*
“My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
We snag on this line. But the prayer, Christ’s seamless garment, unfolds:
You who fear the Lord, praise him!
All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him;
stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!
For he did not despise or abhor
the affliction of the afflicted;
he did not hide his face from me,
but heard when I cried to him…
The poor shall eat and be satisfied;
those who seek him shall praise the Lord…
“He did not hide his face from me…. The poor shall eat and be satisfied.”
We despised the Lord’s servant. We took him to be of no account. We disgraced him, expected him to hide his face from us, ashamed. But he did not look away, even when we marred his image beyond recognition. He did not hide his face from us and he did not hide his face from God.
Dying, suspended under God’s silence and above his mother’s sorrows, a prayer rose in his heart: “Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?” Forsaken, God prays—for the godforsaken. His prayer unfolds into praise: “You did not hide your face from me…. The poor shall eat and be satisfied.” Falling into dereliction, swallowed up by “the gaping mouth of annihilation,” God confesses God to God in words taken from his beloved Hagar: “You are the God who sees, the God of my seeing.”
The cry of the poor is not only heard by God. It is heard by God as God’s. Jesus’ prayer made it so.
**
Who are “the poor”? Not the exaggerated figures of political propaganda, left and right. Not the figments of moral philosophies, good and bad. The poor are our flesh-and-bone neighbors, our kith and kin, who lack the good God means for them. Everyone who lacks anything vital—and we are responsible.
But are we? How can we be? Is that not too much for God to ask?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in 1932 Berlin, delivered a sermon on the story of the rich man and Lazarus. “One cannot understand and preach the gospel concretely enough.” That was his opening line. In the middle of the sermon, he turned to the Lukan beatitudes:
Nothing is said here about the poor in spirit, nothing about hunger for righteousness, but blessed are you poor, you hungry, you who are weeping, as we know you in the world. Blessed are you Lazaruses of all the ages, for you shall be consoled in the bosom of Abraham. Blessed are you outcasts and outlaws, you victims of society, you men and women without work, you broken down and ruined, you lonely and abandoned, rape victims and those who suffer injustice, you who suffer in body and soul; blessed are you, for God’s joy will come over you and be over your head forever. That is the gospel, the good news of the dawning of the new world, the new order, which is God’s world and God’s order. The deaf hear, the blind see, the lame walk, and the gospel is preached to the poor.
He knew some would protest that “the main thing is always what a person’s attitude is toward his poverty and toward his wealth.” But even if such a criticism contains some truth, it is ultimately only an evasion:
Now, I ask you, where in the story of the poor Lazarus does it say anything about his inner life? Who tells us that he was a man who within himself had the right attitude toward his poverty? Just the opposite, he may have been quite a pushy poor man, since he lay down in front of the rich man’s doorstep and did not go away. Who tells us anything about the soul of the rich man? That is precisely the frightening thing about this story—there is no moralizing here at all, but simply talk of poor and rich and of the promise and the threat given to the one and the other. Here these external conditions are obviously not treated as external conditions but are taken unbelievably seriously. Why did Christ heal the sick and suffering if he didn’t consider such external conditions important? Why is the kingdom of God equated with the deaf hear, the blind see? . . . And where do we get the incredible presumption to spiritualize these things that Christ saw and did very concretely? …
Bonhoeffer ended that sermon with the same questions I’ve raised in this one. Who is the poor man? Who is rich? And what are we to do?
The rich man should see that death is standing behind him and Lazarus, and that behind Lazarus God himself, Christ, is standing with the eternal good news. We should see—see poor Lazarus in his full frightening misery and behind him Christ, who invited him to his table and calls him blessed. Let us see you, poor Lazarus, let us see you, Christ, in poor Lazarus. Oh, that we might be able to see. Amen.
Selah.
***
Israel, enslaved in Egypt, cried out to God and he delivered them—into the wilderness. A wilderness so perilous the people longed to return to their bondage. Deuteronomy descries it as “the great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions.”
Why, God, lead them this way? Why lead us this way? Is it because we cannot know how to live with plenty if we fail to remember how we were poor—and how poor you are?
“The poor you have with you always.”
