The poor will always be with you

 This week's verses are Deuteronomy 15:7-11:

If a fellow Israelite from one of your villages in the land that the Lord your God is giving you should be poor, you must not harden your heart or be insensitive to his impoverished condition. Instead, you must be sure to open your hand to him and generously lend him whatever he needs. Be careful lest you entertain the wicked thought that the seventh year, the year of cancellation of debts, has almost arrived, and your attitude be wrong toward your impoverished fellow Israelite and you do not lend him anything; he will cry out to the Lord against you, and you will be regarded as having sinned. You must by all means lend to him and not be upset by doing it, for because of this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you attempt. There will never cease to be some poor people in the land; therefore, I am commanding you to make sure you open your hand to your fellow Israelites who are needy and poor in your land.

 These verses, at least on the surface, are about generosity. But they also challenge legalism and the shrewdness of our hearts when we are given the choice between selfless love and safe charitable gestures.

 In the law of the land given by God to Moses, all debts to non-foreigners were to be forgiven every seven years. This was useful because the natural flow of money in a society tends to benefit the people who already have it. "To him who has, more will be given, but to him who has not, even what he has will be taken away," right? 

So God designed this rule into society for that the folks on the bottom, the folks who had no cash and no way to earn cash quickly. If you borrowed money and couldn't manage to pay it back by the time the seven year cycle had passed, the person who lent it was supposed to say "No worries, just forget about it. We're good."

But if you were already a generosity-challenged individual, would you be willing to lend money to someone near the end of that cycle? Would you be willing to lend someone more money than they would be able to pay back before society reset, guaranteeing your loss? Absolutely not! And from a financial standpoint, it's a rational decision. What corporate board of directors would support a CEO who lost money on an investment that all of the experts said was guaranteed to fail?

But God says that it wicked to think that way. He even says that it is sin to ignore the poor person in your community who is in need!

It just seems like craziness! And what's more, God tells us that there will always be poverty. We can't even just make a one time payment to bail people out and put them back on their feet. There will always be people who need what we have, for whom we have to make sacrifices, receiving nothing in return from them. It will never end as long as we are alive.

But if there will always be the poor among us, what's the point of losing money over it? If there are always going to be people suffering the consequences of bad decisions, bad luck, or bad circumstances, why be in such a hurry to help? Why does God say it's wrong to wait or play it safe? Why does their problem have to be our problem? Can't we just write a check for $25 every Christmas to the charity that makes us feel the most good about ourselves and call it done?

As usual, the conversation about generosity is about more than generosity. It's about the attitude of our hearts. Elsewhere, when Jesus talks about inviting people to dinner, he says that you are not a good person for blessing people who can pay you back. The good person is the one who is willing to bless people who cannot pay them back. The question of debt forgiveness is secretly also a question of grace, and of how much we love each other. It's a question of how much we recognize God's character and how much we allow it to be reflected in our own lives.

God even mandates that we should give generously to those in need, and that we should not be upset about it when we do it. If we love others as much as we do ourselves, that part should come naturally. If we don't, at best we'll fake it, and at worst we won't help anyone at all. But our natural tendency as human beings is to give lavishly to ourselves and be shrewd about giving to others. 

So, statistically speaking, if you are reading this, you are probably not as generous as you could be. So spend some time this week asking yourself if it is because of any wickedness in your heart that doesn't want to bless those who can't pay their own way. We ourselves have had bigger debts paid for at the cross. Would we want God to have also been shrewd about his sacrifice or to have made only a token gesture?