The Bible is a
good starting point, because it's among God's better teaching tools,
connecting us with ancient civilizations sufficiently different to
challenge our assumptions – as well as being remarkably like our
own in ways we are likely to miss.
Poverty, and
wealth, and the power relations that bring them about, were universal
features of these civilizations.
Farming entailed
risks, and the need to borrow. Village and family solidarity would
sometimes cover the need; but when it did not, a borrower might have
to pay interest and put up collateral – a family member's labor,
his land, his own freedom. Interest, as a customary practice, was
generally ruinous. For a trader with a reasonable expectation of
using the money profitably it was a fair cost of doing business. For
a small farmer it was a recurrent risk of homelessness and
enslavement.
Michael Hudson, a
financial economist with an active interest in the history of
economic thought, says (in
michael-hudson.com/1992/03/the-lost-tradition-of-biblical-debt-cancellations/)
that: “discoveries of Bronze Age Near Eastern royal proclamations
extending from 2400 to 1600 BC throw a radically new light on [the
Biblical debt] laws... Mesopotamian royal edicts canceled debts,
freed debt-servants and restored land to cultivators who had lost it
under economic duress. There can be no doubt that these edicts were
implemented, for during the Babylonian period they grew into quite
elaborate promulgations, capped by Ammisaduqa's Edict of 1646. Now
that these edicts have been translated and their consequences
understood, the Biblical laws no longer stand alone as utopian or
otherworldly ideals; they take their place in a two-thousand year
continuum of periodic and regular economic renewal.
“Radical as the
idea of canceling debts and restoring the population's means of
subsistence seems to modern eyes, it had been a conservative
tradition in Bronze Age Mesopotamia for some two millennia. What was
conserved was self-sufficiency for the rural family-heads who made up
the infantry as well as the productive base of Near Eastern
economies. Conversely, what was radically disturbing in archaic times
was the idea of unrestrained wealth-seeking. It took thousands of
years for the idea of progress to become
inverted, to connote freedom for the wealthy to deprive the peasantry
of their lands and personal liberty. ”
Whenever, wherever
the Torah took its final form -- Its laws on debt and property were
based on practical ancient custom. But as David's monarchy was
established, with the aid of a small professional army, the need for
a large peasant infantry was lessened. From here on, we find prophets
increasingly denouncing an elite class whose wealth is apparently
gained at the expense of their poor neighbors. In the one example of
jubilee practice we're specifically told of, Jeremiah convinces King
Zedekiah [faced with a military threat from Babylon] “that every
one should set free his Hebrew slaves, male and female, so that no
one should enslave a Jew, his brother... but afterward they turned
around and took back the male and female slaves they had set free,
and brought them back into subjection as slaves.” After which the
Babylonians return to conquer.
After the Exile,
tension between needy neighbors, greedy neighbors, and Torah
continued. Deuteronomy had said: “You shall not harden your heart
or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your
hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be.
Take heed lest there be a base thought in your heart, and you say,
'The seventh year, the year of release is near;' and your eye be
hostile toward your poor brother, and you give him nothing, and he
cry to the Lord against you, and it be sin in you.” But in Herod's
day, Rabbi Hillel had to institute the prosbul, an arrangement that
allowed borrowers to sign away their traditional rights, because in
actuality the poor were not finding anyone willing to lend without
interest and the option of foreclosing. And under Roman
administration, their Hellenistic economic practices – which were
dispossessing their own small farmers in Italy – became the rule
in Israel as well. By Jesus' time there were many of his people
dispossessed, indebted, eking out a desperate living by agricultural
itinerant labor until malnutrition and illness reduced them to
beggary.
It was these
people Jesus spoke of when he said, “Blessed are the destitute, for
God's reign is theirs.” It was their debts he went about
promiscuously forgiving, most often their diseases and injuries he
healed, their petty crimes he overlooked. The story he tells in Luke,
about 'Dives and Lazarus,' suggests that poor people have a nicer
afterlife than rich ones...
And now I'm in
this adult Christian Sunday school class, discussing 'What are the
most helpful ways of helping poor people?'
This is very rich,
for one assumption has been that we should be “developing” their
economic possibilities, “curing” them of poverty. Not even Jesus
tried to do this...
What do we want to
accomplish? – Why? – What should we?