Jesus is quoting the Law: “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land’’” (Deut. 15.11).
And this command, which Jesus gives and takes, follows hard on a promise: “There will, however, be no one in need among you, because the Lord is sure to bless you… if only you will obey…” (Deut. 15.4-5).
(Notice: the condition of blessing and the purpose for the blessing are one and the same.)
“The poor you have with you always.”
Jesus summons this text and its commanding promise to witness against those harassing the woman with the alabaster jar who has anointed him for his burial.
Why do you trouble the woman? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me. By pouring this ointment on my body she has prepared me for burial (Mt. 26.10-12).
What Bonhoeffer said of Lazarus and the rich man is true also of this woman and her despisers: “We disdain the gospel of the poor. It undermines our pride, our race, our strength…”
****
Jesus not only calls the poor blessed. He himself, the Blessed One, is poor: “The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
He is poor and a friend of the poor. But there is an even deeper wonder. He is the poor, and they are him—his nearness, his kindness, his wisdom.
But to see this, as Bonhoeffer urged his hearers to see it, we must become poor. St Paul tells the Corinthians exactly this:
For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich
(2 Cor. 8.9).
Christ comes to share our poverty so we can share his. The wonderful exchange is not our poverty for his wealth, but both our poverty and our wealth for his poverty, which is his wealth.
There was a saying in Israel: “If you close your ear to the cry of the poor, you will cry out and not be heard” (Prov. 21.13). This did not mean that God retaliates against the indifferent, punishing them cruelly, ignoring their cries as they have ignored the cries of others. No. It tells us we can and should hear God’s sighs, God’s screams, God’s silence, and hearken to him.
(Hearken—there’s a word we should not have lost.)
It tells us that God is the poor man. And that the cries of the poor are the call of God.
No two cries are the same. But however inarticulate, however inaudible, however impolite, they are God’s. That is why hearkening to them cures the heart and cleanses awareness, affording us the silence in which we can voice a joy unspeakable, groaning with the Spirit groans that cannot be uttered.
The cries of the poor are the call of God. Answering that call changes our questions.
“I am with you always,” Jesus tells his disciples, some of whom doubted him then at least as much as we do now. How could they be sure he was to be with them always? How can we be sure? Because he is in the poor who are with us always.“What you do to the least of these, you do to me.”
St Maximus saw this clearly:
Goodwill toward our neighbors is the clear proof of the grace [received in the church’s sacramental mysteries]… The one who requires our aid becomes as much our relation as God, insofar as this is possible, and we do not leave him unnoticed and uncared for… For God ordained that nothing be more conducive for righteousness and theosis—if I may speak thus—and suitable for closeness to God than mercy given from the heart with pleasure and joy to those in need. For the Word has shown that the one who is in need of having good done to him is God; for, he says to us, as long as you did it for one of these least ones, you did it for me—and God himself says this!—then how much more will he he show that the one who can do good and who does it is truly God by grace and participation because he has taken on in happy imitation the energy and characteristic of his own doing good. And if the poor man is God, it is because of God’s condescension in becoming poor for us and in taking into himself the sufferings of each one sympathetically and “until the end of time,” always suffering mystically through goodness in proportion to each one’s suffering. All the more reason, then, will that one be God who by loving human beings in imitation of God heals by himself in a God-fitting way the sufferings of those who suffer and who shows that he has in his disposition, in due proportion, the same power of sustaining Providence that God has.
Let that sink in.
God is poor and the hope of the poor.
God is in need.
God is what is needed.
We are the providence of God.
Let us not forsake him.
Before we moved overseas and were trying to discern what to do I heard the Lord ask me, “Max, if you had to try and find me where would you look?” It took me some weeks and months to answer the question but eventually I came to see he is 1. Always in his church , 2. At the table in the bread and wine, and 3. Among the poor and suffering. And it was that which lead us to move where we are. Reading this brought me back three years to those weeks and months of wrestling and touched me deeply. I’m convinced now more than ever that the face of our poor and suffering neighbor, and enemy, is the face of Christ. It is where we will always find him. Blessings to you Father Chris!
The image of the wounded hands of Jesus watching the wounded feet! Wow.
Is this one of your works, Chris?