Menu

The Poor and Poverty in the Teaching of Jesus (Luke)

Viv Grigg, May 1994, rev Jan 2001

Go to  Power Point for this lecture (in development)

Affective Objective: Trainees will see Jesus in his interaction with the poor, and desire to follow him.

  1. Introduction
    • As a child the person of Jesus captivated me.
    • Because of encounters with him through this his word, as a child I began to go and seek out the poor and needy.
    • That has lead me into the thrill of walking with him across four continents in and out of the underside of cities, watching him act, watching him rescue the poor and needy.
    • Direct Urban Leadership, which is enabling indigenous leadership and developing city networks in 1000 cities around the world
    • A division of which is the emergence of a U.S. leadership to the poor in Servant Partners
    • We are in need of administrative help.
    • For God is a God of Justice and that leads him and those who follow him into the places of injustice, and God is a God of compassion and that leads him and those who follow him into places of great need.
      • Go through the book of Luke - he with his doctors eyes seemed to have a particular leaning to issues of poverty in Jesus teaching.
  2. The Servant Among the Poor Foretold

    Four Servant Songs (3:22 = Isa 42:1)

    • 600 years before Christ
    • Read Isa 42:1-7
    The Magnificat (1:52)

    John the Baptist - Clean up your act (3:11-14)

  3. The Incarnation: Act that changed History (2:6-7).

    Down from His glory...

    O the Joy of Following Jesus!
    • Joy of entering squatter area of Tatalon,
    Incarnation as a Profound Economic Act
    • It reversed values, demonstrated the active intervention of a heavenly father in providing, is the primary step in seeing the transformation of the economics of an emerging Kiongdom community, and the broader community in which it finds itself.
    Incarnation as a Profound Political Act
    • To be identified with the poor , is to deal with the causes of poverty.
    • In most places in the world, poverty is caused by oppression. You are in a class conflict and on the wrong side, for the poor are often illegal, dispossessed. So Jesus became an illegal immigrant into Egypt because of a man who killed the children of whole town to get rid of him.
    • Fruit of that incarnational obedience - Advisor to President Marcos on how to convert sugar factories into poor people ownership, advisor to current President on the redevelopment of the squatter areas, advisor to President Cory Aquino, on how to develop peasant involvement in management of haciendas.
    Incarnation as a profound historical symbol
    • Civil servants
    Incarnation as the beginning of a New Social Ethic.
    • "The one thing the government should be able to do is the effective policing of neighbourhoods of the poor. But law and order is hardly the whole answer. The cultural and moral efforts required to reconstruct the ethic of work, lawful behaviour and family responsibility in our inner cities lie outside the competence of government. Parental authority and habits of self-reliance must be strengthened, and for the most part, the only available institutions for taking the lead in these taasks are the churches.
      "Black and Hispanic churches may seem like a very weak reed on which to lean, and they are that. But they are the only indigenous institutions on the scene. "
      "What Should Be Done About the Poor," in The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday April 14.
  4. The Empowering Spirit: Compelling Us to the Poor (4:18)
  5. The Power of the Proclaimed Kingdom
    • Kingdom breaks open the darkness
    • e.g. Boy with the 2x4"
  6. The Godly poor of Yahweh
    • Oppressed poor
    • responsive to God, the humility and dependnece not the physical state that is blessed
    • repentant poor - prostitutes and sinners go in before you Luke 15:1 now the tax collectors and "sinners" were gathering around him.
    • The blessing is in the Kingdom of God
      1. in the Kingdom they will laugh, eat, be free, see, see justice, walk, be healed, hear, be brothers....
  7. O the Joy of Following Jesus!
    • e.g. Bangkok thief encounter
    • Indeed good news for the poor.
  8. Jesus Confronted with the needy
    • A mother in-laws fever ( 4:38,39)
    • A Man with leprosy (5:12-13)
    • a paralytic (5:17-26)
    • Jairus daughter
    • A women with a flow of blood.
  9. The blessed poor in the horror of poverty (Luke 6:20-27)
  10. Jesus speaking as a poor man
  11. Blessing is not poverty but for the poor
    • The blessing is in the kingdom
    • Kingdom brings satisfaction
    • Kingdom brings laughter
      1. remember the ladies singing.
      2. Wherever the Spirit of God touches there is a burst of song.
  12. The terrors of riches
    • Wealth is a blessing from God
    • But it turns our hearts from the Father.
    • The cares of the world, and the delight in riches enter in and choke the word. (Parable of the sower (8:14)).
  13. Validation of Our Ministry: Impact on the poor (7:22-23).
  14. Miraculous among the poor
    • Lame, blind, lepers, deaf, the dead are raised
    • The dead - talking with a man raised from the dead, Indonesian mother
  15. Social Ministry among the poor
    • Lame boy in Bombay, Rs400. Take this, and read this. It will make you wise.
    • When the Kingdom came to the elites in Britain, tremendous amount of social legislation to uplift the poor.
    • We are not all Jesus in the area of signs and wonders
  16. Good news is preached to the poor
    • the class of oppressed poor vs those poor through calamity, those made poor by their own sins.
    • Indian preacher among the lepers or the leprosy mission
  17. Righteousness is Related to Involvement with the poor
    • Mother Teresa - Righteous, cares for the poor
    • Jesus the just one
  18. Teaching the poor by Parables
    1. Most amazing of teachers
      • Look at the poetry of the beatitudes
      • He spoke of the folly of putting a candle under a bowl, of the wise man who built his house on a rock and the foolish who built it on sand (sandy earthquake filled valleys), of putting new cloth on an old cloak so it tears, of new wine in old wineskins, about a sower and his different soils, about weeds in the midst of the wheat field, of a mustard seed that becomes a tree hat fills the world, about hidden treasures, and finding a valuable pearl about a lost sheep and a shepherd who leaves all other sheep to find that lost sheep, ..... At least 40 parables... and mostly about a Kingdom, a coming Kingdom, that somehow mysteriously has arrived.
      • This is the pattern of the poor - telling stories. This is not the pattern of seminaries.
      • Story telling in Costa Rica.
    2. You may become a story-telling troubadour if you follow Jesus.
  19. Apostolic Poverty: Dependent on the Poor, Dependent on God

