Monday of the First Week of Lent 2011

The LORD said to Moses,

“Speak to the whole assembly of the children of Israel and tell them:
Be holy, for I, the LORD, your God, am holy.
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
I am the LORD.”

Since the Great Recession began, the middle class have learned what the poor were telling us all along: there aren’t enough jobs; education is too expensive; there are too few opportunities; there is too much excess and too much chicanery.

Many of today’s soup kitchens and used clothing outlets began as small neighborhood projects thirty years ago; they have now grown into large non-profit corporations. If a food kitchen served thirty men in 1981, it is serving 300 men, women and children today.

During these changing times, as old job skills become useless and old workers are discarded, our political/economic institutions have failed to “teach a man to fish.” (But they did not fail to provide inexpensive alcohol, cigarettes and jails.) They catered to the influential few and then decreed that the churches should feed the poor.

It would be easy to suppose today’s parable supports that solution. But charity, given from “disposable” funds, is not enough. While we should feed the starving, we must also build and rebuild the institutions that will prevent starvation in the first place.

Loving your neighbor does not mean taking care of yourself first, and then giving some of the excess to others. It means sharing everything from the start.

The historian Tony Judt, in his Ill Fares the Land reminds us that our leaders did not always believe in The Market. When the Second World War ended they saw national governments had failed to provide for the needs of the people, leaving them vulnerable to corporate interests. They resolved not to let that happen again. Their new institutions – the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and so forth – helped to share the wealth among all the nations and, through the 1960’s there was hope for the future throughout the world. The optimism of the Second Vatican Council reflected that new vision of prosperity for all.

But with success came complacency and a new generation wanted not security or peace but wealth. And so we see an ever widening gap between “Dives” and “Lazarus”, not only between rich and poor nations but in the United States. Ten percent of the population is now claiming fifty percent of our income every year. We are rapidly becoming a “third world nation” although our poor, unlike Lazarus, remain largely invisible.

In today’s parable, the Lord gives us fair warning. When he come to judge “the nations” and “separates them one from another,” he will judge them by how well they cared for the “least;” and then he will issue his verdict.