Lausanne World Pulse – Reducing Poverty, Not the Poor: Reclaiming Community with the Victims of Oppression

By Christopher L. Heuertz
January / February 2012

Even the basis of our intimacy with the Lord is cradled in how our intimacy with the poor is expressed in our social lives. Photo credit: Esdrianne Cohen

A Call to Justice: Reducing Poverty through Obedience
“There must, then, be no poor among you.” At least that’s what God told the Israelites in Deuteronomy 15:4. Sounds pretty authoritative—I mean, it’s hard to read this as a suggestion or even a good idea which God is trying to convince his people of. Thankfully, this responsibility is given to the community of God’s people rather than to one isolated individual. Further, not only does the community share this opportunity to obey, but in the second part of verse 4, God makes provision for everyone (the poor and non-poor alike) by promising his blessing. The promise of blessing is the subsequent sign that God’s people have been loving and faithful in their obedience. This points to the reciprocity of God providing for the poor through his provision for the community.

However, if you follow the thread through the rest of Deuteronomy 15, the ultimatum of poverty reduction seems to break down. In fact, verse 7 starts by stating, “If anyone is poor…” (emphasis mine). This suggestion that there might be poverty does not yet reference a total breakdown of God’s ideal—it allows God to offer the grace of a contingency, reminding his people that if there are poor people, not to be “hardhearted toward them.”

Surprisingly, we read that God’s ideal moves from a command to a contingency to a collapse. In verse 11, we read of the present and tragic disobedience of his people by the presence of poverty: “There will always be poor people in the land.” The presence of the poor points to the direct correlation that poverty is an indictment of sin, the disobedience to God’s ideal as commanded in verse 4. In the rest of verse 11, God institutes a secondary statute in light of disobedience: “Therefore, I command you to be openhanded toward those of your people who are poor and needy” (emphasis added).

Often when discussing this command-contingency-collapse-command continuum, people try to distance themselves from their responsibility for the poor. Sometimes people reference Matthew 26:11 where Jesus himself says, “The poor you will always have with you,” as if to suggest Jesus was giving up on fighting poverty and, therefore, absolving us of the same fight. Those who use this passage as an exemption from fighting poverty have unknowingly (at least apparently) lost the context on which nearly all Bible scholars agree: Jesus was not cowering from a social problem; he was reminding us of the command in Deuteronomy 15:11.

A Call to Imagination: Not Reducing the Poor to Their Poverty
Today, in a highly stratified, over-categorized, globalized world, Christians have yet to take significant steps in reducing poverty. Christians have, however, taken great strides in reducing the victims of our disobedience to those we refer to as “the poor.” This reductionist mentality comes with loaded assumptions and accusations of those suffering in contexts of oppression, exploitation and extreme poverty. It is perpetuated by our language as a means of further distancing ourselves from our complicity in their poverty.