Faith and Values: Our national vision isn’t really poor

Forgiving debts every seven years? Moses commanded it.

Freeing slaves, too? Again, Moses.

Caring for the poor as an ongoing obligation to bring about shalom (wholeness) justice? Moses said it.

All of this “social justice” stuff comes from Moses’ three sermons that make up what we call the book of Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). He died shortly after he preached, so he was laying the blueprint for a healthy Israeli society in the Promised Land.

These sermons were on Jesus’ mind 1,400 years later when he and his disciples had a significant disagreement in Matthew 26:11 – not long before he was killed for his revolutionary ideas. He knew he would die, and tried to get them to embrace that likelihood. They didn’t get it.

They were eating dinner in the house of Simon, the leper in Bethany. An unnamed woman came and anointed Jesus with expensive oil, as though preparing him for his burial. Jesus got that gesture. His friends angrily thought the perfume’s cost could have helped the poor instead.

Jesus called them up short: “The poor you will have always, but you won’t have me here much longer.” He knew it was time to grieve his death, and his friends didn’t take the hint. He knew the poor would be around as long as their world was dominated by a system that didn’t care for the poor.

Jesus wasn’t condoning poverty, or giving in to its inevitability. But we too often use those words to justify our own giving in to “the poor” being a simple fact of life. This quote is actually still an indictment of how we dismiss both “the poor” and the Kingdom of God all at once.

Jesus didn’t think up the Kingdom of God all by himself. Did you ever consider that? One of his scriptural learnings came from the entire book of Deuteronomy. The great leader Moses helped form the vision – partly described above – that shaped Jesus’ own vision of God’s Kingdom.

One of Jesus’ primary truths came from Deuteronomy 6:45, the Shema, the call of Israel’s one-God identity: “Hear, o Israel, the Lord our God is the one God. You shall love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength” (my abbreviated version). From that came Moses’ vision of a just society.

Jesus’ love for the marginalized and the poor came from God certainly; but it also came from his life experience. He was always poor. So were his disciples. They knew the economic and social domination of the Roman government from the inside out. And still they hoped.

A fool’s errand to hope like that? To most of us, it seems that way. Perhaps it seemed that way to Moses also, but he pushed his people to see beyond the cultural domination of their own times. They were more than their daily existence, because God was also more.

Sometimes I wonder in anguish if we believe God is “also more” today. We aren’t preparing for Jesus’ burial, like Jesus was doing in Simon’s house. Yes, the poor are “always with us,” and that will remain the case until we start believing we can keep working to change that reality.

One major sign we might be moving in the direction of a socially just nation is when we make progress on changing the systems that make people economically poor. The “poor” are people, not religious or economic labels. We must work together as Americans first.

We have the capability to do that. Currently, we lack Jesus’ Kingdom of God vision and will to do that. Let’s find it, together.