Peace be with you.
While studying in the Holy Land, it was common for women to be sitting on the ground with a child sleeping close by with a sign stuck in a box or basket saying she and her child were sick and asking for help. We would often throw some money at her feet and she would thank us. One day, two of my classmates were going down to the Church of All Nations, which is located in the Garden of Gethsemane. Along the way, they noticed one of these women stand up, pick up her child, and start walking quickly in that same direction. They walked about a half-block behind her until they got close to the church, at which point she turned and opened the back door of a shiny, black Mercedes-Benz. She put her child in the back seat and removed her robes to unveil that she was quite well-dressed and looked very healthy. Then, she climbed into the front seat and drove off. That was the last time we gave money to any of these women.
As I look back, I can’t help but wonder if we overreacted. I mean, what if she was the exception? What if every other of these women were, in fact, a sick widow struggling to take care of her child? What if she was loaned the car by a friend or what if she was sitting there begging for a friend, a proxy of sorts for a friend too sick to even beg?
A similar thing happened much closer to home recently. There was a picture on Facebook of a guy mowing a lawn next to a picture that appeared to show the same man holding a “homeless vet” sign. The second picture appeared to be taken on the corner of Dodge Street in Dubuque between Chick-Fil-A and Chipotle where homeless people commonly stand. The person on Facebook told people not to help the man because he was mowing his own lawn at his own house and is, in fact, not homeless but ripping people off. I couldn’t help but wonder if the person posting knew that for sure or was making assumptions. What if the homeowner had offered to give him money if he mowed his lawn? Or what if the homeowner allowed him to live there in exchange for these services?
I’m betting most, if not all, of us don’t want to be ripped off. If we help someone, we want it to be someone actually in need and not someone just pretending to be. Our sense of justice says that we should feed hungry people who cannot feed themselves but we can’t be responsible to feed those who are perfectly capable of doing so themselves. We may take in a family member or close friend who loses a job or gets a divorce or has something else happen to them that causes the person to be homeless but we all bristle at the thought of paying for housing for people who can readily afford it.
In the first reading, Sirach is struggling with similar things. This is part of a section dealing with what is true and false worship involving how best to fulfill the rules surrounding almsgiving. On the one hand, God doesn’t play favorites and doesn’t always favor the poor if they are at fault. But, he also doesn’t ignore the widow or the orphan simply because the rest of society tends to do so. Instead, God looks to whether the person willingly serves Him and whether the person is lowly.
It seems to me that Sirach is, in part, saying that we shouldn’t be so concerned that someone is worthy of our gift; that we shouldn’t demand the person give us an accounting of what they used the gift for or prove to us that they really needed it. Sirach doesn’t see what we call charity to be something separate from the notion of holiness but interconnected with it. It’s part of being in a covenant. A commentary I read put it this way, “In covenant theology, we are all responsible for one another, the well-fed are obliged to address the needs of those who suffer misfortune.” That means giving to the poor and oppressed is actually a prayer, an act of honoring the image and likeness of God present in each person, especially the poor.
Can we see the image of God in a woman and her child begging in the streets of Jerusalem? What about in that person standing by the side of the road in Dubuque? What about in a relative or neighbor who struggles with drug or alcohol abuse or brain health that calls and asks for help? In all of this, you may say that you don’t think the right answer is to just throw money at the person and walk away, and I agree. But what is the right answer? How can we honor God in those relationships? How can we make these experiences and others like them, especially the ones where the image and likeness of God is much harder to see because of anger or past hard feelings, an experience of worshipping God?