Mission is by the poor to the poor (9:1-3, 10:7)

  • Joy of bringing the blessing of God onto homes
Foxes Have Holes (9:58)
  • No easy life serving this King, but what a joy. Fruit of my life in Calcutta
God's Provision (12:32-34).
  • Never lacked bread for 25 years now.
  • Food and clothing, basic needs, not the latest couch
  1. Almsgiving

    Parable of neighbours (10:25 - 37)

    • Loving the unlovely at high school
    Hospitality for the Poor (Luke 14: 13,14)
    • Bangkok Story
  2. The Call to the rich for radical repentance
  • Analysis of poverty => Analysis of Riches
  • Jesus loved the rich
    • always partying with them
    • Zacheus today I will eat at your house
    • Nicodemus
    • Lazarus
    • the rich young ruler - Jesus loved him
    • the women who supported him
  • Parable of the rich fool (12:13-21)
  • Give Up unconditionally your attachment to riches (Luke 12:33, 14:33)
    • This is not ascetism, but it is severe
    • Its austerity in no way destroys the joy of life, rather it creates new levels of worship and joy
  • You cannot serve God and money (16:13-15).
    • Jesus here bestows a personality on money, considering it a form of divinity. This is no pagan name it is a creation of Jesus himself, somehting Jesus did not do elsewhere for he was not in the habit of making comparisons with divinity.... (Jacques Ellul)
  • The Rich Man and Lazarus (16:19-31).
    • He is dying of hunger and you gave him gluttony
    • He is without clothing and you dress in furs and turn your gaze as you go on your way without mercy,
    • so let us not
      1. accumulate wealth
      2. administer it poorly and not help the needy
      3. increase the goods that cannot be transferred
  • Gaining the World , Losing your Soul (9:25)
    • World says that to make it is to become rich
    • Repent of your sins, repent of your wealth
    • Friend, gained a food business, lost his soul.

Choice: Junk or Jesus

  • Not necessarily a call to poverty though for many it is a call to apostolic mobility, rather a call to charity and solidarity with the poor, sharing in their sufferings as Christ shared in ours, in order that they might know the uplift of the Kingdom of God.
  • For some a choice in your use of money
  • Kingdom of Darkness or Kingdom of Light,
  • Choice trinkets Of Damnation or eternal glory
    1. At the end of your life you must answer the question, will you follow the Prince who became a Pauper? Wherever he may choose to lead you. In doing so , you will enter the very throne room of the King and obtain the honor of God.
    2. The Kingdom will come where poverty is destroyed and the oppressors judged. But the Kingdom has entered the present, and those who receive the King and walk behind him, will know in our day the presence of that future, the power of his spirit and the promise of his provision and grace.
    3. John 12:24-26.
© Viv Grigg & Urban Leadership Foundationand other materials © by various contributors & Urban Leadership Foundation,  for The Encarnacao Training Commission.  Last modified: July 2010
Previous Page