I must have touched off some kind of nerve last week, in one of my many blogging efforts, because someone tried to post this comment under my post from Wednesday:
“the very first person you should pray for is yourself, I said, because you are helpless, and if you don’t beg God for help, your life will be really horrid” You are a horrible mother, telling your kids they are helpless and that they need to BEG god for help…
It is a grotesque idea, of course—begging. Where I grew up, begging was a sort of an institutional occupation. Young koranic students had to go around with cans, trying to get a certain amount of money before they could go back to their schoolmasters at night. The lame, the blind, the destitute, and those with twins, would sit by the side of the road and beg. Sometimes those people would be dropped off by relatives in the early dawn, and picked up in the dusk, and whatever they made would go into the family coffers. Other times the person sitting there was really destitute, and if no one threw a coin into the can, he or she would not eat anything that night.
All kinds of thoughts and conversations swirled around me in my childhood, about the best way to really help people. The mission run clinic offered medical care and hope, and also a pastor would come and preach a sermon to the assembled desperate, because most Christians know that it is a very wicked thing to heal the body, and not at least offer the healing of the soul. Still, when you are really sick, sometimes it is hard to attend to someone preaching to you.
Even here in America, when the weather isn’t subzero, there might be someone standing by the corner with a cardboard sign, asking for help, explaining that any money given won’t be used on drink or drugs or anything like that. The more well-off zip by in their cars, consumed by their own worries and preoccupations. Good Shepherd is possessed of a drunken man who likes to wander in, usually when the building is being locked up, “not to ask for money” he says, but just to say hi. Once he staggered in at 8:20 on a cold Sunday morning, as the sermon was being preached, and knelt before the pulpit, incoherently drunk, and was gently helped to a back room and given some coffee. But he is not a beggar. Indeed, offer him anything, especially a conversation about Jesus, and he will belligerently explain that he is not there to “take anything from anyone.”
The problem with begging, of course, is that it is humiliating, even he, poor as he is, knows this. The person who begs stands there and says, publicly, so that everyone can see, that he needs help, that she failed, that unless someone else comes along with money and succor, he or she will not be ok.
Today is officially Candlemas, also known as the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple. Jesus is rather a confusing person to consider in his infancy. Some, this past Christmas, asserted that he and his mother and father were refugees, turning up in the wrong place and the wrong time, and should have been treated better than they were. Debates were carried on about this, some of which were very interesting.
The trouble with the Jesus-as-refugee theory–which, some might say, is a mere step up from outright beggar–is that it gets Jesus the wrong way around. He looks poor—pathetic even, by the time you see him on the cross—but doesn’t act like it.
It is everyone else who is poor, including even his parents, at least until the arrival of the Magi. When Joseph and Mary present him in the temple, they offer not the usual lamb, but the poorer option, the turtle dove. No one recognizes them. None of the priests stand up and say, ‘O Goodness, God himself has come into his own Temple, maybe we should have swept the floor or something.’ Simeon and Anna alone, in what might have been a throng of people, know who Jesus is and are happy to see him.
As I said, Jesus looks poor, but he is not the refugee or the beggar. We are. If you aren’t thinking about Candlemas, you could wander over to Epiphany 4 and see this curious line: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” This terrible line is illustrated by Jesus himself, over and over through the gospels, in stories and parables and commendations of people who come and prostrate themselves before him, begging him for help. The Syrophoenician woman, despite what liberal exegetes might try to say, is not teaching Jesus anything when she calls herself a dog. Nor is Jesus being clever when he tells the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man. It’s not some bate and switch. Lazarus really is a poor beggar who sits outside the gate of a very wealthy, nameless man who never needed help from anyone in his life, though when he died he begged Abraham for help from Lazarus first, and then his brothers, though still was unwilling to look for help from God.
And that’s the trouble. Most people in this life are willing to look for help from other people—from the government perhaps, or their neighbors, or a gofundme, or the church, or their parents, or their children. And that is fine, because we should all be helping each other. I want to help my children and my parents and people in my church and hopefully my neighbors, because all of those people have been a help to me—such a help that I cannot even begin to calculate it. When my parents lovely car wouldn’t start, and we couldn’t get it back up our drive, our neighbor directly across let us park it in his driveway for four days, and honestly, there is no way I can really repay him, because my hill will never be useful if he finds himself in similar trouble.
The economy of being human means that we can always try, at least, to “pay it forward” or somehow reciprocate. If something bad happens to me, and my community helps me, and I get back on my feet, I will be able to help others. Therefore, I am never a beggar, never the person by the side of the road so ruined that no matter what anyone does I will never be able to pay them back.
But in the divine economy, it is absolute madness to think that I, a sinful creature, could offer God anything. In the economy of God’s divine perfection, I am not just cast down by the side of the road, waiting for a coin to be able to buy some poor supper, I am in a pit so deep there is no way out. There is no ladder, no stepstool. The only thing I am really capable of doing is digging it a little bit deeper. And this is true not just for me, but for every single creature who walked this earth–save Jesus–who personally went into the pit, on purpose, into the poverty, into the ruin, and drug me out by his own power and mighty outstretched arm.
It is a lying shame for me to pretend that it is otherwise, or encourage anyone else to think the same, especially my children, whom I love. No, rather, seeing myself standing in the light, pulled out of the pit, safe in Abraham’s bosom, I would rather rejoice along with Simeon who says, ‘FINALLY,’ I get to see my salvation with my own eyes.
If you were still caught in Epiphany 4 instead of Candlemas, you might hear this as part of your morning:
“For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God choose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
It’s not just that Jesus saves you from being the beggar that you are. You go from your pit into the very throne-room of heaven, for there He is, day after day, bringing your needs before the Father, your name ever on his lips with all the cacophony of deprivations and troubles that you have. Why wouldn’t you ask him for what you need? He has given such an incredible gift—himself—to save you, and would give more. Ask, beg even. Throw yourself on your bed and weep, not as one cast away, but as one who, in the presence of God, has already been given life itself.
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