Who is the poor?
"Blessed are the poor” – a biblical view of poverty.
Jesus – the wisdom of God
St. Matthew, at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, shows Jesus sitting on the top of the mountain: (Mt 5:1-2). The attitude of the Master of Nazareth is very eloquent. It refers directly to the Old Testament, in which there are beautiful texts about the wisdom of God. In Proverbs 8, the inspired author presents Wisdom, who sits on a mountain and exhorts people to reject evil, avoid pride, and enter the path of righteousness. He says that Wisdom existed before the world and man were created, because it is the source of life. In this image of Wisdom, we see Jesus Himself, the Son of God. He is the One who existed before centuries, and at some point entered the history of the world to reveal the Father's plan for man. Jesus appears as the One who knows how to carry out this plan. He proclaims it on the mountain, joyfully announces it. This is not the way of the 613 commandments of the Torah, humanly impossible to fulfill.
Blessings
"You are the salt of the earth and the light of the world" (Mt 5:13-16) – on the one hand, it is a call to shape life according to the Wisdom revealed in the eight Beatitudes, and on the other, it is a call to undertake a specific mission: "salt must dissolve and perish for itself, and light must diffuse to illuminate the darkness". This passage is a call to enter into the logic of self-giving on the path of mercy, forgiveness, gentleness, so that people affected by such an attitude may praise the One who enables them to live in this way of life. The Beatitudes are not so much a code of new morality as a hallmark for people who choose a form of life "having the shape" of Jesus.
Poor for the poor
Poverty refers to people who have nothing, that is, beggars, paupers, poor in the material sense. In the Gospel of Matthew we have the clarification "in the spirit" ("Blessed are the poor in the spirit"). This means that in order to understand the poverty of which Jesus speaks, it is necessary to go beyond a material lack. Jesus speaks of poverty not in the sense of a deficiency, as it is customary to say, but in relation to the situation of a person who, regardless of the circumstances, and even in the midst of difficult life experiences, decides not to deviate from the path of obedient adherence to God, from the path of trust, love, forgiveness.
A poor person is someone who cannot count on himself. This is someone who experiences situations in different ways in which he can say: I do not have any power in myself to give meaning to my life. I have no way of working for bread. I need God's action. In such a man the possibility of God's action is opened. Sometimes this action is extremely surprising, but it always leads to the discovery that regardless of the state of the account, the number of sycophants, prestige in the eyes of other people, it can be saturated with a life that even death will not take away from him.
The poor in the evangelical sense are also those who expect disciples of Jesus to share with them what they themselves have received from God. In this way, God shows them grace and becomes for them the source of life.
Pope Francis, in his Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (No. 198), writes that he "desires a Church of the poor for the poor" and points out that "mercy towards them is the key to heaven" (No. 197), and thus, as it were, an entry visa to the passport that we receive at Baptism.
The Rich Man and Lazarus
In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the evangelist Matthew shows two figures. First, a man who had great riches. God gives him many gifts that he, unfortunately, cannot use. Jesus does not condemn what the rich, nameless man possesses. However, he indicates that he lives insensitive to the need of others, locked in his palace, in his fortress, limiting the world to his own ego.
At the gate of the palace filled with the wealth of the nameless rich man lays Lazarus. He is the rich man's greatest treasure, the talent that the Lord has deposited with his servant to multiply his value. This is a ticket to heaven for the rich man. It does not matter how much God gives me, but how I used it, and multiplies it.
The key word in the Gospel is the noun "gate". It separates the rich man and Lazarus. It is an allusion to the gate of death through which both heroes must pass. It is also an allusion to the gates of the eternal city of God from the Apocalypse. Salvation, that is, the possession of the passport of the kingdom of heaven, depends on which way it opens; it must open towards another person who needs my love. As you can see, you don't have to wait until you die to pass through the gate of God's city. We are going through it right now, although we do not see it. The gates of the kingdom are the people we meet every day: the hungry, the thirsty, the sick and the weak, deprived of dignity and rights.
Lazarus hoped only in God, God in the rich man (that he will multiply what He gave him), and the rich man? The rich man placed his hope only in the goods of this world.
Standing on the side of the poor
Poverty cannot be thought of only in the aspect of material poverty. Jesus teaches this. He wants us to become poor ourselves, that is, to experience the action of God's power in us, in order to later stand on the side of the poor and open to them the door to that power in which they will find the face of God. We must not exclude the poor, to throw them out, because that would mean that we do not understand anything about the conception of life that Jesus accepted, who "being rich, became poor for us in order to enrich us with his poverty" (cf. 2 Cor 8:9). Only putting what is at my disposal to others generates life. Only such an attitude can convince others to adhere to God and generate fraternity.
until Tomorrow
fr. george