The Asset of Poverty

Letting the poor teach us how to be spiritually rich

12/24/2017

Luke 1:26-38 The angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin's name was Mary. And coming to her, he said, "Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you." But she was greatly troubled at what was said and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.Then the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.

             I’ve already opened some of my Christmas presents, and I have to tell you about the most unique gift I’ve received. Someone sent me fifty different lottery tickets that were the “scratch off” kind. Have you seen these? Maybe they felt a little less guilty about buying them because they were gifts for a priest! One was called, “Win It All!” (but I didn’t win anything), another “Holiday Cheer,” (which didn’t make me very happy) a third kind was “Fast Money,” (but it was very slow money), and the last one was called “Lucky Numbers” (but mine were very unlucky). I don’t know how much they spent on fifty lottery tickets, but I won a grand total of $27.50. So, I think I’ll take half of today’s collection and buy as many tickets as I can, and see if I’m “feeling lucky” like Clint Eastwood said. I’m sure the bishop won’t mind at all.

              Now, what do most people say they will do with the money if they win the big jackpot, say a million dollars? Most people have told me they will donate half of it to the poor. Little do they know that after Uncle Sam takes half of it in taxes, they’ll only be left with half the jackpot. Nevertheless, there is something noble and well-intentioned in thinking about helping the poor. Our love and concern for the needy should always be paramount, especially when we realize how blessed we are. However, here’s the sad fact about scratch off lottery tickets. About three out of four tickets are bought by people with below average incomes, that is, most lottery tickets are bought by the poor. In other words, you may give half of that money back to the poor, but three quarters of that jackpot was given to you by the poor in the first place. Winning the jackpot isn’t the best way to help the poor.

             In the gospel today, God shows his own predilection for the poor, how he loves them, and we need to learn to love the poor like he does. God sends his angel to Mary, who was arguably the poorest person in Israel in virtually every respect: socially, economically, politically, legally and even personally. Socially, she was unmarried and so considered more like property than a person. Economically, she had no possessions and too young to own anything in her own name. Politically, she was a woman, so she would never wield authority or power outside the home. Legally, being unmarried meant she didn’t have the protection of a husband and no standing in court. And personally, she had no life experience, she admitted to the angel Gabriel, “I have no relations with a man.” Mary was poor in every sense of the word.

          Only in one sense was she “not poor,” namely, as Gabriel explained: she had “found favor with God.” In other words, God loves the poor, and that love is precisely what makes them rich, and being loved by God makes them richer than all the billionaires in the world combined. And the poor are able to receive God’s love for them because they don’t have anything to distract them like material possessions. Because Mary had nothing else to clutter up her life, she had plenty of room for God’s love. In a sense, you could say Mary’s greatest “asset” was precisely her “poverty.”

                My friends, may I suggest to you that our love for the poor should have an entirely new orientation and motivation (not just buying more lottery tickets and promising to give half to the poor)? What do I mean? Well, our love for them should not be motivated by false feeling that they only need us; but rather, by the clear conviction that we also need them. Indeed, we need them more. To be sure, we need to help the poor with our material resources, as Jesus explained in Matthew 25: “I was hungry and you fed me, I was naked and you clothed me, etc.” But no less urgent – in fact more so – is what the poor can provide for us: a greater openness to God’s love and mercy. We have to learn from the Blessed Virgin Mary that our greatest asset may surprisingly be our poverty. That’s when we win the predilective and preferential love of God. Why? Well, because there is less stuff to get in the way of his love.

                 It is in this sense that I invite you to understand the need to have a wheelchair ramp in our church. The handicapped are also “poor” not economically-speaking, but physically-speaking, and they need our help. I believe that assisting those who cannot climb steps will also be a criterion of Matthew 25, even though it is not explicitly stated: “I was handicapped and you built a wheelchair ramp for me.” But I would suggest to you, that we need them even more than they need us. How so? Well, we need them to teach us how their “physical poverty” becomes a “spiritual asset” opening them to God’s love, like Mary’s poverty opened her to God’s love. In other words, we need them to have better access to the church, not just for their benefit, but for ours! You could almost put it this way: the poor are like “spiritual financial advisors” who can help us attain that great asset of poverty.

                My friends, what do we celebrate at Christmas? We celebrate that God became a man and dwelt  among us. True enough. But we also rejoice that God became a poor man, indeed even a helpless, vulnerable Baby born in a barn – poor in every sense like his mother was – in order for him to embrace as fully as possible our own poverty. Why would God do that? The Catechism answers: “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods” (Catechism, 460). And by the way, that kind of wealth is worth more than winning all the lotteries in the world.

Praised be Jesus Christ!