This difference between John and other sources seemed less crucial a point of discussion that the statement of Jesus that \u201cthe poor you will always have with you\u201d. When I first read those words, I took them to mean that, in general, concern for the poor should take a lower priority than worship<\/a>. I now take a different view of the meaning, primarily because it seems that the words attributed to Jesus are an allusion to Deuteronomy 15:11<\/a>. When combined with the story from other Gospels (which John seems to have known, even if not directly from one of them in written form), the impression one gets is that concern for the poor remains as central a concern as ever \u2013 it is more central in both Testaments than many contemporary Christians do justice to.<\/p>\n Jim Wallis<\/a> uses the image of modern conservative Christians having a \u201cBible full of holes<\/a>\u201d in his book God\u2019s Politics<\/a>. Wallis refers to a group of seminary students who did a search for all the references to poverty and surrounding issues in the Bible. Realizing just how many thousands there were, and how neglected these are, they decided to make the point symbolically. Since if one persistently ignores texts from the Bible they might as well not be there, these students cut out all these two thousand references. This shows in a provocative way what many people who call themselves Christians actually have: a Bible full of holes, not in the sense of full of problems (although I am not denying that), but in the sense of full of passages that they ignore. Indeed, fundamentalists ignore the problems, and so both meanings of \u2018full of holes\u2019 overlap for them, but they also ignore other parts, the ones where God criticizes the ancient equivalents of the Americans \u2013 since we as a nation are wealthy and not only are not doing all that we can to help the poor, but we ignore the fact that our national and corporate policies are actually in many ways responsible for poverty both in our nation and in the wider world.<\/p>\n
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