If my memory is accurate, I was a young child when a stranger wandered into our farm yard one evening, on foot. This didn’t happen. Our farm was a long way from the nearest city, the nearest highway, the nearest railroad.
A man in a long, dark trench coat was a strange sight on a farm set back from the gravel road by a fairly long driveway. I pretty much just stared at the visitor and tried to imagine who he might be and what he may want.
Only a few sketchy memories remain in my mind about the words and actions that played out between my dad and the tall man in a dark trench coat.
“Can I sleep in your barn tonight?” “Um, no, I don’t think so. I’ll get you a sandwich to take with you.” And the man walked on to see if there were other options somewhere.
Our family conversation after that also comes back to me in a few tidbits: A rehearsed story of a barn burning after a stranger was allowed to spend the night in it; An old song playing in my mind with those exact words: “May I sleep in your barn tonight, mister…?”
I readily identify with the inner struggle my father must have had that summer evening: “I want to be kind and generous toward someone in need; I don’t want to put my family and property at needless risk. What would someone like Jesus do in this situation?”
I find that this common dilemma is part of the conversation in daily life of North American society. It’s included within political and social ideals and tensions. It comes out when we evaluate budgets and cuts and services and programs.
Who is it that really deserves some of my hard-earned blessings? Isn’t that a fascinating question? I’m blessed by God because I’m smart enough to earn and save. So I actually deserve my blessings. And it’s obvious that the needy person standing before me hasn’t been as astute, as wise, as smart. Not, at all, like me.
Out of that premise, we commonly fear and reject social services that provide for others at a cost to our own deserving blessings. It’s an extension of the conflicting ideals we carry in our own souls. I know. I’m faced with that dilemma almost every day, on a personal level.
Jesus told a story a long time ago. I just read it carefully, again. You can find it in Luke 16:19-31. Lazarus is a named character in the story. He suffered disease and poverty at the front door of a rich, unnamed character who had the power to make Lazarus’ miserable life very much more comfortable.
I’ve been listening to church talk and teaching for 68 years. I believe I can safely say that I’ve never, ever (in my church background) heard any speaker refer to this story primarily for the purpose of illustrating Jesus’ main point in the story. It has often been used to support the idea of torment, but not for Jesus’ main point.
As Jesus tells the story, Abraham explains in his own words what the point of the story is: “Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish.”
Think about the dilemma that followers of Jesus face. On one hand we want to be generous to those “poor people” who really “deserve” our help. On the other hand, our fears of creating dependencies and destroying dignity in people by thoughtless and guilt-induced charity programs are based on realities. At the same time, we feel justified in closing our hearts to the needy because we don’t want to appear supportive of another political ideology or the evil of “socialism.”
Jesus didn’t build a lot of nuance and subtlety into his story. It’s quite straight-forward. Most North American evangelicals don’t really appreciate the point that Abraham made about the reason for deserving torment in the next life–that of being oblivious to the suffering of a human being right in the “blessed” man’s personal space. It doesn’t fit our rehearsed story.
Maybe our philosophies of deserved wealth, poverty and responsibility are actually eternally consequential. Or, maybe Jesus just didn’t have much experience in the real world. There are lots of good reasons to reread this story.
I’m so thankful for the Holy Spirit to guide us in making the best decisions!
My fear is that it’s far less complicated than you say… Our lack of care for others is straight up selfishness, if we are honest–though we’d never say it that way. That’s the way God sees it. There’s no “deserving” or “undeserving” poor in the Bible. Just a lot of God warning people that their lack of care for others and societal systems that oppress people are deserving of judgment.
How can we miss this? Jesus told another story about how the final judgment will go, how he decides who are sheep and who are goats. Those who cared for the “least of these”–those who Jesus calls his family and says we’ve treated him that way.
I don’t have answers for when we let people sleep in our barn or shower in our house, those require wisdom for the moment. And I don’t have stories of how I’ve done great at this. But I do have a deep-seated fear that our Christian culture has missed something really important, that perhaps our “Christian” culture isn’t really Christian, and that Jesus is going to claim he never knew many of us. He didn’t ask us to pray a prayer or believe a doctrine, he asked us to follow him and told us and showed us what to do. Is that what we are doing?
I want to grow in truly caring about other people; thanks for the reminder.
Thanks, Mary. I feel that Jesus, in both those teachings about caring for others, didn’t saddle individuals with responsibility to solve poverty or suffering as a global problem. Rather, I hear him warning us that if we ignore the needs on our doorstep and in our personal space we are in deep trouble.
Questions like these tormented me while working in Africa. I have never doubted my salvation as much as I did laying awake at night in the heat, thinking about all the beggars that I walked past. And wasn’t I living in more luxury than the man in Jesus parable? And yet, the people who cautioned me not to give indiscriminately were not wrong. I stayed there long enough to see the harm that could be done by giving to indiscriminately. This teaching of Jesus unsettles me. It has pushed me, more than any other teaching in Scripture, away from a straightforwardly Literal interpretation of scriptures. To take Jesus literally, we would need to give to all beggars all the time. But once the beggars of this world caught on, we would all be broke, and they would all be temporarily rich. This may not happen here. But it would have happened over there. Literally, it would have. If we got out, the hungry masses would have stampede it. The situation could have gotten dangerous. That would not be good for anyone, although one could make a case for its working in the past (eg monestariss, Francis of Assisi, communal living). You are right that Jesus did not build a lot of new ones into the story, or the sermon on the mount. But perhaps other scriptures can help us. For example, scriptures which ground the assurance of our salvation not in our works, but in the completed work of Christ. Also, verses in Proverbs about stewardship. Verses that talk about caring for our families. Verses that talk about giving to our church, who will then redistribute the funds for famine relief. And the principal – yes, it is just a principal – of giving 10%. Which means, of course, that normally we get to live by 90%.
There’s much more to be said, and you can fall off either side of the narrow path. But these are some nuances that enabled me to sleep better at night, and feel the peace of God again, despite the fact that I felt like it was the right decision not to give on certain occasions.
Thanks, Josiah. I certainly agree that a simplistic, literalistic reading of this story or other teachings of Jesus will likely lead us to inconsistencies. I hope that we can find the punch line in his stories, and take that seriously as a core value. In this case, a person who was able to do something about the suffering right on his doorstep did nothing but pamper himself. And Jesus makes it clear that God isn’t impressed with that. Maybe we don’t need to dig much deeper than that.