number. The Evangelical Churches aren’t a whole number. The Orthodox Churches aren’t a whole number. No one Christian denomination is a whole number. Together we make up a whole Christian number – and that is still not a whole faithnumber.

And so, we are meant to be anxious around these questions: Who no longer goes to church with us? Who is uncomfortable worshiping with us? How can we be comfortable when so many people are no longer at table with us?

Sadly, today, many of us are comfortable in churches that are far, far from whole. Sometimes, in our less reflective moments, we even rejoice in it: “Those others aren’t real Christians in any case! We’re better off without them, a purer, more faithful church in their absence! We’re the one true remnant!”

But this lack of solicitude for wholeness compromises our following of Jesus as well as our basic human maturity. We are mature, loving people and true followers of Jesus, only when, like Jesus, we are in tears over those “other sheep that are not of this fold”. When, like the woman who lost one of her coins, we cannot sleep until every corner of the house has been turned upside down in a frantic search for what’s been lost. We too need to solicitously search for a lost wholeness – and may not be at peace until it is found.

An Invitation to Something Higher

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What is a sin? Is it a sin to not go to church on Sunday? Is it a sin to cheat on your taxes? Is it a sin to get drunk? Is holding a grudge a sin? Is masturbation a sin? Is infidelity in marriage a sin?

For too long preachers, catechists, Sunday school teachers, church hierarchy, and moral theologians have been too focused on sin. Well, indeed there is sin around, but that should hardly be our focus in terms of understanding what it means to live a moral Christian life. Here we should take our cue from Jesus.

In his Sermon on the Mount (Mattew 5-7) Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law and the prophets; I have come to fulfill them.” What he is saying here is basically this: I have not come to do away with the Ten Commandments; I have come to invite you to something higher.

Unfortunately, we tend to think of living a moral life mostly in terms of keeping the Commandments and avoiding sin. What we call “moral theology” has classically been focused on ethical issues, what’s right and what’s wrong? But that’s not what we hear from Jesus as a moral teacher. His Sermon on the Mount (perhaps the greatest moral code ever written) focuses instead on an invitation to do what’s higher. It assumes we are already living the elementary essentials of morality, the Ten Commandments, and instead invites us to something beyond those essentials, namely, to be the adult in the room who helps the world carry its tension.

Jesus doesn’t offer us moral theology in its classical or popular form. Rather he invites us into an ever-deepening discipleship (which is what moral theology, proper catechesis, and Sunday school are meant to do).                 

Here’s an example of an invitation that lies at the very heart of the Sermon on the Mount. At one point, Jesus invites us to a “virtue that goes deeper than that of the scribes and the Pharisees.” It’s easy to miss the point here because, almost without exception, we tend to think that Jesus is referring to the hypocrisy of some of the scribes and Pharisees. He isn’t. Most of the scribes and Pharisees were good, honest, sincere people who practiced a high virtue. For them, living a good moral and religious life meant keeping the Ten Commandments (all of them!) and being a man or woman who was scrupulously fair to everyone. It meant being a just person.

So, what’s lacking here? If I am a person who keeps all the Commandments and am fair and just in all my dealings with others, what is lacking in me morally? Why isn’t that enough?

Jesus’ answer to that takes us further than the Ten Commandments and the demands of justice. He invites us to something beyond.  

He points out that the demands of justice still permit us to hate our enemies, to curse those who curse us, and to execute murderers (an eye for an eye). He invites us to something beyond that, namely, to love those who hate us, to bless those who curse us, and to forgive those who kill us. That is the essence of moral theology. And note that it comes to us as an invitation, inviting us always to something higher. It’s not concerned about what’s a sin and what isn’t (thou shalt not). Rather, it’s a positive invitation beckoning us to reach higher, to transcend our natural impulses, to be more than someone who just keeps the commandments and avoids sin.

I remember once hearing a lecture from the late Michael Hines in which he offered this image of God as forever inviting us to something higher: Imagine a mother coaxing a toddler to walk. Squatting on the floor in front of the child, an arm’s length away, her fingertips just inches away from the fingertips of the child, she gently coaxes the child to risk taking a step forward; then when the child takes that step, she moves her fingertips back a few inches, and again gently tries to coax the child into risking another step. And so, all the way across the floor.

That’s the image we need for Christian discipleship and moral theology. Our first concern should not be, is this a sin or not? Is it a sin to not go to church on Sunday? Is it a sin to entertain lustful thoughts? Is it sin to hold a grudge?

The question with which we need to challenge ourselves is rather, what am I being invited into? Where do I need to stretch myself toward something higher? Am I loving beyond my natural impulses? And more specifically: Am I loving those who hate me? Am I blessing those who curse me? Am I forgiving murderers?

I have not come to do away with the Ten Commandments; I have come to invite you to something higher – all the way across the floor.