REFLECTIONS
Robert Meyers

A highly vocal majority in the churches of my boyhood argued that ministers should stick to “preaching the gospel” and leave social and economic problems alone, that Christ meant for us to have the poor around or he would not have said: “The poor you have with you always.” To eradicate poverty, they claimed, would be to make Christ a false prophet.

In light of so much else in the Bible, others of us interpret Christ’s comment as a rueful lament, rather than as a prophecy of what must be, or a reflection of what he wanted. It is cruel to interpret this remark in such a way that Christ is made to seem calloused to the fate of the poor.

The fifth chapter of James has a blazing indictment of social injustice. Men are excoriated who defraud others of their proper wages, and who cheat and connive in order to live in the lap of luxury. When Upton Sinclair read this once to a group of Biblically illiterate ministers he attributed it to Emma Goldman, an anarchist agitator. The ministers are said to have reacted with indignation against the sentences and to have declared that she ought to be deported.

They might have known better. Long before James, Amos said the same thing: “Therefore because you trample upon the weak, and take from him exactions of grain, though you have built houses of hewn stone, you shall not dwell in them.” One may read Micah 6:10-11, Isa. 3:13-15, Jer. 5:26, Luke 16:19-31 or Luke 20:46-47 for support of the idea that social concern is central to Christian witness.

Early preachers bore blunt testimony to social issues and the demands they make. Clement of Alexandria wrote: “I know that God has given us the use of goods, but only as far as it is necessary . . . . It is absurd and disgraceful for one to live magnificently and luxuriously when so many are hungry.”

The supreme irony is that many who cry out against what they call the “social gospel” feel it is a sure stepping-stone to Communism. Yet in their calloused neglect of the poor they. play right into the hands of their enemy. As Lenin wrote in 1905, “Religion teaches those who toil in poverty all their lives to be resigned and patient in this world, and consoles them with the hope of reward in heaven. As for those who live upon the labor of others, religion teaches them to be ‘charitable’ - thus providing a justification for exploitation and, as it were, also a cheap ticket to heaven. . . .”

As if to prove him right, a minister writes from California: “We must be interested only in saving men from SIN - we have no concern with their material affairs.” He says that ministers who sermonize about unfair employment and housing practices, greed, and discrimination are “pinkos” or Communist dupes.”

It strikes me that he and his kind must be the joy and delight of true Communists, since they can be used to prove the thesis Communists have promoted for years: that no one cares a thing about the poor and exploited except other poor and exploited, and that they must all band together --- under Communism --- to do something for themselves.

Fortunately, not all Christians have decided that daily bread is a trifle. Every week, in some far flung corner of the Kingdom, one discovers men and women doing battle against exploitation, and sealing, in some cases, their concern with their very blood. One remembers that the great Agreement was ratified with blood in the beginning; perhaps to keep men aware of its value, it must always be --- over and over.