The resurrection and the homeless

The Resurrection and the Homeless

Though you have made me see troubles,
many and bitter,
you will restore my life again.
Psalm 71:20
Jesus taught there were three weighty matters critical to true religion: mercy, faithfulness and justice. (Matthew 23:23). For sometime now, I have had some understanding as to how his resurrection connects with the first two, mercy and faith. For us to share in God’s immortality takes an inexhaustible supply of mercy on His part, and the simplicity and endurance to believe it on ours.
But to connect the resurrection with that third essential, justice, has taken some reckoning. It has come with looking out my office window and seeing those without a home.
Is the resurrection merely the consolation to those hard done by this life, that things will be better for them in the next? If so, what better excuse for us who have, to do nothing for those who haven’t! There’s a cop out! Like the mobster who shoots his neighbour and then goes to mass to be absolved, our religion would give license to the very thing Jesus came to reverse.
Remembering the parable Jesus told of a rich man who ignores the suffering of a poor man at his doorstep (Luke 16:19-31), the resurrection marks the great reversal of fortune from the way things are now. As Bob Dylan put it: ‘the loser now will be later to win.’ The servant of all, though forsaken by man and God, is raised to become Lord of all. The man of sorrows’ ascends with joy ‘into glory.’ The despised and rejected One is now in body and spirit, the living evidence of justice’s triumph for all those rejected and despised.
For Jesus himself was homeless. He had ‘no place to lay his head’ (Luke 9:58). He too had been accused of ‘being out of his mind’ (Mark 3:21), worse still, of conspiring with the devil (Mark 3:22). He too had been left for dead.
Jesus had no comfortable pew. Whether as a carpenter he ever made one, we are not told. Based on his teaching, I don’t think so. There’s that business about it being easier to squeeze camels through the eye of a needle than to get rich people into his kingdom. Add to that his demands that we do good to those who hate us, lend to those who can’t re-pay and host gala celebrations to which only the destitute are invited and clearly he’s not the cushy type. Whenever I am in a church with comfortable pews, I reason they are there to brace the congregation for the brunt of his commands.
Not that we are likely to hear in church ‘woe to you who are rich now, for you will go hungry.’ (Luke 6:25) Sermon material along those lines does little to increase church attendance or cash flow. Taking up one’s cross and following Jesus runs counter to a mindset hooked on self-fulfilment. Were the loud part of Christianity a car, it would be one with Prosperity at the wheel, Individual Salvation blaring through the speakers and Justice bound and gagged in the trunk.
Admittedly there is as ground swell within various denominations to take our economy to task for its propensity to reward at the expense of the many, the the tyranny of the dollar holds unparalleled sway both within and outside church walls.
What ails us most is a callousness of heart. We are too ‘me first’ for justice. Justice by definition means justice for all. ‘Justice,’ proclaimed the prophet Amos, ‘must flow like a river,’ filled with a life as sustaining and dignifying to my neighbour as it could ever be for me. Together we are to labour ‘that there might be equality...so that he gathered much did not have too much, and he that gathered little did not have too little.’ (2 Corinthians 8:13, Exodus 16:18)
Jesus was even more emphatic. Heaven can only be found by those who undertake to care for him in his present address: among the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the afflicted and the imprisoned. (Matthew 25:31-46)
Like the rich looking through barred gates, I can see the beggar Lazarus outside my office window. He goes by many names and story-lines now. It is only when he feels your respect that he will actually tell you his real name.
What to do?
Forget the question for the moment of what society should do. That’s a cop-out. The heart of the matter is: ‘what am I to do?’ The news that I will share in the resurrection of the righteous sadly isn’t enough to compel me. A salesman by profession, I am wary of deferred compensation.
Yet there is, as I look over the wall called ‘affluence’, the sense that my life is likewise out there, beyond the wall, where he and I are brothers in need of the real currency of value in life - mercy, faithfulness and justice. There, beyond the wall, is where one’s taste for all three grows, especially for justice.
If it is true that God himself is found among those in pain, I really have no idea what awaits me in the encounter. I can imagine an exchange between Lazarus and I, where neither of us really lose. I have heard others describe it in more exhilarating terms: a treasure of lifelong sacrifice whose reward exceeds anything that can fit into a bank account, the raising of the heart, mind and body to do as Jesus did.