There are certain things I wish Jesus had never said. Sometimes I object to them because they place a demand on me that makes me uncomfortable—the command to repeatedly forgive offenders falls into this category. Other sayings of his bother me because they don’t fit neatly into my personal theology, such as certain parables that seem to depict God as vindictive or even violent. But what Jesus says in John 12:8 I object to because of the use it has been put to by subsequent interpreters. He says, “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
The context of this statement is the scene in which Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus with an expensive perfume, an act which Jesus interprets as preparing his body for burial. Judas Iscariot, as the epitome of evil in John’s gospel, objects to what he considers a waste of valuable resources that could have been shared with the poor, prompting Jesus’s response about always having the poor around but not always having him.
This in turn has prompted centuries of self-interested Bible readers to take a fatalistic attitude toward poverty that saps any energy they might have employed to eliminate it. After all, if no less an authority than Jesus says there will always be poor people, who are we to presume that we can eradicate poverty? And it’s a short step from thinking it’s an intractable problem to concluding, “Why bother?”
Too many upper-class or first-world Christians spend lavish amounts on luxuries while leaving only scraps for their poorer neighbors, justifying this neglect by saying, “After all, Jesus said the poor are never going away.” Helen Todd, an American suffragist in the early twentieth century, emphasized the need for not only bread but also roses for poor people, acknowledging the need for both sustenance for the body and beauty for the soul. But it’s one thing to offer both bread and roses to poor people; it’s quite another to feast and grow a rose garden for yourself and give only crumbs and wilted petals to the poor ones in our midst. And it’s illegitimate, even blasphemous, to justify such activity by appealing to the words of Jesus.
A better way to understand what Jesus is saying here is to hear it in its proper context. He seems to be referring to a verse from Deuteronomy in which Moses says, “There will never cease to be some in need on the earth.” But that’s only the first part of the quotation. Moses goes on to say, speaking for God, “I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land’” (Deut 15:11). Far from using the ubiquitous presence of poor people as an excuse to ignore them, God wants us to work conscientiously to meet their needs.
It’s interesting to note that a few verses earlier in Deuteronomy 15 Moses says this: “There will … be no one in need among you, because the Lord is sure to bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a possession to occupy, if only you will obey the Lord your God by diligently observing this entire commandment that I command you today” (Deut 15:4–5, emphasis added). In other words, if we do what we’re supposed to do, we will learn to share and sacrifice and act justly until we can send Jesus’s saying about the poor always being with us onto the scrap heap of history.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but let’s prove Jesus wrong.