Right Attitude
Toward Poverty
It is our greed, our idolatry of money, that makes us equate poverty with unhappiness. The correct attitude of a well-to-do Christian toward a poor one is not pity, but rather envy or emulation. Although you might have more bread than your poor brother, and butter and anchovies upon your bread, "man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God" (Luke 4:4). The poor man has a privilege which you do not: Jesus has been sent to preach the gospel to the poor (Luke 4:18); only a poor man can fully hear the message. Rich men hear only a watered-down gospel delivered by pastors who have never hungered or fasted, who are rich or would like to be so.
Such pastors do not wish to lose their rich contributors and preach to them from the gospel only so much as will not give offense. They never tell their rich parishioners that they have as much chance to enter the kingdom of heaven as a camel to enter through a needle's eye””in other words, that their whole religion is in vain.
I repeat the question from the preceding meditation: Should we not help the poor? Surely we should, but on one condition””not to rob him of his previous poverty.
The way to help the poor is to follow Jesus' example and become poor like them.
We read in the Hebrew book Shemen ha tov how Rabbi Havyim Auerbach of Launtzitz was once petitioned by a shoemaker who had no wood to heat the room in which his wife and newborn infant lay. The rabbi immediately awakened a wealthy neighbor. The rich man invited the rabbi to come in, but the rabbi said he preferred to speak outside. It was bitter cold and the rich man had to stand shivering on the street and talk with the rabbi for a long time. At last the rabbi mentioned the shoemaker's plight and said "Now that you have felt the cold yourself you will know what to do." The rich man brought wood to the shoemaker's family, dragging it there himself in a wheelbarrow. Whoever has not felt the noose about his own neck cannot know the situation of someone who is in deadly danger.
No welfare state or philanthropic millionaire can replace the charitable works done long ago by monks and nuns who had taken vows of poverty. These people, some of them former members of the upper class, gathered the poor into the first hospitals, homes for aged people, and orphanages. They descended in reality and in spirit to the level of those whom they strove to help, and truly loved their neighbors as themselves. Embracing poverty for themselves, they could appreciate its value for others. The aged, the cripples, and the poor were helped not only with bread, but also by being brought to regard as a privilege what they had until then seen as a handicap.
In the United States and other countries there are now so many poverty programs which do not work. St. Francis of Assisi's program worked. He became poor and influenced many rich men to give away their money, not in heavily borne taxation, but in jubilating love.
There are diverse ways of giving help. I read that natives of Portuguese colonies, when they were sick, passed by the state hospitals and traveled many miles further to a Christian hospital. When asked why, since the state hospitals were as well equipped and gave the same treatment as the Christian ones, the natives answered: "Yes, the treatment is the same, but the hands are not the same." It is only the empty hand that can caress.
"Do not...oppress the afflicted at the gate" (Proverbs 22:22). "Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people with His own blood, suffered outside the gate" (Hebrews 13:12). Jesus longed to arrive at Golgotha to fulfill the salvation of mankind. But in those days everyone, even executioners with victims, were stopped at the gates to answer questions, to show their papers. I too have seen it. It is not easy to be taken outside a prison gate, not even for an execution. The executioner knocks at the gate; the guard looks suspiciously through the peephole, then checks the written order. So it also in times before.
Those who belong to Jesus are so happy to bear afflictions for sake; do not stop them at the gates to question them, to slow down their heroic march toward self-sacrifice by offering them pardons or conditions. By doing this you further oppress the afflicted ones who glory in their afflictions for Christ's sake.
A Christian must so conduct himself that his children will joyfully say like Jacob, "God of my father" (Genesis 32:9). Jacob had ancestors of whom he could boast. Abraham had left the highly civilized Ur of Chaldee, living as a stranger in a barren land in order to be free to worship God as he knew best. Isaac was ready as a child to magnify God by his death. Such men should not be robbed of the afflictions that promise them an eternal weight of glory.
Affliction has its difficulties. Often you are overcome by despair and feel God has hidden His face from you. But then you realize that it has only been for sport, like play with a child. You seek Him, find Him again, God and you, both exhilarated, both open wide with joy.
Richard Wurmbrand
