Christ and the Poor

I've been thinking that our traditional views of what the Lord said about the poor are wrong.
He was proclaiming the end of one age and the beginning of another, so naturally the poor of that time were more likely to become part of the new. They weren't part of the existing structure.

To the well off, and the merely okay off, Jesus was saying, "Follow me." This was the real problem, not the riches. Here is the reason; most people were in a closely bound community in which the father was the authority figure. Okay, in some cases it might be your uncle or something, but you get the idea. It was a real patriarchy. I know people like to throw that term around, but you can ignore your Dad in most of the West. Daddy's word was law back in those days. Even today in the Middle East, Jesus' words can instill white-faced fear, because fathers still command a lot of respect in the land.

So Jesus was going around telling people to stop listening to their father and start listening to Our Father in Heaven. This was scary stuff. To do what Jesus said meant being cut off from all the people you knew. It meant losing your job. Selling everything you had might have been a struggle for some, but most people never really got that far. Disobeying your father to follow Jesus, well it made giving up possessions seem like a cake-walk.

So, fast-forward to today, a lot of people assume that rich people are still having a lot of trouble getting into the kingdom of God. I don't know if that's true anymore. Undoubtedly there are temptations that the rich can fall into, but if you are reasonably wealthy in this age, you are wealthy within the order Christ set up. Assuming you are Christian, of course.

This seems to bear out in the economic data. The poor seem to be less religious and more interested in acquiring stuff. This is hardly surprising given that is it generally a lack of stuff that is causing them problems. Once you get enough stuff, then you start to turn to all the wonderful intangibles that you are supposed to be seeking. Why? You can afford it now!!!

Amazingly, this sort of thing has been happening throughout Christian history. Wealthy people put their lives and their money on the line in Britain to Christianize the place. The wealthy, or at least the upper middle class are undoubtedly the most responsible for the spread of Christianity. It is all there in history, and in the socio-economic data, but it seems rather hard for us to be self-aware enough to appreciate what it means.

So, in this lone corner of Christendom, I will work on it...