What God Wants For Your Life

My students are really struggling with what many theologians refer to as God’s “preference for the poor.” I think, in part, the struggle that they experience arises out of the way that they have heard Scripture’s language about the poor used in the theology that they read. And, whether they are hearing it accurately or not, what they gather from their reading is that God loves the poor and that the wealthy are — at best — the stepchildren of God’s love.

A long list of questions follows, of course: Does God love them at all (granted that they are, if not wealthy, solidly middle class)? If God prefers the poor, should they embrace poverty? What would that mean for their families? Wouldn’t they simply add to the numbers of poor that must be cared for by someone?

What about the economic realities? Wealth generates jobs and reduces poverty. Poverty does not. Governments can address poverty, but not everyone can be a ward of the state; and, in the final analysis, the government has no resources of its own. Those resources come from taxing people who have jobs and bank accounts. (And, given modern political realities as opposed to those that held true in ancient Israel, nothing done by the government is done in the name of God.)

The most perceptive of my students have other questions as well: Poverty does not make people intrinsically loveable or righteous. Poverty can be simply grinding and ugly. So, why does God “prefer” the poor? And, when their guard is really down, they point out that the theologians who insist on God’s preference for the poor are themselves fabulously wealthy by the world’s standards. They hold Ph.D.s from some of the world’s most expensive graduate programs. They own homes and cars. They have children that they feed, clothe, and educate and — ironically — they hold endowed chairs at a well-heeled university that were paid for by (that’s right) wealthy people.

The problem here, I think, is the way in which the language of the Bible is construed. Scripture does not say that God prefers the poor over the rich. Scripture says that God cares about the poor, loves them, and thinks that we all should attend to their needs in a world that might otherwise neglect them. Scripture can also be very hard on the rich when they care for their own salvation and live in denial about the needs of the poor. But none of this is a simple, categorical message that amounts to what they hear from some interpreters: God loves the poor and hates the rich.

The reason that Scripture is so emphatic about the love that God has for the poor is that in both the world of the Old and New Testaments, poverty was often considered a sign of God’s judgment and condemnation, while wealth was considered a sign of God’s blessing and salvation. What made the message of the prophets and Jesus radical was its insistence on the notion that one’s economic standing did not exclude you from the love of God, nor did your standing imply that God loved you.

So, when Jesus insisted that the wealthy would find it difficult to enter heaven, he was contradicting what the disciples and others took for granted: if you were wealthy, you were blessed. The radical message of the prophets and Jesus was that God’s love and salvation could not be tied in any way to one’s economic status.

This is not to minimize the notion that those who have resources should care for those who do not. What God wants from us, regardless of our social and economic standing, is to live in ways that are attentive to the needs of those whose needs make no demand upon us other than the one that God calls to our attention.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 26th, 2010 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.