Mission Alive will pick back up with our Reimagining Church series next week. In the meantime, let’s give some thought to helping people. After all, how we love our neighbors in need matters as we think about starting innovative faith communities among marginalized communities.
As a minister, one word I have heard a lot of church folk mention when it comes to helping people and church resources is the word stewardship. I mention this anecdote because I want to discuss a particular biblical text that has a lot to say about helping people but never says anything about stewardship.
To be clear, I have in mind the word oikonomia which is usually translated into English as “stewardship.” What may surprise some Christians is that oikonomia is never used in the New Testament to speak about how we use our resources, financial or other, to offer benevolent help to others in need. However, the New Testament is far from silent on the use of resources to help those in need. Perhaps the most daunting passage is the lesson Jesus taught on the separation of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25.31-46.
There are several things I find significant about this passage in Matthew 25.
In this passage, Jesus is telling us that based on what we do or do not do for others we have also done to him. The others for whom Jesus is speaking are mentioned as “stranger” (v. 38). The term “stranger” (xenos) can also be translated as alien, which is significant since Matthew’s Gospel was most likely written to a Jewish Christian community and it was the Jews who, despite the strong teaching of Deuteronomy, forgot the strangers and aliens (cf. Deut 10.17-19; 16.11-12; 24.14-15, 17-18; 26.12-13; 31.12-13). Politics took precedence over justice and mercy for the strangers and aliens and it appears that some things haven’t changed much in society. Jesus insisted that what is done for the stranger(s) is done to him, whether it is clothing, feeding, housing, visiting, or ministering in some other way.
This teaching passage from Jesus immediately follows Jesus’ parable of the talents (Matt 25.14-30). In that parable, the only person reprimanded by the master is the one who holds on to his one talent rather than using it for good. Of course, the question in the parable of the talents, is what do we do with our talents? Perhaps the answer to the question about our talents is answered for us in Jesus’ teaching of the sheep and goats.
While issues about worship and church polity have been argued for centuries, Jesus never wasted his energy on such issues. It is hard, if not impossible, to find an actual passage where judgment is pronounced on people for their worship or congregational polity (though some have no doubt strained the scriptures to do just that). But here is one particular passage in which we are told that what we do for others will impact the way we are judged.
This teaching of Jesus certainly does not provide a specific “how to” manual for helping those in need. Sometimes it seems like helping people in need would be much easier with such a manual. Furthermore, organization and procedures are often helpful but we should remember that organizational and procedural systems are a means of helping people and should never get in the way of helping people.
I also find it interesting that Jesus never talks about stewardship, budgets, personal safety, whether such strangers have helped themselves or deserve our help, and all the other concerns I have heard expressed among churches over my twenty-five years serving as a minister of the gospel. Jesus just says that whatever we do or do not do, we have done to him. Every day we encounter Jesus in the faces of people in need, people waiting to be clothed, fed, housed, visited, and ministered to in the many strangers we meet. Whatever the need is, our help is a testimony of God’s love that gives substance to our proclamation of the gospel.
K. Rex Butts, D.Min, serves as the lead minister/pastor with the Newark Church of Christ in Newark, DE, and is the author of Gospel Portraits: Reading Scripture as Participants in the Mission of God. Rex holds a Doctor of Ministry in Contextual Theology from Northern Seminary in Lisle, IL, and a Master of Divinity from Harding School of Theology in Memphis, TN. He is married to Laura, and together they have three children.
Great post Rex. I think that the Messiah born in a feed trough and raised in a poor family, who hung out with marginalized people, would have a hard time with what we often teach about money.