You may have heard Jesus words in Matthew 26: The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me." We may read those words and be resigned to the fact that this is the way the world is and therefore we should just resign ourselves to systemic poverty, but more likely Jesus was referring to the reality that his people were not always living as generously as he expected them to live. Ben Irwin in a Huffington Post Blog of a number of years ago said this about the passage. “In other words, when the writer said there would always be poor people in the land, it was a concession to Israel’s likely failure to obey the law requiring them to protect its most vulnerable citizens. Sure enough, that’s pretty much how the story plays out in the rest of the Old Testament.
There would always be poor people because the Israelites would not prove as generous as they were meant to be. There would always be poor people because Israel would not cancel everyone’s debts like they were supposed to. The statement “you will always have the poor with you” is not an excuse for apathy; it’s a condemnation of it.
Good people will disagree on the best ways to mitigate and perhaps even eradicate poverty…. But one thing is clear, at least for those of us who claim the Bible as some kind of authority: apathy in the face of poverty is not an option. We do not have the right to use Jesus’ words as an excuse for inaction. The statement “there will always be poor people” might describe the reality that is, but it does not describe the reality that ought to be.”
When you think about our 250 @ $250 Campaign to raise funds and hope for our Global Partners you might want to think about it as a challenge to live more generously than we do presently; to share our abundance with those who struggle even for the basics of an education. Or just maybe when Jesus says the poor you will always have with you he is asking us to always be with the poor because that is where he is and that is where we want to be, where he is, on the side of the poor. As a teacher or student at Surrey Christian School, consider how you personally or together with your classmates might be able to be with the poor in Honduras and Sierra Leone.
Prayer: Dear God, you call us to live in your world with generosity and open-handedness. As we at SCS launch this campaign to raise funds for our global partnerships help us to imagine a different hope-filled future with our partners as we each do our part in living more faithfully as your people in this world filled with your goodness. Amen!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-irwin/war-on-poverty_b_4571433.html