There is no question that one of our Lord's main concerns was for the poor. It seems, though, that many Christians perhaps get mixed up about what our Lord actually commanded. For example, today I read this from Oscar Romero, in the context of an advertisement for some event or other at my school:
The church would betray its own love for God and its fidelity to the gospel if it stopped being... a defender of the rights of the poor... a humanizer of every legitimate struggle to achieve a more just society... that prepares the way for the true reign of God in history.
It strikes me that this is a bit wrong-headed. First of all, it doesn't seem that the Church is called to defend anyone's rights, as such. Nor does it seem that she is meant to be a "humanizer" in just about any respect. What our Lord did command was that we preach the gospel to the poor (Matthew 11.5, Luke 4.18), that the poor are blessed (Mark 12.42, Luke 6.20 and 14.13), and that we give liberally to the poor (Mark 10.21, Matthew 19.21).
But giving to the poor and preaching the gospel to the poor seems to me a very different thing than being a defender of rights, and a fighter for a more just society. And its not to say that defending the rights of the poor and fighting for a more just society are by any means bad things. Its just that they are not necessarily deducible from the actual injunctions of the gospel that we should ourselves give liberally to the poor. My concern is that the gospel becomes politicized when it is translated into the the language of civil rights and social justice, and that our concern for the latter can cloud our concern for the proclamation of and obedience to the actual gospel. "Social Justice" and "civil rights" can, in other words, become idols of our own making.
I think one of the central messages of the gospel is that the civil society's standards of measurement are hopelessly flawed. For it is in embracing our Lord's own poverty that we are made rich (2 Corinthians 8.9).
And for the record, I believe that the Church's members (myself included) do a pitiful job in obeying our Lord's actual mandates, both of proclaiming the gospel to the poor, and of giving materially to them.
2 comments:
What I find myself constantly pondering is this: what would supply-side Jesus do?
Is there a relationship between Church, qua the Kingdom of Heaven, and Christian's social responsibility?
Presumably, preaching the good news to the poor, at least in part, means declaring poverty defeated and alien to life under God's Kingship. In this sense Acts 2 forwards a normative Ecclesiological vision where baptism in the Spirit and socio-communal egalitarianism are ineluctably tied.
GWB is right to decry transposing the logic of Christ's Kingdom into the language of civil society. Such a move does violence to the later, and dillutes the former.
Yet, life in Christ's Spirit requires living according to the reality (eschatologically) actual in God's Kingdom where there is neither slave nor free and all believers, together, "hold everything in common". Declaring this good news, therefore, involves acting in definite and irreversably political ways. We testify that the kingdoms of this world are being usurped by God's rule, and the 'poor', as children of God, will recieve equal inheritance.
To keep Christ's teaching of the Kingdom, a Christian ethic towards the poor requires living now as it is in eternity, in the power of the Spirit. It therefore, prepares the way for the true reign of God in history.
~Frank C.
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