Who said the poor are always with us

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This authorization to debit or credit my bank account shall be the same as if I had personally signed a check or authorization to FH. He asks us to pursue justice. Charity may provide some relief to poverty through services like soup kitchens, shelter, food banks, and Christmas gift boxes.

Charity is ointment on an open wound. It helps; it consoles, but it is not surgery. On May 24, , I took my daughter to a Joyfest concert at the Carowinds amusement part in celebration of her seventh birthday. Before the concert ended, a representative from Compassion International shared a testimony and spoke about child sponsorship.

I watched as volunteers gave out packages with the names and stories of children in need of sponsorship, and before the volunteers arrived to our aisle, my daughter was already raising her hand to receive a package. We can always do more. She had spoken the truth, so I texted her father to inform him that we just sponsored another child. Compassion International is not a charity organization. Through their child sponsorship program, they passionately pursue biblical justice by having a holistic approach to offering spiritual and physical care, education, and leadership, which eventually sets a sponsored child up to obtain employment which supports their families and communities.

The one who criticizes the woman in John is Judas. Judas uses the poor as an excuse to make money for himself. You earn money or come upon nice things in some other way and then use that money to donate to the poor. He praises the woman for her alleged waste of the ointment.

This sounds like Jesus is justifying poverty. So when Jesus said this line to his followers, they would have understood his reference to Deuteronomy 15 and would have known that God had another program for addressing poverty.

Rather than selling something valuable and donating the money to the poor, the people of God were supposed to be organizing their society to enact the Jubilee. The woman anointed Jesus as king of an empire that had Jubilee and Sabbath at the center.

This interpretation of Matthew 26 in light of Deuteronomy 15 is consistent with and actually frames the biblical teachings on poverty. There are passages like Matthew 25 where Jesus reminds us that what we do to the least of these, we do unto him. There is the story in Exodus 16 of the manna that God sends from heaven when the Israelites are living in the wilderness after escaping from slavery.

The prophets all emphasize our duty to care for the widow, the orphan, those in need. There is the community of goods in Acts 2 and 4 that tells us that the early Christians had no needy people among them because they shared and cared for each other. Or even the Apostle Paul following his revelation of Jesus started a collection for the poor of Jerusalem that he discusses in Romans, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians — more than any other single theological issue.

But my disappointment is deepened by the fact that a little curiosity as to where Jesus came up with this statement reveals a rich and challenging understanding about God, his people and the poor. A little curiosity as to where Jesus came up with this statement reveals a rich and challenging understanding about God, his people and the poor. The section of Deuteronomy that Jesus refers to begins with a complete contradiction of the claim that the poor will always be with you.

This unambiguous claim is followed by the reason why this is so. The land that God is going to give Israel has more than enough for everyone. There are to be no poor because there will be enough. And more than enough. I can believe this, because I believe that the loving, caring God, who created the world for humankind could never have intended a world of scarcity. The God whom I worship would never place humankind in a land that was unable to provide for life and life abundantly.

But there is a condition to the promise. How can this be? Did Moses get confused? Is this a contradiction? There has to be provision for the poor in the Promised Land, not because God failed or intended it, but because Israel failed.

And so it is today, I suspect. It is a fact that there is enough agricultural production today to feed every human being on the planet. Yet people are dying of hunger, and children are stunted because of chronic malnutrition. We neither love God nor love our neighbors. Did he mean that poverty is something we should tolerate because it is just the way things are?