The Only Appropriate Response Is Generosity

As we begin Holy Week, we turn our attention to the last week of Jesus’ life. During this week in prior years, I have tried to have Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s The Last Week on hand. It is a beautiful book that explores a lot of what happened during Jesus’ final days (from an historical perspective), and it changed a lot of my understanding of these events.

The context for Holy Week is the Passover celebration in Jerusalem (Passover is actually going on right now in Jewish communities all around the world with the first night being on April 12). In prior blogs, I spoke a little bit about what happened on Palm Sunday as Jesus positioned himself in contrast to the dominance and might of Rome and instead held an alternative celebration/street protest. His would be a different way. He would be a different kind of leader.

The first reading from Isaiah 42 gives us an idea of what this leader would be like. Isaiah says that the chosen one, “shall bring forth justice to the nations.” But “not [through] crying out, [or] shouting, [or] making his voice heard in the street.” No, the chosen one will instead be about the work and will “open the eyes of the blind, bring out prisoners from confinement, and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness.”

In the United States culture, we tend to favor the big. The large. The loud. We tend to love big announcements, big celebrities and a big splash. So a leader who is meek, not promoting everything they are doing and yelling to try to get mass attention may not quite feel like much of a leader. Jesus had no PR firm helping him out on socials. No branding that people will recognize. He’s not appearing on the late night TV circuit. He had no slick handouts with a QR code.

Of course I’m being tongue-in-cheek about this, but what Isaiah 42 offers us is a version of discipleship that says, “be about it without having to talk about it.” Or in the words of St. Francis of Assisi, “Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.”

In the words of Nike, “Just do it.”

Which brings us to the gospel from John 12. Jesus is at the house of Lazarus (whom he raised from the dead) about a week before the Passover. After dinner, Mary took some costly perfume and anointed Jesus’ feet with it. Judas protests and says the famous line, “Why was this oil not sold for three hundred days’ wages and given to the poor?”

I do not know why Judas was calling this out. Perhaps, he really thought it was a waste and that the money could have really been used in other ways. He might have even been saying, “The money from that oil could have made a BIG difference!” (though the gospel says that Judas was just greedy and he was being a bit performative.)

Jesus, however, takes a different position. He lets himself be cared for in this way by Mary (which you can read more about here) receiving her generosity and then replies with his famous line, “Leave her alone…You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

It’s always worth highlighting Jesus’ affirmation that we are all entitled to care and love. I know that this is one of the harder lessons for me to accept and take in given the many messages I have received about being there for others and serving.

But his affirmation that we will “always have the poor with us” is one that needs just a little unpacking.

Many church people have interpreted that line from Jesus – according to Rev Liz Theoharis * from the Kairos Center – as a way to “justify the inevitability of inequality and to provide religious sanction for the dispossession of the majority for the benefit of the few.” If we take his words to mean that there have always been poor people and there will always be poor people, our urgency to address poverty diminishes greatly as does our feeling of responsibility.

Rev. Liz goes on to say that Jesus’ response, however, far from being a justification for inaction, would have actually been heard by his followers as a call to action! In this tradition, Jesus is actually referencing a central passage from Deuteronomy 15 where God instructs people on how to actually address poverty in their midst. Deuteronomy 15:11 says this,“There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your [neighbors] who are poor and needy in your land (Dt 15:11).”

By affirming that “the poor will always be with you,” Jesus is citing that the only appropriate response is generosity (like that being shown by Mary), and the disciples will have this continued opportunity to be openhanded every single day. They will not have this opportunity with him, however.

It’s also worth noting that Jim Wallis from the Sojourners community (in Washington, DC) used to always say that Jesus was also likely saying “the poor you will always have with you” because he knew that his disciples, as his followers, would always be surrounding themselves with poor people – because that’s who Jesus came to attend to!

And that’s exactly where we saw Jesus on Palm Sunday – surrounded by a rag-tag group of people who did not fit anywhere else in society. Jesus attracted the lost, the forgotten, the neglected and the invisible – because he wanted them to feel found, visible, and cared for.

This is the work that is ours to carry on – not by making big pronouncements, loud noises or massive media campaigns. This is the work to be done everyday, and it rarely feels sexy, grandiose or life-altering. But we do it because there will always be “the poor” in our land and we can always be openhanded to those in need.

No doubt, we can all allow ourselves to receive the love, care and support we need to continue on. And we can then take that love, care and support out in everyday ways that make a difference in the world.

* Rev. Liz Theoharis will actually be in Rochester along with Noam Sandweiss-Back on Sunday, April 27 from 2 – 4pm in Celebration Hall for a special event co-sponsored by Spiritus. Liz and Noam will be discussing their new book You Only Get What You’re Oranized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty. There will also be a panel discussion on how we all might help to build this movement for justice. I hope that you can join us. You can register here.