Always with Us?

What Jesus Really Said about the Poor

Liz Theoharis

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781467447133
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

A strong theological call for ending the abomination of systemic poverty Jesus's words "the poor you will always have with you" (Matthew 26: 11) are regularly used to suggest that ending poverty is impossible, that poverty is a result of moral failures, and that the poor themselves have no role in changing their situation. In this book Liz Theoharis examines both the biblical text and the lived reality of the poor to show how that passage is taken out of context, distorted, and politicized to justify theories about the inevitability of inequality. Theoharis reinterprets "the poor you will always have with you" to show that it is actually one of the strongest biblical mandates to end poverty. She documents stories of poor people themselves organizing to improve their lot and illuminates the implications for the church. Poverty is not inevitable, Theoharis argues. It is a systemic sin, and all Christians have a responsibility to partner with the poor to end poverty once and for all.

CHAPTER 1

Is Ending Poverty Possible?

While Jesus was in Bethany in the home of Simon the Leper, a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as he was reclining at the table. When the disciples saw this, they were indignant. “Why this waste?” they asked. “This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor.” Aware of this, Jesus said to them, “Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. Truly I tell you, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

—Matt 26:6–13

The Bible—a text replete with calls for economic justice and denunciations of the scourge of indifference to the poor—has been misused and cynically politicized to suggest that poverty is a result of the moral failures of poor people sinning against God, that ending poverty is impossible, and that the poor themselves have no role to play in efforts to respond to their poverty. Biblical texts, especially “the poor you will always have with you,” are used to justify the inevitability of inequality and to provide religious sanction for the dispossession of the majority for the benefit of the few. The well-known preacher Jim Wallis¹ regularly conducts a short Bible quiz with American audiences that he speaks to, asking the question: “What is the most famous biblical text about the poor?” Every time, he receives the same answer: “The poor you will always have with you.”² People quote “the poor you will always have with you” as a way to discredit antipoverty organizing, justify the foreordination of poverty, and support the idea that charity is the best response to poverty. Such assertions are made by people who place a great deal of authority in the Bible as well as people who describe themselves as atheists or agnostics.³

Such readings of “the poor you will always have with you” are widespread, pervasive, and damaging. They are used in various arenas, including the mainstream media, popular culture, and the speeches, sermons, and writings of politicians, preachers, and biblical scholars. The passage is used by leading figures in both major political parties in the United States: President Barack Obama opened his remarks with it at Georgetown University’s Poverty Summit in May 2015,⁴ and Texas governor Rick Perry was quoted saying, “Biblically, the poor are always going to be with us in some form or fashion.”⁵

This interpretation of Matt 26:11 has become the common-sense⁶ understanding of the whole of Jesus’s teachings on poverty. A Bible study guide promoting the Millennium Development Goals, prefaced by Dr. Antonios Kireopoulos, the Associate General Secretary for International Affairs and Peace for the National Council of Churches, states that although Jesus admits we can never end poverty, it is nonetheless our duty to care for the poor and work to eradicate “extreme” poverty. In the following, I uncover and analyze the dangerous ideas, ideologies, and assumptions made about poverty and the poor through traditional interpretations of Matt 26:6–13. I will attempt to reinterpret the passage in subsequent chapters to show that “the poor you will always have with you” is actually one of the strongest statements of the biblical mandate to end poverty.

Popular Treatments

It is not news that the Bible is the most widely read, distributed, and translated book in the United States. Always on the top of the bestseller list, it is cited for a boundless range of moral stances and consulted for everyday personal decisions as well as political decisions with major social implications. The issue of poverty appears throughout the Bible—the Old and New Testaments are full of instructions on how we are to respond to poverty and injustice. Jim Wallis surveyed key biblical themes, noting that

in the Old Testament, the suffering of the poor was the second most prominent theme. . . . In the NT we found that one out of every sixteen verses was about the poor. In the Gospels, it was one out of every ten, in Luke, one of every seven, and in James, one of every five verses.⁷

Common throughout the New and Old Testaments are texts addressing the redistribution of wealth and the abolition of poverty: “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe them . . . ?” (Isa 58:6–7); “Speak out, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy” (Prov 31:9); “[God] has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things” (Luke 1:52–53); “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. . . . Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt 25:35, 40).

Yet, while passages like these are common, many people fixate on a small handful of passages: “You will always have the poor among you” (John 12:8); “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat” (2 Thess 3:10); “For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them” (Matt 25:29). These verses are regularly cited to assert that poverty cannot be ended and that if God wanted to end poverty, God would do so. They have been used to claim that the only “good news” that poor people will hear will be in heaven, and interpreted to mean that while some lepers and hungry people in Jesus’s day deserved compassion, today’s poor people are at fault for their own poverty.

To see the omnipresence of this biblical statement, one only needs to do a search for “the poor will always be with you” online. Available are hundreds of thousands of references (728,000 mentions in one of my searches), as well as a debate emerging on the role of Jesus, the Bible, and faith communities in the eradication and amelioration of poverty.⁸ Typically, this debate takes the form of a personal assertion, reflection, blog post, or series of questions on whether or not this statement in Matt 26:11, John 12:8, and Mark 14:7 is saying (a) that we can never end poverty; (b) that it is the role of Christians, not the government, to try to care for the poor; or (c) that Jesus rather than the poor should be our concern.

Following are some examples of these contemporary interpretations of Matthew 26, Mark 14, and John 12. I have emphasized (in bold) key assumptions about poverty and poor people in each. When explored together and in the context of hundreds of other similar online entries, these statements reveal some of the most insidious beliefs in contemporary American society about the meaning of the biblical statement “the poor you will always have with you.”

