On August 10th the Catholic Church celebrated the feast of St. Lawrence, deacon and martyr, and there is a story from his life that should stop us in our tracks. Lawrence was responsible for the material goods of the Church and for the care of the poor. During the persecution under the Emperor Valerian, the Roman authorities demanded that he hand over the treasures of the Church. Lawrence asked for time to gather them. Then, instead of bringing gold, silver, vessels, or money, he gathered the poor, the crippled, the widows, the orphans, and those who depended upon the Church for help. He presented them and, in effect, said: These are the treasures of the Church.
What did Lawrence understand that we have forgotten?
Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you.” We often hear those words almost as a sad concession, as if poverty were an incurable blight upon the world, a kind of financial leprosy that humanity has failed to eliminate. We speak of poverty as a problem to be solved, and certainly Christians should work to relieve suffering wherever we can. But perhaps Lawrence understood that Christ was revealing something deeper. The poor are not merely a problem placed before the Church. They are also a gift placed before the Church. Not poverty itself, not hunger, sickness, homelessness, or desperation, but the human beings who suffer these things. They are a gift because through them we are given the opportunity to love. Saints have been made by caring for the poor. Souls have been transformed by feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner, tending the sick, and sitting beside those whom the rest of the world has forgotten. Without someone who needs our love, how would we learn to give it? Without someone who cannot repay us, how would we ever know whether our love was truly love?
Saint Paul tells us, “So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” Older translations often use the word “charity,” and there is something valuable in that word because charity makes us think of love moving outward. Love is not merely affection. Christian charity is love that leaves the heart and enters the hands. It feeds, carries, forgives, visits, sacrifices, gives, and suffers. Charity is the love of God received by us and then poured through us toward another person. And we understand this instinctively when we look at our own children. They did nothing to earn our care when they were born. We fed them before they could thank us, clothed them before they could repay us, protected them when they did not understand danger, and forgave them repeatedly when they disappointed us. Even when they misuse our generosity, love does not begin by demanding that they first prove themselves worthy of it.
Jesus asks us to enlarge that family. He teaches us to see other people not merely as strangers, failures, burdens, taxpayers, irresponsible people, worthy people, or unworthy people, but as neighbors and, in a deeper sense, as brothers and sisters. “Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.” Yet when we meet someone in poverty, how quickly we begin an investigation. Is he really poor? Did she make bad decisions? Is he addicted? Could she work more? Did they waste what they had? Are they poor through no fault of their own? Before we give mercy, we want to know whether mercy has been deserved.
But did Jesus treat us that way?
Did He first demand that Peter prove he would never deny Him before calling him? Did He refuse to wash Judas’s feet because Judas was preparing to betray Him? Did He reject Paul because Paul had persecuted the Church? Christ knew exactly who these men were and still loved them. Scripture tells us, “While we were still sinners Christ died for us.” That is the standard placed before the Christian. Christ did not wait for us to deserve His love. He loved us first.
Charity has a companion called generosity, but perhaps there is a difference between generosity that waits and charity that searches. I remember once picking apples on a farm and asking the farmer how he got the apples from the very highest branches of the tree. He told me there were two ways: you could wait for them to fall, or you could climb the tree and pick them. There is a spiritual lesson there. We can wait for the poor, the lonely, the forgotten, and the suffering to find us. We can wait until someone knocks on the door, makes the telephone call, holds out a hand, or becomes desperate enough to ask. And if we help them, that is good. But there is another kind of charity that climbs the tree. It goes looking. It notices the person sitting alone. It finds the family whose electricity is about to be shut off. It notices the elderly widow who has stopped buying enough food, the father too embarrassed to ask for help, the mother frightened about how she will care for her children, the lonely person whom everyone assumes is fine. Charity does not merely wait to be interrupted by suffering. Charity searches for someone to love.
Perhaps that is why Lawrence could call the poor the treasures of the Church. He did not mean that poverty was good. Poverty can crush human dignity. Hunger is not good. Homelessness is not good. Desperation is not good. Christians should work against those things. But the people who suffer them remain precious, and Christ has mysteriously chosen to identify Himself with them. “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me.” The astonishing part of that passage is that the righteous do not even realize they were serving Christ. They ask, “Lord, when did we see you hungry?” They simply loved the person standing before them and later discovered that Christ had been hidden there all along.
