Homeless Jesus
At St. Patrick’s church,
downtown,
where Homeless Jesus
sleeps on a park bench at the
corner,
they handed out
their one millionth free meal
to Robert, who was next in line.
He’s been coming for ten years.
It started with sandwiches
passed through the living room
window
of the rectory, and graduated
to breakfast and a hot lunch,
made
in a state-of-the-art kitchen,
newly set up in the school next
door,
using fruit, vegetables, eggs
and honey,
grown or raised on their own
farm,
which they bought because
they’re in this for the long haul.
The very long haul. Or,
as the Bishop put it, “The need
is great,
and hasn’t abated at all.”
On so many levels,
a free lunch doesn’t solve the
real problem,
but meeting your neighbour’s
bodily needs
is a kind of concrete
thing to do,
that makes the world a million
times
not-worse.
From the collection Some People.
This is a beautiful and moving poem, but it is based on a faulty, if popular, interpretation of Matthew 25: 31-46. Homelessness is a huge problem, one that should concern us all, and with which Jesus was intimately acquainted (Matt 8:20; Luke 9:58), but it is wrong to say that every homeless person, including those who are victims of their own sinful behaviour, are Jesus in disguise. To be sure, they deserve our compassion and practical help (there but for the grace of God go I), but Jesus’s description of the last judgement was not based on humanitarianism alone, even if done in his name. For a more accurate interpretation, see the needed corrective by the late Calvin Seminary prof, Andrew J. Bandstra, in a November 14,1983 Banner article, supported by then editor Andrew Kuyvenhoven. (Anyone remember those days of weekly publication?) Sadly, the corrective has largely gone unheeded.