The Poor You Will Always Have With You

“The poor you will always have with you…” (Matthew 26:11 and Mark 14:7).

As someone who holds deep convictions about God’s call to love and serve those excluded by our economic systems, I’ve thought a good bit about these words of Jesus spoken during Holy Week. They were provoked when a woman broke open an alabaster jar of perfume to anoint him. The product was worth about a year’s wages, so Judas (in Matthew’s gospel) and others present (in Mark’s gospel) complain that the stuff could have been sold and the money given to the poor.

Was Jesus giving license to throw our hands up at the inevitability of poverty or accept the condition of the poor as immutable. I don’t think so, for a few reasons:

1. Jesus was quoting the first half of a verse in Deuteronomy. The second half goes “… Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.” Deut. 15:11. Jesus is pointing to a section of Hebrew scriptures detailing the installation of an economic structure where debts are forgiven very seven years and wealth is redistributed every 50 years.
2. Jesus himself was poor. This woman’s offensive generosity was a lavish gift given to a poor, wandering Rabbi who was born into a peasant household.
3. In Matthew’s gospel, right before this event, Jesus tells the parable of the sheep and the goats. In it he states, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” (Matt. 25:40). Jesus suggests that the excluded stand in proxy for him, and our acts of kindness and generosity toward them, are done as unto him. It’s almost as if this incident is a picture of that parable; extravagant generosity given to a houseless man about to be sent to death row.
4. Let’s take Jesus’ response at face value. “The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me.” (Mark 14:7). So now we do not have him with us, at least not in the same way. So, it is the season when we can help the economically excluded all the time. Now that Jesus has died, been resurrected and ascended, our lavish generosity toward the poor will be received as if Jesus himself were the recipient of our kindness. We get to play the part of the woman with the alabaster jar, and the incarcerated, the houseless, the impoverished get to play Jesus.

The reason the poor are with us is because human empires need to maintain a slave labor force to support an economic system that keeps the rich rich and the powerful in power. So, when Jesus charged his disciples to seek first God’s kingdom and its justice (Matt. 6:33), he meant for us to chase after the sort of “empire” that will be good news to those excluded from the economies of this empire.

I may be wrong. Jesus may have been challenging his disciples to stop obsessing so much about the poor of this world and to be more devoted to other forms of religious service. I guess I’m willing to risk it. I’ll risk being chided by Jesus for being too concerned for the socially, economically and politically marginalized. In the end, I must depend on the generosity of Jesus to receive my acts of ignorant devotion to the “least of these” as devotion to him.