Jesus Flip-Flops on Poverty: Ignoring the Poor is Now A-Okay!
I have learned to be exacting with my language when talking to my oldest son, Carter. If he can take something literally instead of seriously and it is to his advantage to do so, he will. He’s a good kid who obeys the rules. But, he has marshaled all his rebellion into exploiting loopholes. He loves to find little loopholes in household rules and board games based on some thing I’ve said with an insufficient amount of thoroughness to cover all possible contingencies. Yet, he knows what I mean. He’s like a junkyard dog looking for and exploiting little loopholes that give him some small advantage. He seems to take as much pleasure in finding the loophole and exploiting it as he does in the actual benefit they confer upon him. The one that sticks out in my mind is how Carter, on occasion, takes advantage of his allotted device time. It is a classic example of: Give an inch, take a mile.
Carter is allotted a generous 1 hour and 45 minutes of device time each day. During device time, he can watch television on his phone or play video games on his device. Frequently, he does both simultaneously. I’m convinced that one of the marks of his generation will not merely be the ubiquity of mobile entertainment devices, but the 10,000 hours of simultaneous dual-device consumption that accompanies their childhood. I’ve tried to make the case that dual-screen usage should result in device time being used at double the rate. And if this generation is marked by dual-device indulgence, my generation of fuddy-duddy parenting is marked by failed efforts to double count device time and lecturing children about how when we were kids we had to earn our way to video game success instead of buying it through in-app purchases. So, Carter’s 1 hour and 45 minutes of device time is effectively 3 and a half hours of device time, as calculated by his curmudgeonly father. “When I was a kid, we only used one screen at a time” has replaced, “I walked to school both ways, uphill in the snow.” This is a generation that insists on extracting as much device consumption as possible out of a set time. If you give them a minute, they take an hour. Even if it takes whipping out a third device.
Now, if all that isn’t enough, one time Carter’s device time expired right at some exciting point in the middle of one of his games. He frantically asked me if he could finish his game. And like an oblivious parent, not yet wise to the ways of this particular generation that sucks down device time faster than clock time, I said, sure, you can finish your game. And here’s where I really went wrong, I was softened by his coming to me and politely asking me if he could finish his game. I could relate. I don’t like it when I have to abruptly quit something on an imposed time table. I told Carter, as a general policy, I don’t mind if you finish the game you’re on when your device time runs out. Device time is made to serve the child. The child is not made to serve device time. I felt proud of myself for being a generous father.
Well, I’m not sure exactly when, but at some point, this became a loophole. A legal way to stretch 1 hour and 45 minutes of device time into something exceeding two hours. I should have known that it would not take Carter long to discover that if he intentionally ended his game just before his 1 hour and 45 minutes were to expire, that he could then start a game, even with literally one second of device time remaining and maximize the loophole that I provided. Give a second, take another 27 minutes of multiple device screen time.
I hope you all are as outraged as I am, because it gets worse. Carter sometimes will do little chores and things to earn extra device time. He might earn 10 minutes here and 15 minutes there. I think Carter was happy to earn these little, discrete chunks of device time, because unlike the loophole being applied to his daily allotment, increasing his time by 10–15%, the loophole applied to these little discrete chunks of earned time, increased his time by as much as 100% or more. He might earn 10 minutes of device time for unloading the dishwasher, but in reality it may be more like 20 minutes because he makes sure to start a new game just before the 10 minute time ends. It took me a while to realize that this loophole incentivized him against doing several chores at one time and accumulating device time and using it in a larger chunk. This kid knows his loopholes. Give an inch, take a mile.
Jesus Creates a Loophole
In our Scripture today, we have this wonderfully passionate story of Mary extravagantly using an excessive amount of an excessively priced perfume to wipe Jesus’s feet with her hair.
But Judas immediately sees the problem with what Mary was doing and in Jesus for allowing it. Judas is like that strict parent who rigidly enforces device time. Too many video games will rot your brain out. You could be practicing your instrument, working on a merit badge, or cleaning your room instead. “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?”
Judas makes a pretty good point. And as a parent concerned about the dual-device using, in-app purchasing, device time extracting generation, I applaud Judas. Well said, sir. Indulgent excess can come at the cost of more important things.
