My brothers and sisters, show no partiality
as you adhere to the faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ.
We are called by Jesus to learn to see the inherent value in each human being. To do so we must overcome an innate tendency to show partiality to those who, in one way or another, are especially appealing to us. The rich, the popular, celebrities and the like, should not receive preferential treatment over those who are poor or unremarkable. Yet we tend to fixate on the impressive, ignore the unremarkable, and shun those whose poverty makes them appear undesirable. This is also true at the other extreme, where the very rich are often the dehumanized villains of our narrative about the world. In God's eyes, by contrast, everyone has value. When we look for proof of that value in the actions or accomplishments of others we miss the fact that it is already present in them before they say or do anything at all.
Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters.
Did not God choose those who are poor in the world
to be rich in faith and heirs of the Kingdom
that he promised to those who love him?
The poor come the closest to revealing this fact of the inherent value of all people, for they have no polished appearance behind which to hide. Jesus himself did not come to enjoy a life of riches, and strongly identified with those who were without enough to meet their material needs. He called the poor blessed. He taught that by contrast, the rich had more going against them as they strove to enter the Kingdom, more weight pulling them back down to earth as they tried to rise to heaven.
Perhaps we can see why there remains for us the temptation to shun the poor. They reveal our own calling to us, and it is frightening. We have a hard time imagining being so free from earthly attachments and so completely dependent on God. It is easier for us to sweep all of this aside and keep only that which is polished and pristine as our focus. We don't exactly imagine ourselves as shunning the poor. But they nevertheless slip through the cracks of our attention. While we may not be openly hostile, the result is still the privation of what the Lord would otherwise use us to do for them, which is in fact something we owe, not merely a gift we might offer on a whim.
You shall love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing well.
In order to love the poor we must be able to see their poverty without being overwhelmed by it as hopeless. And the only way to do this over the long-term is by faith in the person and mission of Jesus himself. He was a Messiah whose mission did not seek success on worldly terms, but was rather a straight line directed toward the cross.
Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
When we learn not to rebuke Jesus for his own mission we will become able to welcome all those who are suffering together with him. They will not be outliers to be ignored, but the focus of the very heart of Jesus himself, those to whom he was especially close. We will then be more free to embrace his mission as our own, free from our own need to always have a surplus of resources or a presentable appearance, if the demands of the Kingdom require it of us.
When the poor one called out, the LORD heard,
and from all his distress he saved him.
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