For You Will Always Have the Poor

• Matthew 26:11:  “For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me.”

• Mark 14:7:  “For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you will, you can do good to them; but you will not always have me.”

• John 12:8:  “The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.”

        At different times, Jesus’s statement concerning the poor’s ubiquity has been amplified by the assertion that the poor in the United States today live better than the royalty of antiquity. These statements seem to be justifying a certain lethargy concerning addressing the needs of the poor. A closer look at the context of Our Lord’s statement may help contextualize our perceptions of poverty and our responsibilities thereto.

What is the context within which Jesus Christ asserted this? It was six days before the Passover and Christ’s Passion and Death. Christ was in Bethany and attended a dinner in his honor at the home of Simon, a Pharisee, whom Christ had healed of leprosy. Lazarus, whom Christ had raised from the dead, was among the guests. Lazarus’s sister, Martha, served the meal. After some time had passed, probably near the end of the meal and, perhaps, after night had fallen, a “woman of the city, who was a sinner,” entered the house. This woman was Mary, the sister of Lazarus and Martha. Weeping, she washed Jesus’s feet with her tears and dried them with her hair, then she broke open an alabaster jar full of expensive and aromatic pure nard and anointed Jesus’s head and feet.

Simon, the host, thought to himself of how scandalized Jesus would be, if he had known what type of woman was touching him. Knowing his thoughts, Jesus told Simon the parable of the creditor with two debtors and Simon admitted, that the debtor with the larger debt would be more grateful to the forgiving creditor. Jesus then used Simon’s understanding of the parable to draw the comparison between Simon’s reserved treatment of Jesus to Mary’s lavish treatment of Jesus as evidence of Mary’s understanding of the severity of her sins and of her faith in Him as the God Who can forgive her of her sins and of Simon’s ignorance of who Jesus truly is and of his ignorance of his own sins. Then, in revelation of Himself as God and in demonstration of His power over sin, Jesus forgave Mary of her sins. While Mary’s anointing of Christ recognized and honored Him as God and demonstrated her faith in His ability to forgive her of her many sins, Mary, also, demonstrated her faith in Jesus’s prophecy about His imminent passion and death: “In pouring this ointment on my body she has done it to prepare me for burial” (Matthew 26:12).

In response to Mary’s anointing of Jesus, Judas Iscariot stated indignantly, “Why this waste? Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” (Matthew 26:8, John 12:5). At this moment, Judas Iscariot rejected Jesus’s claim to be the Son of God and Jesus’s entire ministry. Or did he? “This he said, not that he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief and, as he had the money box, he used to take what was put into it” (John 12:6). St. John the Evangelist seems to imply here in John 12:6, that Judas Iscariot was only upset by the loss of the donation of the 300 denarii to their fund and, by extension, his inability to pilfer those funds. Rather, St. John is providing the reader significant insight into Judas’s character. As a thief, Judas was adept at determining the price of everything he saw and valued only those items for which he could gain the most utilitarian benefit. Judas used this skill to immediately price out the nard at 300 denarii, yet Judas was completely unable to understand the infinite value of being one of the twelve chosen personally by the Son of God Himself and the infinite love Jesus had for him nor did he value his own salvation. Judas Iscariot was a man, who knew the price of everything but the value of nothing.

“Let her alone, let her keep it for the day of my burial. The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.” In this stinging rebuke of Judas’s lack of faith and sin and in an irreproachable defense of Mary, Jesus told Judas, that it is not His responsibility to care for the poor. Caring for the poor is the disciples’ responsibility, a responsibility they will always have. Jesus’s responsibility is to forgive Judas’s sins and to save his immortal soul, just as Jesus had just done for Mary right in front of Judas. Unlike the poor for whom he could have plenty of time to help, Judas is running out of time to be saved. Jesus will be dead in six days. Judas, of course, rejects Jesus Christ and betrays Him, a fact recorded in the very next verse after this account in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark: “Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them.”

Rather than some vague permission to ignore the poor’s welfare until a more convenient time decides to arrive, this account, found in all four Gospels, is a chilling and terrifying recounting of the moment and of the reason Judas Iscariot rejected Jesus Christ, forsook his own salvation, and turned against Jesus and his brothers within the twelve. The forgiveness of Mary’s sins immediately before Judas’s outcry is what makes this account as horrifying as it is. Judas sees nothing but the immediate, the material. He understands his own lusts and passions as the measure of all else. He betrays Jesus precisely because he is unable to use Jesus to his own purposes and becomes sick of the game he had been playing for three long years. Judas can take no more. Jesus had blown this opportunity to finally ingratiate himself within the Jewish power structure and to take His place within it by rebuking and humiliating his host and taking the side of a woman and a sinner. “Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them.”

As a statement on the poor, what there is of that in the accounts of this event, Jesus is entirely consistent with everything He had said and done in both the Old and New Testaments regarding the critical responsibility every Christian bears for the welfare of the poor. It is in the midst of a lavish feast thrown by a high official within the political and religious system of the Jews in Roman Palestine, that Jesus made the distinction between His responsibility to save souls and the Christian’s responsibility to care for the poor. As lay members of His Holy Church, our baptismal roles of priest, prophet, and king have nothing whatsoever with concelebrating the Ordinary Form of the Latin Rite with the priest from whatever convoluted perspective such an error could be imagined. Rather, as priest, prophet, and king within the Church Militant, our responsibilities include devoting our resources to the amelioration of the poverty around us in order to open as many people as possible to their salvation in Christ Jesus. Yet, in these accounts, the care for the poor is tangential to Christ’s lesson concerning the absolute reality of the free gift of forgiveness and salvation to the truly repentant and the withholding of that gift to those who reject it.