Matthew 11:4-6, ‘Jesus answered and said to them, “Go and tell John the things which you hear and see: The blind see and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he who is not offended because of Me.”’

We are asked to focus on the phrase, “the poor have the gospel preached to them”, and think of what Jesus was talking about – in what way did he preach the gospel to the poor? In your experience have you seen the gospel transform a poor person? It’s easy to take this and say that when we give money to people we preach the gospel, but on the other hand the gospel can transform people and even a country.

Not offended

We may wonder who could be offended at Jesus’ wonderful miracles. But people do not like change, especially if it upsets their monetary arrangements. And neither do they like the presence of goodness in a world where they have learnt to compromise with evil. And in Matthew 8:33-34, we learn that after Jesus healed the demon-possessed men, which involved a herd of swine perishing in the sea, the whole city begged Him to depart from their region. It reminds me of the difficulty of getting visas to enter Myanmar to do God’s work of healing there.

Who are the poor?

The secular definition of the poor is given by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in purely material terms as those with an income below ‘half the median household income of the total population’. In Australia, this covers three million people, including a single adult living on less than $426.30 a week, and a couple with two children on less than $895.22 a week.

Judas Iscariot also defined ‘the poor’ in monetary terms. In John 12, after Mary anointed the feet of Jesus with costly oil, Judas said, “5 Why was this fragrant oil not sold … and given to the poor?“

Jesus’ reply

When Jesus replied, “8 For the poor you have with you always, but Me you do not have always”, He was not saying that our help won’t change things so don’t bother. On the contrary, He condemned those who were indifferent to the physical needs of others, as shown in Luke 16:19 by the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, and in Matthew 25:42 in his example of “I was hungry and you gave Me no food“.

Jesus was saying that the opportunity to respond to those in physical need would be available in the future, but the opportunity to respond to Him would not always be there, so that needs to be our primary concern. It demands a decision before anything else, because our decision determines our entire direction and our response to everything else, including how we respond to the physical needs of others.

Materialism

To see our world and people and their needs solely from the perspective of what is visible, material, and physically measurable, is what we call Atheism.

And Jesus warned about seeing the needs of people purely in physical dimensions.
When Jesus was hungry and tempted by the devil to turn stones into bread in Matthew 4:4, He replied, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’”. And when in John 6:26, Jesus saw the focus of the crowd was on material things, He said, “Most assuredly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw the signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled.“

Paul warns of this focus in 1 Timothy 6:10, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith“

Jesus’ reply to John

We read in Genesis 2:7 how God created man from the dust of the earth, but man became a living being when God breathed into him the breath of life. And Jesus highlights the absence of this aspect of real life given by the breath of God as being the essential nature of impoverishment.
In His reply to John, he refers to the prophecies in Isaiah about the Messiah which indicate the wider nature of the poor, as being the brokenhearted, the captives, and those bound in prison (Isaiah 61:1).
And in the Beatitudes, Jesus links this to those who are “poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3).

To the woman at the well in John 4, Jesus directs her away from physical hunger and thirst to the eternal sustenance he gives, a spring of everlasting life (John 4:13-14).

In John 6:35, to the crowd who asked what works they should do, Jesus told them to believe in Him, and He then explained, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.“
The physical food he gave them earlier would not satisfy them in days to come, but all that He gives in Himself will satisfy them forever.

Our Lord Jesus provides for all our needs, both physical and eternal.

Practical Examples

We have a Western heritage rich in social applications of the gospel, which people take for granted, and it’s easier to see their contribution when people remove those elements of the gospel from our society, and create prisons of bondage for themselves.

In 18th century France, the social engineers of that era elevated human reason above God to proclaim “The Age of Reason”, but when this descended into “The Age of Terror” of the French Revolution and wholesale slaughter of the guillotine, people cried out for a return to the gospel.

And the atheistic ideologies of the 20th century resulted in a greater number of deaths than the combined world wars, in the Soviet empire, Communist China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and many other arenas of human engineering around the world.

In church programs we also need to take care we don’t follow the secular formula for tackling poverty by re-engineering of society according to blinkered human views. About 25 years ago, I heard a talk given about a church overseas mission in Zimbabwe, and the speaker, who had recently returned from Zimbabwe, praised President Mugabe for “levelling the distribution of wealth” there. Even our ABC had reported at the time that this “levelling” had been a reign of terror and dehumanisation that brought everyone into poverty, except for Mugabe and his party leaders who had fabulous wealth.

How are we to respond to the people God sends us?

Many years ago, when driving through the CBD early one morning, we saw a man sprawled on the footpath in ragged clothes, and from the way he was lying we immediately thought he may need help. Before I could get out of the stream of traffic, we saw very smartly dressed young woman stop beside him. Instead of travelling on her important way to the office like the priest in the parable of the Good Samaritan, she stopped and took time to assess his condition, and then took out her phone to call for help.

Many years ago, when walking from the office to the train station, I was frequently asked for money for bus fares by young people who did not seem genuine, and because I didn’t keep cash on me it was easy to refuse. But one day I was approached by a young man who was clearly genuine, but I didn’t have cash or a spare ticket, and the pain I felt in not being able to help him drove me to change my habits. In addition to keeping a small note on me, I also kept a supply of multitrip tickets with one ride unused, to offer to people who asked for money for bus fares. Many young people were disappointed to see those tickets, but I was relieved to never again feel the pain of not being able to help those in genuine need.

I read this week that the real spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire was not due to any edicts by Emporers, it was primarily due to the changed lives of believers, who rescued abandoned babies while the pagan world practiced infanticide, who insisted men and women had equal rights in the home, and strove to help plague victims with courage in the face of death.

I like the example of my online bible study leader in the US. At petrol stations and grocery stores, he will ask the person ahead of him to let him pay for what they are buying, and when they ask why, he explains that Christ has completely changed his life, and so he feels led to do things like that for others. That simple help and simple gospel has often brought tears of joy, and this week it brought a request for prayer by our bible study group, for the person said those groceries were for a pastor who was suffering with stage 4 cancer and was in need of prayer.

We live by a lot more than bread alone, we live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.