The Poor You Will Always Have with You?

PLEASE NOTE: My background is as a Unitarian minister, so I sometimes find the best way to understand something is through my religious background. This writing is not meant to inspire you in any particular religious direction, but to serve as a hopefully helpful way to think through some complex problems. Beacon is deeply inspired by religious values but holds no particular religious affiliation.

Some years ago, I went to an educational event, discussing homelessness. One of the panelists made an offhand comment to not worry too much about solving homelessness because even Jesus thought the poor would always be with us. Although I was very familiar with the Biblical quote where those words came from and had heard it used in the past as a justification to not address poverty, its use in this meeting got me curious enough to do some more research into these words. This quote (“the poor you will always have with you”) comes from a rather obscure story that appears in slightly different ways in all four of the Christian Gospels. And in three of those versions, Jesus does in fact say, “You will always have the poor with you.” And, of course, these stories confused me coming from someone who also said, “Blessed are you who are poor,” “Sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor,” and, “Whatsoever you do for the least of these you do for me.” So, I asked myself, “Who did Jesus mean when he used the word poor?” I had a suspicion he might be saying something different from when we use the word poor. And it turns out that is true.  In Greek, the language of the written Gospels, there are two words for poor. The first is penes (pen-ace), which generally referred to the working poor, those who worked in shops and fields and did manual labor to survive. The second word in Greek for poor is ptochos (pi-toe-hos). This is a person who lived through begging. They were destitute of all resources and had lost all family and social ties. They also had severe disabilities due to mental illness, disease, or physical incapacity. They were generally not permitted to pass through the walls of the city and lived on the outskirts, begging to survive. Does that sound familiar? When Jesus used the word poor in this famous quote of the poor being with us always, he used the second term – ptochos.  He is saying people who have severe disabilities will always be with us. And this, of course, is true. Why is this important to me?  Because it speaks to our times. Jesus’s comment about the poor being always with us wasn’t a statement that poverty would always be with us. Through many other words, he clearly directs us to work to end poverty. But, it was a recognition that people with severe disabilities always would be with us. And like then, we are failing to care for them. They remain ostracized and isolated, begging for food and living on the edges of our community. I often hear people talk about the ptochos like they are the worst of the worst, they are beneath human dignity. A recent TV commentator even suggested we should euthanize them. People often speak of these individuals like they should not exist or even should be made not to exist. The Nazis who targeted people with disabilities early in their medical experimentation and human exterminations called them “useless eaters.” But for me, the recognition that people with these struggles have always been with us inspires me to ask, “How do we create a space for them? How do we, as a people, bring in all of our humanity, including the parts that some would wish never existed?” I shared a quote last month that continues to motivate me from Iris Murdoch: “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” Perhaps the biggest failure we have in engaging with the ptochos is our incapacity to recognize they are real. We judge, push away, compare them to animals or garbage, and do whatever we can to push them out of our circle of deservedness and care. But, of course, they are a part of humanity that has existed far longer than any of us have. They shall always be with us. As a community of caring people, it becomes our responsibility to acknowledge what is real, to be open to and present to every person, every single one of us, including the sick, the addicted, the naked, the lost, and the lonely. To meet the standard of the greatest moral teachers throughout time, we are called to engage with love for every neighbor.