Yes, some people will take advantage of us. Some will lie. Some will waste what we give them. Some may return again and again because they have not changed the decisions that created their misery. Prudence matters. Charity does not mean enabling addiction, abuse, deception, laziness, or self-destruction. Love seeks the true good of another person. But we must be careful that prudence does not become an elegant excuse for hardness of heart. If I give in good faith to someone I truly believe to be in need, and that person deceives me, his deception belongs to him; my charity belongs to me. God sees both hearts. “God loves a cheerful giver.” The worth of a charitable act is not determined entirely by the worthiness of the receiver.
There is also another important truth. Not everything called charity is actually charitable. Some forms of assistance may help a person move further away from God and from the good. A gift that enables addiction is not charity. Assistance that helps someone commit an abortion is not charity toward either the mother or the child. Encouraging promiscuity, corruption, exploitation, vengeance, hatred, or self-destruction cannot become virtuous merely because we call it compassion. Saint Paul tells us that love “does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth.” Christian charity must therefore contain mercy and truth together. We are called to help people, but we are called to help them toward what is good.
We are called to do the work of Jesus, to become in a real sense His hands in the world. The hungry person gives us an opportunity to feed with the hands of Christ. The frightened person gives us an opportunity to comfort with His voice. The lonely person gives us an opportunity to sit beside him as Christ would sit beside him. The sinner gives us an opportunity to forgive as Christ forgave us. The poor therefore are not merely a social category. They are invitations. They give us a place to practice the Gospel instead of merely admiring it.
Still, this kind of generosity frightens us. We may say that we trust God, but somewhere in the heart another thought appears: What if I give too much? What if God asks more from me than I intended to give? What if the life He chooses for me is harder than the life I would choose for myself? What if following Christ costs me comfort?
That fear reveals something important. We often trust God so long as we believe He intends to preserve the life we have designed for ourselves. But Jesus never promised that. He said, “Follow me.” He also said, “Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.” God knows our needs better than we do. He may not preserve every comfort. He may permit hardship. He may ask sacrifices that frighten us. But He will never cease working toward the salvation of our souls. What He permits will be ordered toward something greater than comfort: union with Him.
Every act of genuine charity therefore does something to us. It loosens the world’s grip upon us. Every time we give away something we could have kept, we declare that our security does not finally rest in our possessions. Every time we help someone who cannot repay us, we imitate the extravagance of God. God gives first. God gives before we deserve it. He “makes his sun rise on the bad and the good.” The Christian life is the gradual transformation of the human heart until it begins to resemble that divine generosity.
And this may explain something else. Even a world that no longer knows Christ still admires charity. People admire the person who gives his life to care for the dying, the physician who serves the poor, the family who takes in a stranger, the volunteer who feeds the hungry. Even the unbeliever recognizes that something beautiful is happening there. Perhaps that is because every true act of charity bears the faint imprint of the God in whose image we were created. A person may not know Christ by name and still glimpse something of Him whenever he encounters selfless love.
But we who do know His name should understand what we have been given.
“The poor you will always have with you.”
Perhaps we should hear those words with gratitude as well as sorrow. Not gratitude that another human being suffers, but gratitude that as long as suffering exists there will remain opportunities to love. There will always be someone to feed, someone to forgive, someone to visit, someone to carry, someone to comfort, someone to welcome. There will always be another opportunity to become a little more like Christ.
St. Lawrence understood that.
The Romans asked for the treasure of the Church, expecting gold.
Lawrence brought them people.
Perhaps one day, when we stand before Christ, we will discover that many of those whom we thought we were helping were actually helping us. They were teaching us to give. Teaching us to trust. Teaching us to detach ourselves from the world. Teaching us to recognize Christ in another human face. Teaching us to become saints.
We thought they needed our treasure.
St. Lawrence understood the deeper truth.
They were the treasure.
