IT IS A WALK WITH THE POOR

Take your Bible and work through the four gospels. Try to see if you ever hear Jesus praises the rich and the successful (by worldly standards)? Did he ever say: “What a grand house you have built to show your power and wealth?”

 

What does it mean that the Son of God does not value marvellous buildings and a strong showing of power over others?

 

Jesus, who is God’s revelation and God’s truth, begins with “blessed are the poor.” He reaches out to the people who get pushed aside: the peasants (considered dirty and illiterate), women, workers, prostitutes and the ordinary folk, like Peter and company (small business people with a fishing business). 

 

Every person counts! No one is excluded from the goodness and mercy of God. We humans may push the undesirables to the side, but the arms of God reaches out to embrace them. God is so unlike us humans who exclude or degrade others as not being worth as much on the status ladder.

 

To live the Christian life, to walk and pray with Jesus is to walk with the poor of this world. And the poor are always very close to us.

 

We have fellow believers who take time to visit, smile and care for the elderly with their various degrees of dementia. There are  very few words, but there is the gentle and warm taking of the elder’s hand and holding it in human kindness. That simple touching of hand to hand affirms the value and gift that this grandmother, who can only smile at you, possesses.

 

We have a ellow Christian who pick up the phone every week to call his sister in Calgary who has lost a thirty-year old son to a drug overdose. Sometimes you reflect on this mother’s pain, but most often, this is a simple call ‘to see how you are doing.’ It is a warm phone call of care. You want your sister to know that you care and you are walking with her in the painful winter of loss and emptiness.

 

And then you have your old high-school teacher. He has lost his wife three years ago and seems so lost. You pick him up, refuse to hear any excuses and fears that he is imposing on you, and you go to Tim Horton’s for coffee. There are lots of old stories about all the students he had in that chemistry class, but it is all about caring, laughing and just enjoying the surviving relationship from high school.

 

When our Christian faith is actually lived (and not going through the motions) it always leads us to reach out and walk with the poor. We must always think of the poor as the “poor with their many faces.” Poverty comes in many different flavours and colors.

 

Jesus never meant us to be comfortable and secure. He moves us to reach out the poor with the reminder that the poor are always near.