Chapter 3: The Poor and the Oppressed

Chapter 3 begins by letting us know that there has been confusion over whether or not Jesus ever baptized anyone. Jesus did not baptize, instead Jesus went to help and serve the lost sheep of the house of Israel. The people that Jesus turned his attention to are referred to by a variety of terms: the poor, the blind, the lame, the crippled, the lepers, the hungry, the miserable, etc.

Many historic writing tell us only of what the “important” people were doing and saying, when in reality, the true history of humankind is the history of the suffering. We must try to enter into the world of the poor and the oppressed as it was in the first-century Palestine.

The “poor”, including the economically poor, were in the very first place the beggars. They were the sick and disabled who resorted to begging because they had no jobs and were without a relative who could support them. Because there were no hospitals or welfare institutions, the blind, the deaf and dumb, the lame, the cripples and the lepers were generally beggars.

Next were the widows and orphans: the women and children who had no one to provide for them and no way of earning a living. They would have been dependent on the almsgiving of pious societies. Among the economically poor one would include the unskilled day-laborers who were often without work, the peasants who worked on the farms and perhaps the slaves.

The suffering of the poor was not destitution and starvation except during a war or a famine. They rarely starved. The principal suffering of the poor, then as now, was shame and disgrace.

The economically poor were totally dependant upon the “charity” of others. For the Oriental, this is terribly humiliating. In the Middle East, prestige and honor are more important than food or life itself. The poor have no prestige and no honor. They are hardly human and their lives are meaningless. This is why the word “poor” can be extended to cover all the oppressed, all those who are dependent upon the mercy of others.

The “sinners” were social outcasts. They would include those who had sinful or unclean professions: prostitutes, tax collectors, robbers, herdsmen, usurers and gamblers. Sinners would have also included those who did not pay their tithes (one-tenth of their income) to the priests, and those who were negligent about the Sabbath rest and about ritual cleanliness. The illiterate and uneducated were inevitably lawless and immoral.

There was no practical way out for a sinner. Theoretically the prostitute could be made clean by an elaborate process of repentance, purification and atonement. This would cost money and her ill-gotten gains could not be used for the purpose because her money was tainted and unclean. One had been predestined to inferiority by fate or the will of God. In this sense the sinners were captives or prisoners.

Their suffering took the form of frustration, guilt, and anxiety. The poor and the oppressed have always been especially prone to disease. Many of them seem to have suffered from mental illnesses, which in turn gave rise to psychosomatic conditions like paralysis and speech impediments.

For the Jewish and pagan Oriental the body is the abode of a spirit and during a lifetime other spirits can inhabit the body-either a good spirit or a demon. This condition would be observable in behavior. The symptoms of the demoniac boy in the gospels are the symptoms of what we would call epilepsy.

Diseases which appear outwardly on the skin were defects of the body rather than of the spirit inhabiting the body. People who had any kind of disease which made them outwardly unclean were known as lepers. Their bodily uncleanness was also the result of sin. All misfortunes, sicknesses and other disorders were evil. They were afflictions sent by God as punishments for sin.

The people were taught to think of sin as the failure to observe laws of which they were usually quite ignorant. Sin was not always a fully deliberate act. The children of any illegitimate sexual union and their children for ten generations were looked upon as sinners.

The poor and the oppressed were at the mercy of scribes who loaded legal burdens upon them and never lifted a finger to relieve them. They were denied civil rights. Sinners were excluded from the synagogue.

This is the world of the “downtrodden,” the “persecuted” and the “captives”- the people who do not count. But they were the overwhelming majority of the population in Palestine. The middle class was very small and the upper classes even smaller.

The middle class was made up of professional people, shopkeepers and tradesmen like carpenters and fishermen. These people were considered to be “respectable”. The Pharisees, Essenes and Zealots were all educated men of the middle class.

The upper or ruling classes were enormously wealthy and lived in great luxury and splendor. This would include the royal household of the Herods (whose wealth was from taxation), the aristocratic priestly families (chief priests who lived off the tithes and Temple tax), and the lay nobility (elders who owned most of the land).

Jesus came from the middle class. His only disadvantage was the he was a Galilean. The orthodox Jews in Jerusalem tended to look down upon even middle-class Jews from Galilee. The remarkable thing about Jesus was the he mixed socially with the lowest of the low and identified himself with them. He became and outcast by choice. Why did Jesus do this? The answer comes across clearly in the gospels: compassion.

Throughout the gospels we can feel the movement of compassion. Over and over again Jesus says to people, “Don’t cry,” “Don’t worry,” “Don’t be afraid”. What made Jesus different was the unrestrained compassion he felt for the poor and the oppressed. Jesus set out to liberate people from every form of suffering and anguish-present and future.