The poor you
always have with you, but you do not always have me.
--John 12:8 RSV
It was early in my career as an ordained minister and
I had just preached a sermon about economic injustice to the “fiscal Republican”
crowd at the church I served in a Wall Street bedroom community on Long Island.
Afterward, a member who happened to be a great guy engaged with me in a
friendly manner. We talked about my sermon in which I said basically to be
Christian means working to eliminate poverty. He pointed out to me that Jesus
himself said, “The poor you always have with you,” meaning, he felt, it’s an
inevitable law of the universe that some will be poor so why bother? I was
flabbergasted. It was the first time, but far from the last time, I would hear
this verse used to suggest Jesus wanted us to NOT care about poor people. It’s
a bit of bad biblical interpretation that politicians, pundits and snobs like
to throw around.
I bring up this verse today because it is Holy
Wednesday. In Christian tradition, Wednesday night of Holy Week focuses upon
Jesus being anointed at Bethany by Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus (NOT Mary
Magdalene as tradition has confused the various Marys of the Gospels—go read
Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code and he will explain it to you). In John’s
version (Matthew, Mark and Luke all have different details), Mary anoints Jesus
with expensive perfume, Judas objects (because he wanted the money himself
according to the narrator) and Jesus explains Mary was preparing him for his
burial. Then he drops his words about “the poor.”
Yesterday, I shared some background on why Jesus
became angry enough to disrupt the merchants at the Jerusalem temple—the exploitation
of the poor. Now, here Jesus is the next day talking about “the poor” again. It’s
almost as if Jesus cared about poor people and wasn’t promoting a private individualistic
piety as so many Christians think! I bring “the poor” up not because I’m such a
great social activist or even particularly generous but because Jesus won’t
stop talking about poor people even the days before his impending death. It
matters, because Christianity has made Jesus’ teachings and ministry about an
otherworldly ticket to heaven rather than about concrete acts of love in the
here and now.
Recently, I’ve come across a sermon the writer Kurt
Vonnegut preached on a Palm Sunday. I’m sure folks better educated than I are
well aware of it, but it’s new to me. Vonnegut described himself as a “Christ-worshipping
agnostic” which in my book is better than self-identified Christians who ignore
Christ’s teachings. In his sermon, the author chose to focus on the verse
containing the phrase “the poor you
always have with you.” His interpretation is the same as my interpretation, and
if Christ’s death and resurrection are to mean anything in the here and now,
then I think this matters greatly if one wishes to follow Jesus. Here’s some of
what Vonnegut had to say:
Whatever it was that Jesus really said to
Judas was said in Aramaic, of course-and has come to us through Hebrew and
Greek and Latin and archaic English. Maybe He only said something a lot like,
"The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have Me."
Perhaps a little something has been lost in translation. And let us remember,
too, that in translations jokes are commonly the first things to go.
I would like to recapture what has been
lost. Why? Because I, as a Christ-worshipping agnostic, have seen so much
un-Christian impatience with the poor encouraged by the quotation "For the
poor always ye have with you."
I am speaking mainly of my youth in Indianapolis,
Ind. No matter where I am and how old I become, I still speak of nothing but my
youth in Indianapolis, Ind. Whenever anybody out that way began to worry a lot
about the poor people when I was young, some eminently respectable Hoosier,
possibly an uncle or an aunt, would say that Jesus Himself had given up on
doing much about the poor. He or she would paraphrase John 12, verse 8:
"The poor people are hopeless. We'll always be stuck with them."
The general company was then free to say
that the poor were hopeless because they were so lazy or dumb, that they drank
too much and had too many children and kept coal in the bathtub, and so on.
Somebody was likely to quote Kim Hubbard, the Hoosier humorist, who said that
he know a man who was so poor that he owned 22 dogs. And so on.
If those Hoosiers were still alive, which
they are not, I would tell them now that Jesus was only joking, and the He was
not even thinking much about the poor.
. . .
f
Jesus did in fact say that, it is a divine black joke, well suited to the
occasion. It says everything about hypocrisy and nothing about the poor. It is
a Christian joke, which allows Jesus to remain civil to Judas, but to chide him
for his hypocrisy all the same.
"Judas,
don't worry about it. There will still be plenty of poor people left long after
I'm gone."
Shall
I regarble it for you? "The poor you always have with you, but you do not
always have Me."
My
own translation does no violence to the words in the Bible. I have changed
their order some, not merely to make them into the joke the situation calls for
but to harmonize them, too, with the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the
Mount suggests a mercifulness that can never waver or fade.
As we look towards the death and resurrection of
Jesus, let us remember that Jesus wasn’t offering us just a heavenly afterlife
but a way to help people escape Hell on Earth so that God’s will might be done “on
Earth as it is in heaven.”
Grace and Peace,
Chase
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