'There Should Be No Poor Among You'

There should be no poor among you - Deuteronomy 15:4

This is one of the few commands virtually all religious people easily – even eagerly – follow.

We just do it our own way.

The biblical and cultural context and overriding assumption is that those of us with means should contribute – willingly and without conditions – to those among us who, for whatever reason, are needy.

We are not to judge – or distance ourselves – from those who have little – or cannot pay us back. In fact these are the ones Jesus commands that we – and by extension he – should invite to a banquet (Luke 14:12-14).

But we seem to have ‘no poor among us’ – we do our best to exclude, ignore, or even ban them when we do see them.

Almost every neighborhood has carefully hidden clusters of ragged and neglected housing for poor people.

Jesus was correct; we don’t want those poor people ‘among us’ – we want them far from us – or at least out of sight.

We want them to work for us, clean up after us, go to war for us, and fill our prisons, but we don’t want to see them.

We don’t want them in our neighborhoods, our schools, or our churches.

If we must have poor people, and it appears that we must, we will have them tucked away, deployed, or locked up.

Most of us are proud of ourselves on this one; the Bible tells us to have ‘no poor among us’ –  and we don’t.

And if we could, we would complete the job: There is a generation, whose teeth are as swords, and their jaw teeth as knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, and the needy from among men. - Proverbs 30:14-15

Morf Morford considers himself a free-range Christian who is convinced that God expects far more of us than we can ever imagine, but somehow thinks God knows more than we do. To pay his bills, he’s been a teacher for adults (including those in his local county jail) in a variety of setting including Tribal colleges, vocational schools, and at the university level in the People’s Republic of China. Within an academic context, he also writes an irreverent ESL blog and for the Burnside Writers Collective.

Image: Homeless, Annette Shaff / Shutterstock.com