Broke: God & Poverty from Rob Bee on Vimeo.
So Jesus is hanging out with the disciples when a woman comes in and gives Jesus a very expensive gift. It’s kind of the equivalent of a huge bunch of flowers in that it’s not a practical gift and it won’t last long at all – it’s a token of affection rather than something he could use. The disciples go nuts and say to her, “That money could have gone to the poor and been used much better than spending it on silly gestures like this!” Rather than agreeing with them and joining in telling the woman off Jesus tells the disciples to calm down. “There will always be poor people,” says Jesus, “The poor will always be with us.”
So is that statement a kind of laissez faire writing off of those in need? Does Jesus validate doing nothing to alleviate poverty? If so what do organisations like Christian Aid and Tradecraft think they are trying to achieve by their attempts to make poverty history?
The first thing to say is that the word ‘poverty’ is quite nice to type. After you’ve done the ‘pov’ bit you can put the little finger of your left hand on the E key and just roll your fingers – there it is.
The second thing to think about it where poverty comes from.
A long time ago – just after people had decided to stop being hunter gatherers – people realised that they couldn’t supply everything they needed for themselves and so they would have to make swaps with other families to supply those bits of stuff they needed to survive. So Mr Bloggs the butcher would need to go to Mr Briggs the baker to get some bread for his sandwiches. This worked very well as Mr Briggs needed meat for his sarnies so they swapped agreed amounts of bread & meat and all families were happy. Or they were until it got dark and they needed to go and see Mr Evans the candlestick maker. They needed his candles so they could see around their caves, but he was a gluten intolerant vegetarian so he wouldn’t swap anything and so the Briggs’s and Bloggs’s stubbed their toes on the cave walls and ended up having to ask Mr Clark the leather worker if he could invent shoes in return for some cow hides and a birthday cake for his mother-in-law.
This uneven system of trade carried on until Mr Morris the miner discovered some particularly nice shiny pebbles that everyone wanted. They decorated their houses with them, turned them into brooches and earrings and some clever people even discovered that shiny pebbles conduct electricity and invented the internet. Even if people had no use for shiny pebbles themselves they used to keep them as they could swap them for things they needed much easier than their own goods. Their use as currency spread and more and more people collected them. Those that had a lot continued to wear them as ornaments while those who only had a few stashed them under the mattress to use to buy things with and as this behaviour continued the gap between the stashers and the wearers widened. They began to call each other names like ‘social climber’ and ‘oik’ until they no longer wanted to live next to each other and the wearers – being able to afford to do so - moved off in search of bigger caves. The wearers compared their finery to that of their new neighbours and wanted bigger and blingier so devised new ways of getting richer, while the stashers, becoming increasingly desperate for shiny pebbles, became a highly exploitable work force for the wearers and they continued to use their shiny pebbles exclusively as currency and crave a cave posh enough to have an outdoor toilet. And thus capitalism and the class system were borne.
So we can see from this that you need 2 things to create poverty. Firstly you need a lot of money - I’ll say that again – you need a lot of money to create poverty. You need an excess of money in the system for people to be able to hoard it. And secondly you need greed, greed enough for people to crave cash, to collect money and want more and more and more of it. If you want to you can add a third ingredient – ignorance. You could argue that the rich people are often ignorant of the effects their hoarding wealth has on the poor, but I’ll leave that one to you.
So as far as Jesus goes there are 2 issues to poverty, there’s the greed and there’s the whole ‘love your neighbour’ thing. The greed thing’s fairly easy to deal with – There’s nothing wrong with providing enough shiny pebbles to feed and clothe your dependents. There’s nothing wrong with saving for a rainy day, but when the amassing of shiny pebbles becomes an end in itself we need to start to ask questions. And when we don’t care where we get our pebbles from and how we get them then we’re really in trouble. We then start to impact on the whole ‘love your neighbour thing’. Jesus was really clear about this one. It’s not optional, in fact it’s the second most important thing we have to do. Love your neighbour like you love yourself. No matter how badly done to you may think you are on a global scale none of us are poor, we’re not stashers, we’re wearers. So imagine yourself craving that new pair of trainers or mp3 player or diamond encrusted underpants and think about who made them. Were they made in the developing world? That’s where the cheap labour is, that’s where we don’t see the exploitation. Now ‘love your neighbour’. Imagine that it is one of your nearest and dearest that is working in that factory or sweatshop in such appalling conditions – working 14 hour shifts with no breaks and earning only just enough to cover the rent on a shoebox in a gutter. Would you still buy it or would you spend a bit extra to ensure your loved one got decent working conditions and a living wage? Our reaction to the suffering and injustice suffered by the poor should be the same as it would be if we saw our nearest and dearest in their place.
So Jesus cares about poverty. He cares that people are exploited and viewed as tools to get a job done rather than valuable human beings. He cares that people put possessions and themselves above the welfare of others. He cares that people become so blinded by what they have they forget who they are. When he tells the disciples ‘The poor will always be with you,” he means, “You will always need to support them. You will always need to love your neighbour. You will always need to defend those who can’t defend themselves.’ This is the work done by the aid agencies. This is the work that God has for his Church, this is the work he has for you and me.
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