I think John, the author of our gospel, could feel the populist tide starting to side with Judas here and he feels compelled to break the narrative with an editorial insertion. John interrupts to tell us that Judas said this not out of concern for the poor, but because he kept the common purse and would steal from it.
There are few biblical themes that have as much volume of support in Scripture as helping the poor through both charity and justice. According to one count, there are over 2000 such verses.
But in our Scripture, Jesus flip-flops. He issues a single loophole against the entire witness of Scripture and what up until this point had been a major theme of his own ministry. Jesus defends Mary’s extravagant expenditure, which I might add, he was the beneficiary of and says, “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
I love loopholes. Christianity is great, but all of this helping the poor stuff can really take a toll on us. And here we have the perfect “out.” A loophole. Whenever anyone tries to get you to get up at 5 am and go down to First Stop, or give to disaster relief, or donate things as part of a Lenten mission fast — all you need to do is pull out this handy loophole and say, “au contraire mon frere,” I do not have to help the poor. I can indulge myself instead. Jesus says, the poor will always be with us. Sure, there are 2000 other Biblical verses and larger themes that encourage charity and justice for and with the poor, but so long as there is that one time Jesus allowed for an indulgence and put poor people to the side, we can use that one verse all the time. It’s a loophole.
Jesus has given an inch. In her act of loving gratitude, just after Jesus had resuscitated her brother Lazarus, Mary spares no expense in honoring Jesus. Jesus saw the love, joy and beauty in this act. But too often we have taken this as a mile. We are happy to have this loophole.
You see here’s the thing. Jesus’s statement, “You will always have the poor with you” is a summarizing quote. He is quoting Deuteronomy 15:11, which says, “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.’” Yes, the poor will always be with us. But it isn’t a loophole. Jesus both honors Mary’s gift, but says the poor will always be with us — not to dismiss charity and justice for the poor, but to say, they will always be there for us to help.
So, I’m afraid this loophole is rather limited in scope. If the Lord brings a family member back from the dead and you want to honor him with an expensive gift, so be it. It is good that we spend time and energy honoring God. We could cancel worship, sell our sanctuary and put all of our money into helping the poor. But heartfelt generosity towards God, Jesus tell us, is appropriate. We should worship without guilt. But this is not a loophole to do whatever we want with our money. It isn’t a loophole for us to take out all the pews and put in those movie theater seats where you can push a button to recline back, just because they will be used in a worship setting. It isn’t a loophole through which we can justify our own convictions about tax policies or social safety nets. It isn’t even a loophole for us to help only out of our comfort, pausing our help right at the point when it becomes uncomfortable as Carter does right before his device time expires.
// This is the final Scriptural lesson the lectionary gives us before the events of Holy Week. So why is this a Lenten scripture situated right before the passion journey? The one part of this Scripture that connects directly with the events of Holy Week is in verse 7. We learn that Mary had the perfume for the day of Jesus’s burial. Yet, she gives him what she has while he was still with her.
So what does this mean? I wonder if it is an invitation to exploit a different kind of loophole. A loophole to fully, extravagantly, even excessively focus on Jesus Christ in a devotional and worshipful sort of way. As we get ready to experience Holy Week beginning next week with Palm Sunday, most of us have done this before. It can be easy to do all of this on auto-pilot. But what if we walk through the loophole that Jesus offered Mary — not one to ignore the poor for all time, but an invitation to set aside other things this week to invest ourselves thoroughly in what Christ will do for us. With such indulgent, excessive focus, we can get as much out of the passion as a child who maximizes his or her device time by using multiple devices at once. This is a holy time — a time when God’s greatest gift meets our biggest betrayal. It’s a time to drink deeply.
What if next week, we do our best to follow Mary’s lead — to offer ourselves over fully, without reservation or concern for cost in thankful gratitude for the sacrifice Jesus endured out of love for us? What if we find multiple ways to be inspired and transformed by it simultaneously. The imagery and narrative of the coming week is rich and cannot be reduced to only a single lesson.
If we do this, I believe we will discover two great truths — First — no matter how deep and costly our devotion to Christ is, his devotion to us is far greater. Jesus returns the expensive perfume in incomprehensible, abundant, and inexhaustible ways. // And second, the poor are still with us. But now, the power of the crucified Christ and resurrected Lord are also with us, that we might pour ourselves out for the sake of the poor, just as Christ has done for us. Amen.
