Third Sunday of the Year C (2013) Good News to the Poor

Third Sunday of the Year C (2013) – Good News to the Poor

During the past few weeks several well known high street retail businesses, national chains of shops, have closed down, or soon will. Many thousands of people are losing their livelihoods. And there are undoubtedly more redundancies to come. This is a time of insecurity and impoverishment for large numbers of people in this country.

Recently we were marking the passing of the old year and the beginning of the new. Pride was taken in the achievements of the Olympics and Paralympics which we hosted, in associated successes in the world of entertainment, and in various examples of scientific progress rooted in this country.

However, as I have remarked in a previous homily, 2012 was also the year in which food banks became a social phenomenon, and there has been a significant rise in their number. There are now an estimated 13 million people living below the poverty line in Britain, out of a population of 60 million - more than a tenth of the nation! There are new food bank projects growing every three days.

In fact 2012 could have been described as the Year of the Soup Kitchen except that, perhaps, this has overtones of the Victorian era. Instead, the more neutral ‘food bank’ term has been coined. An economic crisis initiated by the immorality of the banks has ended up with ‘nice’ ‘banks’ that offer food for free.

Local charities run these food banks and they are rightly anxious not to be seen as part of the State. But they are precisely what happens when the safety net tears, when the holes ripped open are so big that all sorts of unlikely people fall through them. The fact is that many of those turning up at the food banks have a member of their household in work but still cannot afford food because bills have risen and wages are too low.

It is a Christian organisation – the Trussell Trust – that has been assisting with the setting up of food banks, and the Trust has many case histories which reveal who are the newly impoverished in our country.

For example, there is the man who joined the army and found that while on basic training his wife and children, who had not yet been provided with accommodation, could not cope with increasing bills and his decreased income. His wife broke down at her children’s nursery and was taken to a food bank. He is not a shirker, he is a soldier.

There is the teenage girl who nursed her terminally ill father and was then overwhelmed by the funeral expenses. Her family could no longer afford to eat until they turned to a food bank. She is not a shirker, she is a carer.

A young woman at college who worked two jobs in the evenings to support her educational endeavours was made redundant from both of them. She was 21 years of age and so did not qualify for benefits under the present arrangements. She had to choose between heating and eating until she could afford neither and ended up at a food bank. She is not a shirker, she is a student - aiming to better herself and make a positive contribution to society.

And so it goes on: women fleeing domestic abuse; children kept off school because the family stays in bed all day to keep warm; the police taking young shop lifters to food banks instead of to court. Significantly, shoplifting of food is on the rise.

At the end of last year a survey among teachers in London revealed that on average five children in their class have had insufficient or no food before coming to school and for this reason cannot concentrate on their lessons. Most of the teachers said that they had forked out from their own pockets to buy food for these youngsters. Medical statistics provide evidence of a growth in the numbers of malnourished children – in this, the seventh richest nation in the world!

As a journalist in a respected national newspaper writing on this subject has observed: ‘No one is laughing on the way to the Food Bank’. *

We learn that there are political moves afoot to change the law to specify how claimants spend their benefit money–does this insinuate that there is malpractice and dishonesty on their part?Actually much of the food poverty is caused by the persistence of very low wages. When the discretionary Social Fund is cut as planned later this year the situation will worsen, with inevitable effects on family life.

As I have said in a previous homily, severe austerity leads to family breakdown as a result of unwarranted stress, anxiety and humiliation. And broken families lead to a broken society: the repercussions are serious for all of us no matter what our financial situation is.

In today’s Gospel Jesus says: I have come to bring Good News to the poor; to proclaim liberty to captives; to the blind new sight; to set the downtrodden free.

At one time that familiar text would have been applied in an entirely individual, personal way with the focus on spiritual matters.

So the Good News would be that God loves us, sinners though we are, and that in the person of Jesus Christ we can see this clearly. By co-operating with God’s grace each of us can be set free from the chains of sin – a captivity which oppresses us with a sense of helplessness, and burdens us with guilt and shame. Jesus comes to us so that our lives will become upright and virtuous and so that we will enjoy inner peace, and eternal life in heaven.

That interpretation is still valid, of course. But we have become more aware in recent years that sin is not only private and personal. We are social creatures and there can be sinful structures in our society that can prevent us from realising our potential as human beings. Things can be so set up that they militate against our welfare both as individuals and as groups.

So as well as striving for our personal good we should give attention also to the Common Good - the welfare of all. We must do all we can to ensure that every person and all peoples of the world enjoy their due measure of independence, equality of opportunity, and a fair share in the goods of the earth. The Kingdom of God – a Kingdom of Justice, Love and Peace - is to be built up in human society now – and well as experienced to the full in the hereafter.

These sentiments, these principles, are rooted in the Gospel. They have been expressed in various practical ways in the life of the church over the centuries and they are at the heart of what is now called Catholic Social Doctrine. These teachings call us to action for the sake of the poor, the chained, and the downtrodden - wherever they may be.

In particular that Doctrine calls for a ‘Living Wage’ for every worker – that is, a rate of remuneration that is not an arbitrary sum, or one derived simply by extrapolating from national averages of any kind. A Living Wage is the payment of an amount which is adequate to provide the recipient with food, shelter, health care, and other necessities of life. (cf. Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes, #67; Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, #34; Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, #63-75, Pope John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, #90; Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of Social Doctrine, #250)

At our Baptism we are each called to share in the mission of Christ to bring good news to the poor. In our country today that meanswe have a responsibility to urge the adoption of a Living Wage; to challenge economic policies which sustain - or risk increasing - impoverishment among our people; to denounce any assertions that lay the blame for personal poverty on the sufferers rather than on those whose greed is the underlying cause of it; and to engage in the national effort to establish food banks in every area.

As Jesus says: If anyone has ears to hear, let them hear (Matt 11:15).

o0o

*[Suzanne Moore, The Guardian (G2 Supplement), 20.12.12, p.5: The Year of the Food Bank; see also: Things are not as they seem in the real world, John Battle, in The Universe, 9.12.12]