We can't doubt
that poverty is a bad thing. The material lacks, the intellectual
deprivation that normally accompanies it, the associated emotional
pains and afflictions all demand to be alleviated. But if, by some
wild stretch, we should make a significant difference in poor
people's lives, do we want them to seek to achieve what our own
culture calls success?
Shouldn't we want
this? Should we be sentimental about “the poor”, romanticize them
and their ways of life? Are they better than us; does God like them
better? What have they got that we don't? Only poverty.
What's that about?
The theological difference, between 'rich' and 'poor' is elusive. But
church traditions from James to Dorothy Day, including some
profoundly confusing observations from Jacques Ellul, insist that it
matters.
Certainly poor
people aren't “better.” In general they “play the same games”
as the rest of us, merely for different stakes. If some of them will
give their last dime to help a person who needs it, some will eagerly
rob or cheat him of it.
Does God like them
better? That's not it either. We may need to give the poor
preferential treatment, because they need more help and have a harder
time getting any at all, but from a larger perspective this is merely
correcting an imbalance. While Jesus does imply that rich people's
“wealth” reflects mistaken priorities, poverty is no sign of
freedom from misplaced greed.
Rather than think
of “two sorts of people,” it helps to think of two states of life
in one fallen world.
Both states do, as
our book insists, belong to God's perfect Creation; but this Creation
is the sort of perfection that develops, like a plant or a growing
child; and while it remains immature we remain subject to death. That
subjection takes many forms; one is our addiction to violence.
Another is the desire for forms of “wealth” that imply poverty
for other people. Dorothy Day rightly described the resulting state
of affairs as “this filthy, rotten system.”
When the “rich”
game the system to perpetuate unfair, unproductive advantages –
while the system works to reward that kind of behavior – we have
what is called 'systemic injustice'. John D Crossan sees this concept
as underlying Jesus' first beatitude: “If...
we think not just of personal or individual evil but of social,
structural, or systemic injustice—that is, of precisely the
imperial situation in which Jesus and his fellow peasants found
themselves—then the saying becomes literally, terribly, and
permanently true. In any situation of oppression, especially in those
oblique, indirect, and systemic ones where injustice wears a mask of
normalcy or even of necessity, the only ones who are innocent or
blessed are those squeezed out deliberately as human junk from the
system’s own evil operations.”
A church can offer
people help toward escaping poverty – but escape into what? The
system we're embedded in is neither humane, just, honest, very much
functional – or even guaranteed to remain viable for the next
twenty years. We ought to take care, not to fall into or promote
illusions about finding anyone a secure place in it. And yet –
this system does not permit anything or anyone to exist freely
outside itself.
I've been forced
to concede that 'the rich' and 'the poor' include good people and
bad, happy and unhappy, sophisticated and clueless, with a wide range
of blessings and afflictions... and that both conditions entail being
implicated in “this filthy rotten system,” whether securely
within it or painfully entangled. What then, is the difference?
Jacques Ellul –
like William Stringfellow – considers money to be 'a Power.' That
is, 'Money' is a spiritual influence which people can quite literally
worship. When Jesus says that we can worship God or Mammon – but
not both – this is precisely what he is talking about.
We pray to God,
participate in worship services addressed to God. We don't do
anything of the sort for money. But which object of worship do we
devote the most time to? Which do we worry most about, take most
seriously as a force of practical import in the world? Which do we
most rely on for our security?
You are 'poor' in
the sense Ellul values: when you can rely on God for your security,
knowing you have nothing else to depend on. This is not a theoretical
sort of knowledge, but something people recognize deeply and
automatically – or not. The people we call “rich”generally
feel, and often believe, that they have something else to keep them
safe. The actual amount of money anyone does, or doesn't have –
while significant in other contexts – is not the issue. “Wealth”
works to blunt this awareness; while poverty renders it obvious.
A friend wrote me
once, that “hardships and suffering of many kinds have left me with
an unshakable faith – in Something.”
That is not a
recommendation for hardships and suffering, but it does serve to
clarify their purpose. That “unshakable faith”, so far as we can
acquire and convey it, can do far more to promote happiness and
mitigate suffering than anything more concrete we have to provide.
That is, a church can and should serve whichever needs people find
most pressing – but its specific mission is to promote the
distribution of spiritual goods. Why is that so much harder than
handing out bread?
