“Blessed are the poor”.
So that’s OK then… The poor may be having a tough time right now, but they’ll be OK at some point in the future, actually in another life. (Lk 6:17, 20-26)
This view of Jesus’ teaching, which pushes the impact into the future is a profound distortion. The distortion arises because Jesus isn’t actually talking here about our attitudes to the poor, or how to behave towards the poor, or even towards the rich for that matter. There are other, equally forceful, teachings which do speak to those points – but not here.
The point of what Jesus is telling us here is not about social justice, as we now call it, but about our relationship with God. In his time if you were poor, or otherwise had problems, it was a sign of God’s disfavor due to a failure on your own part. This was clearly a long running problem in Jewish thinking. There are plenty of passages in the Bible along the lines of: trust in God and you’ll live a long successful life, with a large happy family. Contrariwise, the whole Book of Job is basically a refutation of this perspective – Job insists his problems are not a result of him doing anything wrong, despite his “holy” friends telling him otherwise. Jesus frequently has to point out the same thing – as for example with the man born blind (Jn 9:3).
This attitude is not alien to us either. People are poor because of what they have done, or not done. We distinguish between the “deserving poor” and the undeserving – based on what we consider to be their responsibility for the state they are in. Jesus is saying that it’s not like that – God loves us, even when the world condemns us, or we have money troubles, or personal troubles. Those are not an indicator of how God feels about us, or that he’s out to punish us in some way. And conversely if everything is going great, don’t assume that means everything is good with God!
In our First Reading, Jeremiah is equally clear (Jer 17:5-8). What matters is where we put our trust – if we trust in other people we have no sustenance, no foundation. If we trust in God then we have the power to survive – whatever happens.
The difference between us and the bush, that Jeremiah uses for his analogy, is that we have a choice. Or at least some choice. We don’t chose whether we are poor, or whether we have reasons for grief, or are persecuted. But we can chose where we stand, we can plant ourselves by the water that Jesus provides (Jn 4:14, 7:38). If we do that, we can still suffer from drought, but we will survive, we will bear fruit.