Jesus Favors the Poor

Mammon is the god of Western churches.
When your mind is closed a priori to something, you have no moral right to reject it. If you examine it and find it’s not for you, that’s great. At least you know. But refusing to consider something simply by virtue of dropping it into a neat category for exclusion from your mythology, you defy the real God of Creation.
It’s not as if there aren’t some things He prohibits, but He always leaves significant clues as to why they are prohibited. He does not prohibit examining these clues, but He does prohibit rejecting His revelation out of hand. Those of us who believe in this God of Creation are not the ones holding people accountable for rejecting His revelation, though. None of us are the Truth Police; we simply offer His gift of revelation. God still offers good things for people who reject His revelation, and we are foolish for not participating. That’s the reason I make so very much of fully understanding the difference between the Two Realms, between Laws and Grace, and knowing how they interact. We offer so much of revelation as people can grasp, at whatever level they wish to examine it. The burden is upon us to understand what matters to them, to speak their language, and meet them where they are.
If you read the Gospels and don’t see how Jesus favors the poor over the wealthy, you simply lack reading comprehension. You could try to bury that in the context of His time and place, but it’s no excuse for missing how it applies to us today. He was rough with the wealthy and powerful. Not uniformly so; He was pretty decent and gentle when any of them genuinely sought to understand. To Nicodemus of the Sanhedrin, He gently broke the news His teaching was incomprehensible to the intellect. It required a spiritual awareness, available only if the spirit was awakened or born from above. Nicodemus struggled with the literal meaning of the words, when Jesus pointedly used parabolic language. To be a ruler and teacher of a nation born in mysticism, Jesus found it hard to swallow such a man had no comprehension of Hebrew symbolic logic.
To the Rich Young Ruler, Jesus warned a clear conscience and peace with God required not making a god of his wealth. If the young man was unable to throw his material possessions aside in favor of the otherworldly life, he could not even comprehend peace with God, much less obtain it. It wasn’t the possession of wealth and power, but the fear of losing it which mattered. The Hebrew poor were much more likely to be otherworldly. When you consider what went into their condition and their thoughts about it all, they knew instinctively they had not gone out of their way to offend God, yet found themselves in misery. When Jesus explained misery was normal in this life, and that another life was available, they had no trouble deciding which was the better deal. The path to discarding this life in favor of the other was wide open to them. The wealthy and powerful had a huge barrier to cross.
This is not simply some cultural mythology; this is universal truth.
Modern Western Christianity has striven hard to turn this on its head. The bulk of Christian teaching, particularly in America, is all about getting ahead in this world. Like the Twelve at any time prior to the Cross, they simply have no place in their minds for the otherworld. Talk is cheap, and all the slick theology about Eternity (the Pharisees had plenty of it) means nothing when the bulk of religious education is about constructing a mainstream which amounts to little more than self-righteous materialism. The American evangelical experience is bathed in political agendas and cultural warfare, as if to ensure the crucifixion couldn’t happen again. Yet we are assured, when we read between the lines of Scripture, that politics was the whole motivation for prosecuting Jesus. It mattered not the particular agenda; all the parties agreed He had to go. Until we acknowledge the very real truth we are all carrying the hammer and nails for His crucifixion, we can’t drop them. Everything He taught challenged not only political power, but the desire for it in all cases; He literally fled from having it forced upon Him. The politics of man cannot accomplish the grace of God.
There is a godly political regime, only in the sense of Laws, not grace. It required a cultural and intellectual foundation the Judeans had long discarded. That foundation was Hebrew mysticism, the sense that things in this world aren’t to be taken too seriously. When I see a politics built on that, I’ll be first to sign up for the party rolls. Jesus would, too. Every argument He had with the political leaders of His nation can be reduced to telling them they were no longer Hebrew, no longer the nation God called “My People” because they had rejected the fundamental definitions. They had constructed a vast philosophical matrix which could not accommodate the ancient truth, and they were hostile to the explanations of the Law of Moses offered by the very Son of God, who personified all God sought to reveal through Moses.
Meanwhile, the poor were quick to embrace afresh the ancient ways. The middle class agreed with the wealthy and rejected that otherworldly approach. The middle class were the ones who choked on His teaching of the Bread of Life. Those who despaired of this world found in such teaching the one thing left making life worth living.
If the Western churches do not change their ways, they will be destroyed. Not merely the organizational structures, but the lives of every member who has been deceived by this vast lie. During my own lifetime I can recall when churches talked about how this world was not worthy of much attention, and before I reached adulthood, such talk was gone. I can recall professors teaching preacher boys to focus on this life and forget about Heaven, that it was a myth — the secularization of religion. Those professors will bear a mighty burden of guilt when the Day of Judgment comes. Look around you today and you see all the Christian outreach to the poor assumes there is something wrong with them because they don’t care to adopt the money-grubbing ways of this world’s wealthy. This is evil. Yes, there are greedy poor folks, but those not greedy are lumped in with the rest by policy. What will happen to such churches when the material prosperity and “success” to which they cling evaporates? It doesn’t take a religious mind to see it’s happening as you read this.
A church which cannot exist without vast holdings of property, cannot function without pouring resources into political campaigns, cannot organize their activities without their own worldly politicized internal structure which mimics the tools of the psychopaths who rule us today — these churches are not deserving of the label “church.” Thus saith the Lord.