Only the poor can give a ticket to heaven

In Exile

By FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi

He's right. If Jesus is to be believed, then we need to believe that the poor stand before us always as that place where we are judged. We get to heaven (or don't) on the basis of our response to the poor.

The cross of Christ is the key to life and the cross is forever being erected at that place where the excluded ones, the poor, suffer. Only at that place can we learn the crucified-wisdom that, at the end of day, puts us inside the circle of discipleship, or, stated in another way, opens up for us the gates of heaven.

But, as we know, it's not easy to actually feed the hungry, clothe the naked, console the sorrowful or help the downtrodden. Why?

Mainly because we never see them. We think we do, but in reality we don't. In fact, that's the point the Gospels make when they point out the dangers of riches, namely, wealth blinds us so that we don't see the poor.

We see this clearly in the famous, Gospel parable about the rich man who dines sumptuously every day, while a poor man, Lazarus, sits under his table and eats the crumbs that fall there. The rich man dies and goes to Hades and, from there, he finally sees Lazarus - implying that he had never seen him before even though Lazarus had sat just a few feet away from him during his life.

The real danger of wealth is that it causes a "blindness" that renders us incapable of seeing the poor. Jean Vanier, in the Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto in the late 1990s, made the same point: The "great chasm that can't be bridged," he suggests, exists already now, in the present distance between the rich and poor. The next life simply eternalizes a present situation where the rich and poor are separated in a way so that one cannot cross over to the other.

According to the Gospels, the major reason is that the rich simply don't see the poor.

Jesus isn't saying wealth is bad. Nor is he saying the poor are virtuous and the rich are not. Indeed the rich are often just as virtuous in their private lives as the poor. We sometimes naively glamorize poverty, but poverty isn't beautiful and, often times, isn't particularly moral either. A lot of violence, crime, sexual irresponsibility, domestic breakdown, drug abuse, and ugliness of all kinds, happens on the poorer side of the tracks. The rich are no worse than the poor, in these things.

But where the rich are worse is in vision, eyesight. When we are rich, we have a congenital incapacity to see the poor and, in not seeing them, we never learn the wisdom of the crucified.

We try, but in the richest nation in the world, the United States, one in every six children still falls below the poverty line and, worldwide, despite all the resources and goodwill on this planet, one billion people subsist on less than a dollar a day and 30,000 children die every day from diseases that could easily be prevented by simply supplying clean drinking water. There's a gap that we can't find a way to cross.

We see - but we don't see. We feel for the poor - but we don't really feel for them. We reach out - but we never reach across. The gap between the rich and poor is widening, not narrowing. It's widening worldwide, between nations, and inside of virtually every culture. Almost all the economic boom of the last 20 years has sent its windfall straight to the top, benefitting those who already have the most.

What Jesus asks of us is simply that we see the poor, that we do not let affluence become a narcotic that knocks out our eyesight. Riches aren't bad and poverty isn't beautiful. But, nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.

Copyright © 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 -- Western Catholic Reporter