Jesus Loves The Poor 1

So tonight we began a subseries of our Luke series (which may last until 2009; hard to be sure) entitled "Jesus Loves the Poor." We're trying to understand the role that the poor and oppressed play in the ministry and message of Jesus and what that might mean for how we conceive of discipleship to Jesus. We kicked things off with a survey of Exodus, and noted several things:

1 - Exodus marks a new and decisive moment in the history of God. I know that's difficult language for our minds to handle, but the narrative of Exodus outlines it sharply in chapter 6: "1Then the LORD said to Moses, 'Now you will see what I will do to Pharaoh: Because of my mighty hand he will let them go; because of my mighty hand he will drive them out of his country.' 2 God also said to Moses, 'I am the LORD. 3 I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name the LORD I did not make myself known to them. 4 I also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, where they lived as aliens. 5 Moreover, I have heard the groaning of the Israelites, whom the Egyptians are enslaving, and I have remembered my covenant."

Clearly, this marks the inauguration of a completely new history of God. It is a watershed moment of epic proportions. Yahweh rolls out his name at precisely the moment when he defines himself by his pathic concern for the poor and oppressed, and his unrelenting determination to do something about it. This leads to the second point.

2 - The newly inaugurated history of Yahweh is defined by a radical concern for those who suffer under the weight of oppression. Over against the classic Christian teaching on God's impassibility, we have here something altogether different. This is not the God of classic theism. It is Yahweh. And Yahweh resists our categories. Where we once thought the deity was too detached, too remote, too prestigious, too sovereign to be affected by what happens here on planet earth (a stoic god is a safe god, isn't he?), instead we have the passionate, irascible Yahweh who is capable of getting "all worked up" about stuff.

In particular, this god Yahweh gets testy when people get bullied, taken advantage of, and forgotten. We noted several passages in Proverbs that speak to this, and what we found interesting was that: (a) The poor and oppressed belong to Yahweh in a unique sense, and (b) He will take up their side even against his own people. It is not too much to say that Yahweh's people are the poor and oppressed. And if we find this a problematic statement, we ought to give the Sage of Proverbs the third degree and no one else. Those subversive intelligentsia!

What must not be missed, though, is the danger this god Yahweh poses to empires and oppressors. Brueggemann I think was right in "The Prophetic Imagination" when he suggested that compassion is the ultimate social critique. Yahweh's compassion is amounts to "fightin' words" with Pharoah and the self-serving anti-Eden that he has created.

3 - God's choosing of a people is directly connected with his desire to enact his concern for the poor and oppressed in the world. Again, the narrative of chapter 3 is decisive in its description of Moses' calling: "And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. 10 So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt."

It would be difficult to be clearer than that. Yahweh chooses Moses in response to his deep concern for the plight of the oppressed. That is to say, Moses is irrelevant as a character in this theo-drama apart from the plight of the poor. If he fails in this, there is nothing left for him. To enact Yahweh's grand criticism of Pharoah's empire and bring about a new world of liberated possibility for Israel is the sum total of his calling. It's a pass-fail deal. Fail in this; fail in being you.

And lest we think this calling was exclusive to Moses, the compilers of Torah insist that we understand Israel's vocation as a whole as one that is connected to the revelation of the Exodus god, Yahweh. Deuteronomy 10:17-19: "For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. 18 He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing. 19 And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt." Israel is an Exodus people living an Exodus ethic because of the Exodus god Yahweh who has called her into being to enact his purposes for the world.

What does this all mean for us? If Exodus is definitional for how we understand Yahweh, then several things flow. We noted two:

(1) We need to see the poor as occupying a very special place in the heart of God. He hears them, he sees them, he responds to their cry. Proverbs characterizes Yahweh as "their Defender" and "their Maker." That is, they belong to him. And he will "contend their contention" against those who oppress them. It was of interest to us that Yahweh as a character in the Exodus drama does not make an entrance onto the stage of that history until someone got bullied. That brought him out of hiding, and nothing else. This says something for how we understand God.

(2) We need understand that our “being chosen” by the Exodus God is defined by our “being sent” by Exodus God to put the Exodus God on display. Which means that caring for the poor is not a side-issue of discipleship: If we’re following the God of Exodus, and the Jesus of Jubilee (cf. Luke 4), then we have to see this as central and pivotal. We exist to make this peculiar God known: the God who is peculiarly interested in the underdog, in those who are on the underside of power.