Christ the King – 2017
Matthew 25:31-end
Marian Free
In the name of God who is who is present in the poor and the vulnerable. Amen.
One of the things that comes with the territory of being a priest is the requests for assistance. These can vary from food, to transport, to accommodation – even to storage facilities. Over the course of my ministry I have helped out with train and bus fares, food vouchers and even overnight stays in motels. On some occasions the person asking for assistance is mortified that they have come to this position, incredibly grateful for some help to get back on their feet and he or she never asks again. Others are experts at spinning yarns that tug on your heartstrings making it difficult to refuse help, or leaving you feeling guilty if you do. Some, sensing an opportunity, return over and over again until you wake up to their tactics (or are warned by someone else).
Even though I have a psychology degree, have staffed the Life Line phones and have worked at the relief centre at Inala it doesn’t make the situation any easier. I am sometimes caught up in a person’s story before I realise that it is full of holes and by then, often the only way to move them on is to go some way to meeting their request. The problem is made even more difficult by the fact that, as I have said, sometimes the person asking for help has a genuine and temporary issue – they have just moved house and having paid the bond, the removal costs and the reconnection costs, they don’t have anything left for food. Perhaps the case that makes it hardest for me to turn people away is that of the woman who turned up at 5pm on a wet Saturday afternoon. She had come to Brisbane with a boyfriend who had encouraged her return to her drug taking habits. Between them they had no money and in order to pay for accommodation out of the rain, the woman had been prostituting herself. What she wanted was one night’s sleep out of the rain. Reluctantly I organised a motel room and saw nothing more of the woman until, six months later when she passed the grounds as she was out walking. “Hi,” she said, “Are you the pastor?” When I said that I was she said: “I’m that woman you got a motel room for. I’ve ditched the boyfriend, given up the drugs and I’m in a really good space.” The implication was that my assistance had made a difference in her life.
How, and how much, to help others is a fraught issue. It is hard to know who to help and whether our help will really make a difference. Only those who are professionally trained know how to tell the person with genuine need over the person who is taking advantage of us. So when we are confronted with a gospel reading like today’s we can feel that we are in a cleft stick – we can’t do nothing, but we don’t know what’s the best thing to do.
The problem isn’t helped by the fact that twenty-first century Australia is vastly different from first century Palestine. In Jesus’ time widows, orphans and those with any form of illness or disability were utterly dependent on the kindness of others. In our day we pay our taxes to contribute to welfare payments and to public health care. We make donations to charities that provide aid to those who cannot afford to support themselves and their families. Our clothes and other unwanted goods are given to jumble or other organisations who ensure that they go to those in need.
In first century Palestine a great many people lived in villages. Everyone knew everyone. They knew the rogues who would try to exploit them and they knew who needed what. The charity offered may have been meagre but in most cases help was given directly from one person to another and the donor could see whether or not the money was wisely spent. In cities of a million people we are not intimately connected with the hungry and the thirsty, the naked and those in prison and it can be difficult to discern which charities make the best use of our money.
At the same time the inter-connectedness of our world means that we are bombarded on a daily basis with statistics about homelessness, information about people who fall through the welfare or health care cracks. On a world scale we are confronted by the refugee crisis of the Rohinga in Bangladesh, poverty in the Philippines and elsewhere, the suffering in Syria, Yemen, Sudan and countless other places. The scale of the problems can make them seem insurmountable. How can we possibly feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty; clothe the naked and provide appropriate care to those in prison? Sometimes the vast scale of the problem can leave us frozen in indecision.
The problems faced by some people and by some families often seem beyond our capacity to make any kind of difference. There are some things that we can do. We can think carefully about how we spend our money (and about how much we really need for ourselves). We can try to be generous with what we do have. We can endeavour to spend our charity dollars wisely and where the need seems to be greatest. In this great and wealthy nation we can use our democratic freedoms to create a just, compassionate and generous society that takes responsibility for its most vulnerable members and that strives to support nations and people who are weighed down by corruption, overwhelmed by poverty, natural disaster and disease or held in the grip of war and violence financially and through other means.
“Come you blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you: for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was naked and you clothed me, in prison and you visited me.” Sometimes the poor come to us, when they do not, we must find ways to reach out to them.
Swallowsrest 