Between The Poor and Poverty

“Don’t laugh, folks: Jesus was a poor man.”
​--Phrase written on a canvas covering on the mule train of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign

Every now and then I come across words that inspire me to think differently about the world we live in. These are such words. I have taken them from a daily devotional email that comes from the Center for Action and Contemplation, which was started by father Richard Rohr. As many know, he is an inspiration to my ministry. And by far my favorite Franciscan priest. I hope you enjoy and learn some thing from this gift he gave us today.

​It begins:

​Jessica C. Williams, an activist with the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, invites us to consider the practical implications of the poverty of Jesus. What if we take seriously the proclamation of the Mule Train organizers—that “Jesus was a poor man”?

“In the time and place in which Jesus ministered, most people lived under the subjugation of the Roman Empire and were considered expendable. Elite rulers extracted wealth from all the lands they conquered, pushing people to hunger, homelessness, and the brink of starvation—and sometimes over the edge into slavery and death.

“The Bible tells us that Jesus had no place to lay his head (Luke 9:58), which is another way to say he was homeless. Jesus was trained in carpentry—a form of manual labor akin to low-wage work today—and he relied on the hospitality of friends, many of whom were also poor, to share meals and lodging with him. Jesus, the disciples, and those to whom they ministered were poor, subjected, and oppressed. They were the expendables. . . .

“Jesus was a poor man” is a theological statement. It is more than saying “Jesus cares about the poor,”—how Matthew 25:31–46 is often interpreted. In Matthew 25, what is usually translated as “the least of these” is the Greek word elachistoi, which literally means “the smallest or most insignificant ones”: in other words, the expendables. Jesus’s identity as one of the least of these is not a romantic, charitable notion; it is Jesus’s reality. He is saying that the social class of expendables are his people. The homeless, the poor, the incarcerated are Jesus’s friends, family, disciples, and followers, and Jesus himself…

“Interpretations of Matthew 25:31–46 that diminish Jesus’s ministry to that of charity miss the gospel message and actually help to maintain inequality. But when we understand that the Roman Empire considered Jesus to be expendable—much the same way the United States considers poor and low-income people, nearly half of the population, to be expendable—we see that being a follower of Jesus means something deeper than charity. Being Christlike means joining a movement, led by the poor and dispossessed, to lift the load of poverty.

Richard Rohr comments on Matthew 25, reminding us that:

Jesus teaches there is a moral equivalency between himself and other people. Jesus says, “Whatever you do to others, you do to me” (Matthew 25:40). How you treat other human beings is how you treat Jesus. That’s nondual thinking. Many Christians would read this statement and firmly say, “This is the Word of the Lord.” But it isn’t their actual practice. As long as they remain at the dualistic level, they can go to church and worship Jesus and be greedy, selfish, and racist an hour later, not seeing any conflict with that at all.

Here are my quick thoughts on upholding the command Jesus lays out in Matthew 25:

I don’t like thinking it, or muchless admitting it, but we are a poor country and a poor church. I think this way because we allow poverty to exist in our communities and even within our own church. I know there are plenty of programs out there that help alleviate the problem - I am involved in many of them here in my hometown. Yet I know that I cannot point the finger at anyone without first pointing it at myself. I have made it a goal to meet people in this space between, where life presents its greatest challenges, and to meet them as if I am meeting Jesus himself. But I struggle, often wondering if I just don’t like seeing Jesus as poor if for no other reason than it exposes my own poverty. Until we can look at ourselves properly, in the divine image we’ve been made, then we will have trouble seeing the poor for who they really are - Jesus himself. He is here, in our midst, in that space between poverty and the poor. How long will we ignore him?



Work Cited
The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, which Martin Luther King Jr. organized right before his death, led a caravan of mules to carry people to the nation’s capital to draw attention to the plight of poverty.
Jessica C. Williams, “Jesus Was a Poor Man,” in We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People’s Campaign, ed. Liz Theoharis (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2021), 17–18, 19.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Franciscan Mysticism: I AM That Which I Am Seeking, disc 3 (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2012), CD, MP3 download.

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’…. Matthew 25:31-40