Give a man a fish, you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man how to fish, and he and his family will eat for generations. Judge a man for the circumstances surrounding his need and accuse him of being a parasite looking for a handout, and you’ll reinforce his impoverishment — and your own.
We get the principle that there are different dimensions to addressing the needs we are confronted with in helping people. But what of our attitudes toward those we consider “needy”?
Sid Smith III
In Luke 10:25-37, Jesus is confronted by an expert in the law who asks him what it takes to inherit eternal life. Jesus affirms the law which says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” However, the legal expert asks, “Who is my neighbor,” in what Luke takes care to indicate is an effort to justify himself. Jesus responds with what we have come to know as the parable of the “Good Samaritan” and instructs the expert to go show mercy in the manner of the Samaritan.
The effort of the expert to justify himself appears to be a search for the least he can do to satisfy the law, and it indicates an approach that misses the heart of God. In the parable, the Samaritan is shown to meet the substantial needs of the beaten man with a maximum effort and without regard to cost, for the simple reason that the man is in need.
We are called not merely to do the stuff of the law to inherit heaven, but we are called to inherit the heart stance of our Heavenly Father because of our relationship with him. All the “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” will flow out of the heart of God as we receive him. When we fail to walk in the reality of this crucial principle, when we try to act into relationship, our actions lose the world-changing power of God’s omnipotent love and we reveal the true destitution of our hearts.
How dare I assess and conclude the worthiness of someone else’s need when I can see the true magnitude of my own need and the depths to which Christ had to go to save me. My judgmentalism is reflective of the heart stance that Jesus most emphatically opposed, according to the Gospels.
In fact, the heart of God does not just limit its concern to interpersonal interactions, but it also involves itself in the structures that contribute to the need. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
Sid Smith III is a music ministry consultant and serves at Third Baptist Church of San Francisco. His father, Sid Smith Jr., was a pioneer Southern Baptist Convention leader credited with starting more than 400 predominantly Black SBC churches. Sid serves on the board of directors for BNG.