But They Don’t Deserve It! (August Synchroblog)

“The Gospel takes away our right, forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor” – Dorothy Day.

“Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20)

The theme of this month’s synchroblog is poverty. Poverty isn’t just about being cash-poor, it is about political, economic, and cultural deprivation. It is about being at the bottom of the heap, and not being able to pull yourself up by the bootstraps because you have no boots to begin with.

When people talk about the “deserving poor”, they are typically referring to middle and working class people who have found themselves in difficult circumstances: They may not have any money. . .they may not even have a home, but they do have the cultural values, and the privileges thereof, of the middle and working classes. When Jesus spoke about the poor, he was likely talking about those who were living poverty: Like their modern counterparts, the impoverished of his day were caught in a generational cycle that few, if any, would ever emerge from. What is even worse, the impoverished of his day, again like their modern counterparts, probably contributed to their own situation as a result of the culture of poverty, and as a result, they too were probably defined as “the undeserving poor” by those who were in a position to help them.

The funny thing, though, is that neither Jesus nor the prophets ever made the distinction between deserving and undeserving poor. Dorothy Day, who I suspect saw her ministry as being one of hospitality rather than social work or “charity”, didn’t make this distinction either. Instead she obeyed the commands of Christ and his prophets to care for the poor, whether they were deserving or not, grateful or not.

In fact, Jesus doesn’t seem to much care about whether the poor deserve whatever the non-poor can give to them. Instead, he not only tells us that we are supposed to care for the poor, but that, by the way, the kingdom of God belongs to them.

Now ain’t that a kick in the head?

This is a hard thing for me to swallow, incidentally. I work hard, as do a lot of my friends and family members. None of us are rich, none of us have a lot, and some of us are particularly vulnerable: A bad accident or even a minor financial crisis could threaten our housing situation or our ability to even buy food. We are (generally) responsible people who do our best to obey the law and to be productive, and Jesus has the nerve to tell us that the kingdom of God belongs to those “other” people who (really) don’t deserve it in the first place!

Why them? Why the poor? Why not the working classes? Why not those who “deserve” it?

I don’t like to presume to speak for God, but I have a few ideas:

Those who live in poverty, like all of us, have their blind spots: There are options that they do not see, prejudices that they hold, ways in which they misunderstand the world around them. But unlike the working/middle/upper classes, they have no illusions about safety nets: They are aware of their vulnerability to evil and know that the systems in which the non-poor have so much faith simply cannot be relied upon. They live day-to-day, hour-by-hour: Planning ahead is at best a pipe dream, at worst, as set-up for crushing disappointment.

When God incarnated as Christ, he left a “sure thing” for uncertainty: By putting himself at the mercy of fallen and corrupted systems, he found himself being tortured and executed at the age of thirty-three. No system protected him, no system could save him. His resurrection took place outside of established systems (including basic human biology), and his kingdom isn’t of this world anyway. The poor, those high-risk cynics who perpetually “fall through the cracks” of systems that weren’t designed to help them anyway, are closer to Jesus’s incarnated condition than the privileged will ever be.

And that is why they are heirs to his kingdom.

And that is why we are to serve them.

And that is why when we do unto them, we do unto Jesus.

Visit the other synchrobloggers at the links below:

Sonja Andrews: Fully Known and Fully Loved
Phil Wyman at Phil Wyman’s Square No More
Adam Gonnerman: Echoes of Judas
Cobus van Wyngaard: Luke: The Gospel for the Rich
Lainie Petersen at Headspace
Steve Hayes: Holy Poverty
Jonathan Brink: Spiritual Poverty
Dan Stone at The Tense Before
Jeremiah: Blessed are the poor… churches…
Alan Knox: Boasting in Humiliation
Miss Eagle: Poverty and the Hospitable Heart
Jimmie: Feeding the Poor

Tagged as: jesus, kingdom, poverty, the poor