Click here for today’s Scripture readings.
Job 1:6-22
Luke 9:46-50
Teachers find great joy when one of their students comes to a new and significant insight. Such was my experience five years ago when I was teaching older seminarians a course in Catholic social doctrine. One of the students kept referring to “the undeserving poor” and “the deserving poor.” He never went into depth about who qualified for each category. There were hints, especially regarding the former group. I always had the impression that his “undeserving poor” were kind of riff-raff, low-life, sleazy, lazy, and irresponsible folks. I never corrected him on his terminology. At the end of the semester he surprised me by saying, “I think I have to revise my thinking about the poor.”
Just who are the poor? How do we unravel this great mystery? How do we enter their human life and somehow find ourselves in solidarity — as fellow human beings, as members of the Body of Christ, as pilgrims walking the journey to heavenly Jerusalem? No easy task. Furthermore, it is somewhat shocking for me as a middle class, white, educated, privileged North American to understand what the Central and South American bishops meant when, in 1968, they started to talk about God’s preferential option for the poor? It is even more shocking to pray the Magnificat of Mary, our Mother, through the eyes of a poor, peasant Latina mother or grandmother. The New Testament constantly shows Jesus at home with the poor, the downtrodden, the oppressed — but especially those who are dirt poor. And he shared at table with them, breaking bread and drinking cup and promising them a place at the heavenly banquet. I wonder if you are scandalized by Jesus’ behavior and the phrase, “preferential option for the poor.” That may just mean that he leans on the side of the poor and is more at home with them than he might be with me.
Today we make memory of a man who walked in Jesus’ footsteps in 17th century France. Vincent de Paul, born in 1580, was ordained in 1600. He established the first confraternity of charity for the poor in France and was at home with convicts. He started up two religious communities — the Vincentians, also know as the Congregation of the Missions, and the Daughters of Charity. When he died on 27 September 1660, he was renowned for his saintly life in dedication to the poor. Vincent did not see some as deserving and others as deserving. Instead he cared for the poor and established ways to serve them.
My dad was proud of belonging to the Saint Vincent de Paul society. Many others are proud to serve the poor through chapters of the Vincent de Paul society today. One cannot measure the immense good so many lay members have given in a kind of gift-exchange. In serving the poor, Christians have discovered the face of the suffering Christ — a face spat upon, a body scourged and tortured, a God-man mocked, a person stretched out on the cross and raised up in the ignominy of crucifixion. My dad and many others see their service to poor as an encounter with Christ Crucified.
When we help the poor, especially the many poor children in our land and around the world, we are in solidarity with the poor. We stand in comrade-ship with Saint Vincent de Paul. We walk reverently among sisters and brothers who are the least, those whom Jesus made the greatest in the kingdom.
May the example of Saint Vincent help us to serve well. Saint Vincent; pray for us in our poverty and in our riches, in our advocacy and in our service. Amen.
Fr. John J. O’Brien is a Passionist priest who teaches and preaches, studies and writes, and ministers in area parishes and prisons in Framingham MA.
Click here for today’s Scripture readings.