Poverty will never be eradicated. As Jesus said, “The poor will be with you always. . . .” There will always be people who are physically unable to work, and people who will never work because they simply will not, and people who are too stupid to work for very much money, and people who are criminally inclined to steal from stupid or helpless people, etc. And there will always be people who want to take money away from the higher paid, smart, energetic and enterprising people who are the backbone of this country, and give it to those who are not. Those are the people who refuse to believe what God has said. Poverty CANNOT be cured or eradicated, but there will always be people who try.⁹

Though judgmental, this statement contains a number of core assumptions about poverty and interpretations of this biblical text to which most people subscribe. The author posits that poverty will never be ended and insists that to try to eradicate poverty is to refuse to follow God’s intentions. Blaming poverty and economic hardship on poor people, the post does not follow assumptions of liberation theologians and social-gospel believers that poverty is a social, economic, and political problem, or that the poverty of many is the result of the wealth of a few. Instead, the author connects the inevitability of poverty and the stupidity and laziness of the poor with inattention to what the author sees as God’s message. The author asserts that common responses to the poor, through either governmental services taken from taxes or individual charity and acts of benevolence, are not only ineffectual but counter to God’s will.

The following quotation from another post further connects theology to pathologizing the poor:

From time to time I think that I should mount a defense of what could (incorrectly) be described as my anti-charitable political policies, in light of all the “love they neighbor” stuff in Christianity. . . . I’ve spent weekends and one spring break helping to build houses for the poor . . . when they labored alongside. Given that we each also labored every year to pay taxes to support the poor, to educate the poor and—when both of those fail—to incarcerate some lower-tier fractionate of the poor, I think my job is pretty well done . . . and, really, the fact that all of us—by going to work each day—support the capitalist underpinnings of our society, we could skip the taxes and still consider it a job well done.¹⁰

Here, the author critiques generosity, admits that he contradicts the Golden Rule, and blames poor people for their poverty, asserting that capitalism is the final act of civilizing ourselves. Such a defense of capitalism—as the best Christian response to poverty—indeed is touted by many in our society.¹¹

Some blame the economic crisis that began in 2007 on poor people rather than on systemic problems with our economic system. In the case of the following quotation, the author actually asserts that this is what Jesus was trying to tell us when he said, “The poor you will always have with you”:

We have hashed over and over the causes of the banking crisis. Basically, the democrats forced banks to make loans to people with BAD credit (because they were “underprivileged”—due to racial, gender, sexual, and other types of discrimination). We couldn’t bring in illegal Mexicans to build all the new houses fast enough. There was a “feeding frenzy” in the lending world and even though the democrats created those opportunities, we had to hear “predatory lending, predatory lenders, predatory this, predatory that,” ad nauseam, attempting to make us feel sorry for the financially irresponsible, discriminated-against, underprivileged “groups” that “fell prey” to those “bad old” predatory lenders. Naturally, the mortgage payments stopped coming in. That’s what financially irresponsible people do. They don’t honor their contracts. As Jesus said, “the poor will be with you always.” You can’t even get rid of them with a letter bomb, especially if it looks like a bill. The rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer because the rich continue to do the things that got them rich, the poor keep doing the things that keep them poor and the democrats—who wouldn’t have it any other way—keep being re-elected by the poor.¹²

Prosperity-gospel preachers and self-help gurus also believe in the inevitability of poverty and personal responsibility, proposing higher standards of personal responsibility for the poor than for the wealthy. This author claims that he has a solution to the economic insecurity that some face but does not claim that poverty can end:

Poor is a condition I find very sad. Sad, yet inevitable. Jesus said, “The poor will be with you always.” And they will. . . . I didn’t write this book for the poor people of the world. I know it is going to take a lot more than a book to help truly poor people. . . . Broke is NOT a condition like being poor. Broke is a situation you find yourself in because you are either under earning or overspending. I can’t fix poor, though I would love to. I’m good, but I’m not that good. I can fix broke. . . . I will show you how, step by step. I wrote this book for the average person who has a job, makes a living, and still can’t seem to get ahead.¹³

While the quotations I have highlighted so far embody a more conservative and partisan portrayal of attitudes toward poverty and in some cases demonize the poor, even people who think of themselves as more sensitive to the plight of the poor often follow a similar logic.¹⁴ Many “politically conscious” and self-identified “liberal” Christians come up to me after I speak on poverty and complain about seeing poor people use their food stamps to buy shrimp and steak rather than the hot dogs they can afford and should therefore buy. They claim that poor people lack the guidance to make informed, responsible financial decisions and argue that this is the reason they continue to be poor. In effect, they still blame the poor for their own poverty and hardship. This is shown in the following quotation from a post entitled “Why the Poor Will Always Be with Us”:

Why does poverty exist? In the case of my family it was a number of factors. My father—dad was born in 1876. He was also a coal miner. My dad was a child from a second marriage. And so far as I am able to learn, none of the family members were ever college educated. More importantly, we were never pushed or guided to want to go to college and thereby and hopefully, better our lives. This happened because of a lack of education to begin with. One cannot appreciate to the full extent what one has never experienced. So . . . my answer to the question of why does poverty exist will be . . . a lack of guidance and understanding of what is required to escape from poverty. An education, opportunity, and the willingness to work and the discipline to keep working to get those keys to escape. Poverty will always be with us. As will the sick. As will be any unfortunate circumstance. It IS the human condition.¹⁵

In this quotation, the existence of poverty is naturalized and ultimately attributed to the faults of individual poor people. Rather than accusing the poor...