Proving Jesus Wrong about Poverty by Valerie Bridgeman

The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. ~ Jesus, according to Matthew 26:11

The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me. ~ Jesus, according to Mark 14:7

These words, recorded by the gospel writers and attributed to Jesus, have always concerned me. How could Jesus be so “insensitive,” so matter-of-fact, so pessimistic about human flourishing, I thought as early as I can remember. To be sure, context matters, and these two texts are the only ones where it seems Jesus consigns the inevitability of poverty and people made poor by economic systems. In these texts, the words push back against the (male) disciples complaining that the (woman) disciple has taken expensive perfume (Matthew) and poured it on Jesus’ head. The disciples who saw it, were “indignant” and said “this perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor” (Matt. 26:9; Mark 14:5). Jesus rebukes them and in Mark says the poor can be helped “any time you want.” These disciples, from my reading, have never once expressed this concern for “the poor” anywhere else in the text; and still, I’m not happy with Jesus either, even as these texts are considered “pro-woman” discipleship by most feminist biblical scholars. I struggle, then, with how we perceive people who don’t have what they need to have a flourishing life.

Growing up around poverty, and never thinking of myself as poor—even though for much of my early life we had an “outhouse,” and carried water into our house to take a bath in a tin-bottom tub—I can remember looking at some of my classmates with pity. I’m not proud of my internal elitism. I remember the kinds of stories I told myself about my family. We had a working (and sometimes new) car—I knew nothing about high-interest loans. We had a vegetable garden and never had one day when no one ate. My mother was a teacher, but one of her side-gigs was making clothes, so she made all our clothes. We were never in tattered clothes. I knew nothing about that fact that my mother HAD to have side gigs, sewing and doing taxes for people in our area who couldn’t read. We were a statistic I wouldn’t understand for years later. We were among the “working poor.”[1]  My father, when we returned to our family, worked in a steel factory in Birmingham and served as a pastor. My parents were perceived as “black middle class,” and I will attest that we had middle-class sensibilities, what with my mother’s reading program for us during summers and insisting that we visit museums and historical sites so that we had a bigger vision of the world. We, like all working poor people—we couldn’t afford for anything to go wrong. Only now, thinking back, is when I can “see” that my mother was juggling financially. We would hear phrases like: “you can’t get blood out of a turnip,” or “I have to rob Peter to pay Paul.”

There are myths about people made poor, but one of the most persistent in the USA is that poor people are “lazy.” Statistics say otherwise. Most people who fall below the poverty line work two or three jobs, trying to make ends meet. They thrift shop and scavenge for furnishings. They hustle. But the myths persist, as efforts are made by political and social powerbrokers, using their money and influence to undercut any and all social safety nets. As a society, we treat people who are homeless, addicted to drugs, hungry, in need of medical care without the requisite good health insurance, and so much more as pariahs, rather than neighbors.

A few years back, one of my family members had a health crisis. He and his wife both worked; they had health insurance, but they also had large deductibles in order to have health insurance. After all the bills, all of the struggles, we decided they were among the “working poor.” Here they were, educated but in low-paying jobs and barely making ends meet. They could not afford to have anything go wrong. Because when anything goes wrong for those made poor, it spirals into one thing after another. People have to make excruciating decisions from “can we do without electricity this month” to “if I skip the car payment, when will they repossess it?” Please note: any and all of these issues get exacerbated for women.

I don’t know that telling stories will move people, but if it is true that we can “help [poor people] any time we want,” then I believe the church needs to work on our “want to.” In one of the wealthiest nations ever on the planet, no one should “face” hunger,[2] have water that’s not potable,[3] or worry about whether they can go to the doctor because they don’t have insurance.[4]

It’s not simply that the church should “step in” to help. Charity or “mercy ministries”, as they are sometimes called, are necessary. I’m excited that Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago  goes further and connects its ministries to self-determination and economic empowerment. They are now in the midst of adding to their ecological work and garden, a new medical center that will focus on preventive care and that will provide jobs. They see themselves as living into the gospel of Jesus by doing more than giving people food or clothes. They work to bring people into dignity and flourishing. They seem to me to be working against the notion that poverty has to persist, the gospel quotes notwithstanding. They seem to be taking up the “unfinished business” of the church that Womanist ethicist Keri Day demands.[5]

We could read those words attributed to Jesus with resignation, or as a gospel challenge. We can decide that—on our watch—the numbers of people made poor by policies, apathy, or ongoing ill-will will go down as we work against systems like payday loans that gouge people. We can fight for good political policies that uphold the ideal of promoting the general welfare of the nation. We can stand against the practice of making debt a chargeable offense. We can resist cities and states that criminalize people who have no roof but the sky over their head. We may have the poor with us, but the church has an obligation to do justice and disrupt in every way those barriers that make it so. I don’t know that we are able to prove Jesus wrong about poverty and people trapped in its unrelenting cycles, but I would like us to try. May it be so.

Valerie Bridgeman is Interim Dean of Methodist Theological School in Ohio (MTSO), where she serves as Associate Professor of Homiletics and Hebrew Bible. She also is president and CEO of the non-profit organization, WomanPreach! Inc., which trains preachers in prophetic preaching especially attending to Womanist and Feminist concerns.

[1] https://politicsofpoverty.oxfamamerica.org/2016/09/5-myths-about-the-working-poor-in-america/ and https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/who-are-working-poor-america.

[2] https://mashable.com/2016/07/14/child-hunger-united-states/#0heUn8mddaqP

[3] https://newrepublic.com/article/147011/rural-americas-drinking-water-crisis

[4] http://www.pbs.org/healthcarecrisis/uninsured.html

[5] https://smile.amazon.com/Unfinished-Business-Church-Struggle-America/dp/1570759812/ref=smi_www_rco2_go_smi_g2609328962?_encoding=UTF8&%2AVersion%2A=1&%2Aentries%2A=0&ie=UTF8