The Poor with Us?
A Sermon for Monday in Holy Week
This sermon was preached at a service of the Holy Eucharist for Monday in Holy Week at Trinity Episcopal Church in Princeton. The appointed lections were Hebrews 9:11-15 and John 12:1-11.
I have a favorite Gospel that is, perhaps, unlike anyone else’s. As opposed to Mathew, Mark, Luke, or John, the first telling of the Gospel that caught my eye, before I was even baptized, was the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Andrew and Tim. Andrew and Tim are, of course, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, the composer and lyricist of the cultural phenomenon known as Jesus Christ Superstar. I couldn’t have been older than ten the first time my grandmother pulled out her CD of Lloyd Webber’s best hits that end with the concept album recording of Murray Head singing “Superstar,” Judas Iscariot’s last, taunting number to Jesus as he dies on the cross, backed up by an orchestra, rock band, and soul singers. There is no better way to describe it than awesome.
This, of course, has led to a long-time love affair with the whole of the musical, and I could tell you about specific choices in certain production that just work so well, and we’d be here until tomorrow. But I won’t. When I sat down and read today’s Gospel in preparation for this sermon, Jesus Christ Superstar came barreling into my mind and wouldn’t let me go. You see, at the start of the musical, Jesus and Judas have a few fights that foreshadow the second act, and those fights all resolve around Mary Magdalene, who’s standing in as a composite character for Mary the sister of Lazarus. Judas is concerned that, even after considering all the lowlifes and ne’er-do-wells that Jesus has hung out with so far, a putative prostitute may be too far for everyone else, and then he gets mad that, while trying to calm Jesus down, Mary anoints him with the precious perfumes and oil. Like in today’s Gospel, Judas argues that the money could be better used elsewhere, and Jesus answers similarly – “there will be poor always,” but Rice, the lyricist, must add “pathetically struggling.” It is really the first moment in the show where the audience starts to take Judas’s side – a specific choice from Rice in particular, who is on the record as finding Judas “sympathetic,” and believing that he was “intelligent,” as opposed to “evil.”1
There are moments in the Bible where, to our twenty-first century eyes, Jesus seems like an insensitive jerk. A lot of those can be explained away through a deeper understanding of the cultural context that Jesus was operating in.2 But today’s not one of them – the world of the Bible isn’t going to give us any good answers here, and we’re left with “Jesus the Jerk,” because he actually said this.
The easy homiletical route for this text is to focus on Mary, poor Mary of Bethany whose only use in the Gospels is for other people to get mad about her actions. There is so much right and good that we can learn from her example, and Jesus was right to commend her to us. But right now, we are living in a time where a theology of “the poor will be with us” runs rampant across the globe.
The conservative Roman Catholic bishop Robert Sarah argues that, because of this passage, “those who want to eradicate poverty make the Son of God a liar,” and that poverty is a Christian virtue.3 Readings like this, that argue that Jesus accepted that poverty existed and thus, we should too, have created the economic situation that troubles too many of us today. This is how we get churches that are more interested in the physical size of their campuses than the number of people displaced by those buildings. This is how we get leaders who are more concerned with the state of their wallets than the wallets of their neighbors. This is how we get economic policies where “efficiency” is just a purr word that masks a policy of mass layoffs and increased unemployment. We have all these things happening, most of them led by so-called Christians, and the poor are still with us. So, what are we to do with that? How can we read this story in a way that encourages us to remember that the Great Commandment is about all our neighbors, not just the folks who live in our neighborhood?
There are two different threads I want to pull at in thinking about this – the first thread comes from the work of the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, a New Testament scholar who is Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on this topic. The second thread is from the writings of Pope Francis, who has directed the focus of the Roman church towards the poor and marginalized, including through establishing a World Day of the Poor in that tradition.
Dr. Theoharis, in her book, argues that this famous line isn’t about the future, it’s about the past. Jesus is “reminding us,” she writes, of Deuteronomy’s call to end poverty. “Rather than stating that poverty is unavoidable and predetermined, … poverty is created by human beings – by their disobedience to God and neglect of their neighbor.”4 The poor will always be with us, then – provided we keep our selfish ways, as we keep saying with Judas that this perfume is too costly, this donation is too much, the cost too high. Pope Francis, on the other hand, asks us to consider that Jesus “is the first of the poor, the poorest of the poor, because he represents all of them.”5 Taken together, these liberatory readings of this passage suggest something quite important to our faith.
Later in this chapter, the Gospel for tomorrow’s Eucharist, Jesus will offer his last public sermon in Jerusalem, where he will tell the parable of the Grain of Wheat. He will then, with the twelve apostles, go to the upper room, and he will know “that his hour has come to depart from the world.”6 We will spend this week walking that road with him. And here, in Bethany, a place that was, perhaps, the homebase of his ministry in Judea, Jesus challenges us to care for the poor. We are reminded that poverty is of humanity, not of God, and that it is within our power to stop it. We are reminded that when we serve the poor, we are serving our Lord and Savior, who is amongst them and is the poorest of them all. We are reminded that as we go through Jesus’s passion, that the New Commandment, the Farewell Discourse, the High Priestly Prayer, the cross, the tomb, the rolled stone, the resurrected body appearing, Peter’s denial and restoration, the addressing of Thomas’s doubts, all of this happens for us, and for the poor most of all.
All of this happens, the poet Richard Wilbur wrote, so that “the worlds are reconciled.”7 But will we be reconciled? If humanity has the power to create poverty, Jesus tells us, then humanity has the power to end it. Humanity has the power to go into our state’s capital city and build the first grocery store within the city limits, because there isn’t one there now. Humanity has the power to advocate for better public education and a new way of funding schools so that we break the cycles of poverty at the place where they start. Humanity has the power to challenge and repeal the New Jim Crow that is mass incarceration, which takes people’s lives and changes them forever. That is what this week, in part, is about. In only three short days, Jesus will tell us that we need to love one another and all our neighbors. Won’t you join me in that effort?
Let us pray.
God our Father in heaven, who has established justice that rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, as we walk the way of the cross, in this and all weeks, let us see our communities as we journey with you, and let us work and live to see new life spreading through abandoned streets and neighborhoods and cities and nations and let the promise of transformation beckon still that we might, with you at our side, finally take the first tentative step into a jubilee year and world that you call us into. Amen.8
Ellis Nassour, Jesus Christ Superstar: Behind the Scenes of the Worldwide Musical Phenomenon, 69.
For a good example of this, see Jayan Koshy’s exegetical work on the Syrophoenician woman in his September 8, 2024 sermon “Who Do You Think You Are?!” https://jayankoshy.com/mediant/2024/9/8/who-do-you-think-you-are.
Robert Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith with Nicolas Diat, Ignatius Press, 140-141.
Liz Theoharis, “The poor we have with us,” Christian Century (April 26, 2017), 27.
Pope Francis, “MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS FOR THE FIFTH WORLD DAY OF THE POOR,” November 14, 2021, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/poveri/documents/20210613-messaggio-v-giornatamondiale-poveri-2021.html.
Jn. 13:1.
Richard Wilbur, “A Stable Lamp is Lighted.”
This is my adaptation of Rabbi Brent Rosen's “Prayer for the Poor People’s Campaign,” https://rabbibrant.com/2018/03/23/prayer-for-the-poor-peoples-campaign/, that utilizes other Old Testament texts in a collect format.