God of the Poor - or God of Everyone?

 

One pitfall of writing blog posts about anything going well in my life, any sign of progress, is that something then generally happens to remind me how often I fall short in this area, and then I feel like a hypocrite. But the real hypocrisy would be to show only the highlights and not write about my failures, so this Lent I will try to be honest.

After I’d written the last two posts, about the joys of praying together during lockdown and singing hymns, my lovely partner PDB11 and I decided to have a prayer session, and finish with a hymn.  As I’d been choosing songs to play on my recorder, I thought it was PDB11’s turn to choose one to play on the piano.  As we’d been praying about persecution and poverty across the world, he chose Graham Kendrick’s ‘Beauty for Brokenness’.

The song made me feel uncomfortable, not because of Kendrick’s message of compassion (which is one we need to hear), but because of the way my mind looks for the most depressing interpretation possible.  To me, the opening words ‘Beauty for brokenness, hope for despair,’ sounded not like a prayer (‘Give us hope instead of despair,’ or even ‘Give us hope to cure despair,’) but like a bargain: if we can’t produce enough despair, God won’t be interested in trading hope for it.

The song continued with the chorus ‘God of the poor…’ which made me even more uneasy.  I wanted to believe that God is the God of everyone, not just the very poorest.  After all, Christians don’t believe that there are multiple gods for different sectors of society (like the pantheon of classical Greek religion), so if God is concerned only with those who are starving and destitute, that leaves the rest of us with no-one to pray to.  It’s hard to pray for compassion for other people when we fear that God doesn’t have any compassion for us because we aren’t in his preferred category.

So, as we came to the end of ‘Beauty for Brokenness’ now, I said snappishly that I wished God was the God of everyone.  Yes, I said, I knew that PDB11 did believe that God loved everyone equally, but nevertheless, ‘most people’ believed that God was biased and loved the poor more than the rich, and that this was a good thing.

I knew that I was distorting: that most people, even if they talk of, as Gustavo Gutierrez puts it, ‘God’s preferential option for the poor’ in fact believe that God loves everyone.  But the song had triggered memories of times when I had become upset by this topic, and so I was reverting to old patterns of behaviour.

Of course, this, in turn, was deeply upsetting for PDB11.  He sat slumped at the piano, unable to face playing any more songs.  It was some time before we could get the evening back onto a more or less even keel, with supper, a game of Yahtzee, and bed.  I felt ashamed of raking up the same old sour clichés, when I knew that they weren’t what Graham Kendrick meant.

But is God prejudiced?

The website Got Questions argues that prejudice and favouritism are wrong.  After all, St Paul reminds both slave-owners (Ephesians 6.9) and slaves (Colossians 3.25) that ‘there is no favouritism with God,’ implying that God regards slaves and masters the same way and expects them to listen to the same teaching.  We might want to criticise Paul for not campaigning to abolish slavery – but by writing, ‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,’ (Galatians 3.28) he undermined the whole rationale behind slavery.

Nonetheless, Jesus said: ‘Blessed are you who are poor… woe to you who are rich.’ (Luke 6.20-26).  Compared with Paul’s emphasis on unity, Jesus seems (which probably says more about the way I imagine him than about the real Jesus) to see people in binary terms: the poor go to heaven and the rich go to hell, unless they give away everything they have (and are left destitute, therefore finally can be saved).

I can find words in Jesus’s teachings to condemn me if I’m rich – and I can interpret ‘rich’ as meaning anyone who has enough to live on.  But, equally, at times when I haven’t had enough to live on, I felt that Jesus condemned me because, as I didn’t have any money to spare, I wasn’t giving to the poor.  As a child, I felt guilty about both simultaneously – because I was ‘rich’ in the sense of being provided for by my parents, but didn’t get enough pocket money to be able to sponsor a Third World child.

My paranoid mind expects Jesus always to find some excuse to condemn me.  But my rational mind accepts that, if we believe the Christian message at all, we believe that God is love – in which case, it would be impossible for there to be anyone whom God does not love.  God is infinitely loving, so He loves each of us infinitely, so there is no need to worry about whether God loves some people more than others.

I suspect that God sees us both more closely and from a greater distance than we see each other.  In one sense, differences between one human and another probably look insignificant from God’s perspective.  Compared to God’s infinite power, the difference between the richest and the poorest humans must be infinitesimal, like the difference between the cleverest and the most retarded humans compared to God’s infinite wisdom, or the difference between the most virtuous and the wickedest humans compared to God’s infinite goodness.

At the same time, God sees our hearts.  He knows each of us intimately as individuals, so he doesn’t need to judge us as members of categories marked ‘rich’ and ‘poor’, or ‘black’ and ‘white’.  God wants us to work for social, economic and environmental justice because each of us matters, and because the problems the human race faces will destroy all of us if we don’t work for the good of all.