OUR NEED TO SHARE OUR RICHES WITH THE POOR
These are all axioms with the same warning: we can only be healthy if we are giving away some of our riches to others. Among other things, this should remind us that we need to give to the poor, not simply because they need it, though they do, but because unless we give to the poor, we cannot be healthy ourselves.
Jesus teaches this repeatedly and without compromise. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus warns us that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Nevertheless, he praises the rich who are generous, condemning only the rich who are stingy. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus reveals what will be great test for the final judgment: Did you feed the hungry? Give drink to the thirsty? Cloth the naked? Even more strongly, in the story of the widow who gives her last two pennies away, Jesus challenges us to not only give of our surplus to the poor, but to also give away some of what we need to live on.
We see the same message repeated in the social doctrine of the Catholic Church. From Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 to Pope Francis’ recent, Evangelii Gaudium, we hear the same refrain: While we have a moral right to own private property, that right is not absolute and is mitigated by a number of things, namely, we only have a right to surplus when everyone else has the necessities for life.
We need to be giving some of our possessions away in order to be healthy. The poor do need us, but we also need them. They are, as Jesus puts it so clearly when he tells us we will be judged by how we gave to the poor, our passports to heaven. And they are also our passports to health. Our health depends upon sharing our riches.
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