Thursday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 344

You have stored up treasure for the last days.

Behold, the wages you withheld from the workers
who harvested your fields are crying aloud;
and the cries of the harvesters
have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.
You have lived on earth in luxury and pleasure;
you have fattened your hearts for the day of slaughter.
You have condemned;
you have murdered the righteous one;
he offers you no resistance.

In her book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers,  Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity, Katherine Moo describes the methodical exploitation of the helplessly poor, their resistance and their despair. Much of the poverty is the direct result of political and economic corruption, a situation not unfamiliar to anyone who reads the scriptures. 

The scriptures' suspicion of the wealthy is palpable; it appears in the laws, the prophets and the wisdom writings. It's assumed they fix scales for cheating, juggle books, gerrymander districts, stuff ballot boxes, and enacts laws that guarantee both their privilege and their long-term maintenance of privilege. 

It's also assumed both poor and wealthy "will always be with you." As long as there is sin there will be inequity. At times depravity will be so outrageous it will shamelessly flaunt itself without challenge in public -- until the day of judgement. 

In her book about the slums of Mumbai, Moo sees occasional efforts by the national and civic leaders to amend their ways. After the Pakistani-sponsored terror attacks in the finest hotels in 2011, they saw how corruption had paralyzed both the military and the police. A response that should have taken minutes took hours and days. She writes: 

Rich Indians typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government. Private security was hired, city water was filtered, private schools tuitions were paid. Such choices had evolved over the years into a policy: the best government is the one that gets out of the way.
The attacks on the Taj and the Oberoi [hotels], in which executives and socialites died, had served as a blunt corrective. The wealthy now saw that their security could not be requisitioned privately. They were dependent on the same public safety system that ill-served the poor.
Ten young men had terrorized one of the world's biggest cities for three days -- a fact that had something to do with the ingenuity of a multi-pronged plot, but perhaps also to do with government agencies that had been operating as private market-stalls, not as public guardians. The crisis-response units of the Mumbai Police lacked arms. Officers in the train station didn't know how to use their weapons, and ran and hid as two terrorists killed more than fifty travelers. Other officers called to rescue inhabitants of a besieged maternity hospital stayed put at police headquarters, four blocks away. Ambulances failed to respond to the wounded. Military commandos took eight hours to reach the heart of the financial capital -- a journey that involved an inconveniently parked jet, a stop to refuel, and a long bus ride from the Mumbai airport. 

After the attack, when foreign tourists found other, safer places to visit, even wealthy Indians concluded honesty might be a better policy. 

This tragic scenario can happen any place where people take a certain amount of sin for granted. Many people dislike a religion that speaks of judgement, but even the atheist must agree that every act has its consequence and none more certain than evil.