If you looking for a mission statement, that defines the life and work of the Galilean, the ultimate ‘God with Skin on man,’ that they nailed to a tree. It is all beautifully crystallized in Luke’s gospel, right at the get go of his modus operandi.
The ethic supreme that must be pursued above all else.
Borrowing exclusively from the prophet Isaiah, he says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to captives and recovery of sight for the blind, to let the oppressed go free,” (Luke 4:18; Isa 61:1.) It is not an exaggeration to say, that the Christian gospels, lock stock and barrel, pretty much boil down to this overt preference for the poor in their various suffering manifestations.
It should not be surprising therefore, that two thousand years later, the “Preferential Option for the Poor,” has re-emerged with such passion amongst the Christian liberationists I wrote about in a recent post. For them this is the ethic supreme that must be pursued above all else. As Stephen Scharper argues, the option for the poor “is a foundational concept. In other words, it is a core, rather than peripheral, to any religious reflection.” 1 Actually, when that reflecting gets serious you end up very quickly with an intentional call to revolutionary action.
No one captures this rebel zeal better than one of the leading lights of liberation theology Gustavo, Gutiérrez when he writes,
“If I define my neighbor as the one I must go out to look for, on the highways and byways, in the factories and slums, on the farms and in the mines, then my world changes. This is what is happening with the ‘option for the poor,’ for in the gospel it is the poor person who is the neighbor par excellence… But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.” 2
The ethical demand is for a radically re-ordered world.
In other words it is not sufficient to give a little or even a lot, the ethical demand here is for a radically re-ordered world. As Donal Dorr says, “An ‘option for the poor,’ in the sense in which it is intended, means a series of choices, personal or communal… To disentangle from servicing the interest of those at the ‘top’ of society and to begin instead to come in to solidarity with those at or near the bottom.” 3
In terms of defining the poor, another giant in the liberation game, Leonardo Boff, puts it this way, “The poor, are those who suffer injustice. Their poverty is produced by mechanisms of impoverishment and exploitation. Their poverty is therefore an evil and an injustice.” 4
Ultimately, for those who claim the Christ and make no mistake the advocates of the ‘option for poor’ most definitely do. The question becomes is this radically bottom up, make-over of the world, cognizant with the vision of heaven on earth that the Galilean proclaimed? It seems to me without doubt, it most certainly is!
- Stephen Bede. Scharper, “Option for the Poor and Option for the Earth: Toward a Sustainable Solidarity,” in The Preferential Option for the Poor Beyond Theology, ed. Daniel G. Groody and Gustavo A Gutierrez (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 98. [↩]
- Gustavo Gutiérrez, The Power of the Poor in History, trans. By Robert R Barr (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1992), 44-45. [↩]
- Donal Dorr, Option for the Poor: A Hundred Years of Catholic Social Teaching, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 1992), 4. [↩]
- Leonardo Boff, Faith on the Edge: Religion and Marginalized Existence, 1st ed. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989) 23. [↩]