The covenantal economics of the people of God are quite astonishing. “If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor” (Deuteronomy 15:7).

What must you do, to take care of those who have become poor? You must “open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be” (15:8). OK, if it’s a loan instead of an outright gift, your neighbor will have to pay you back. Except for this: “Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts” (15:1) – all debts will be canceled, all pledges will be released (15:2).

So if the calendar is coming up on the end of the sixth year, it means you’ll “lend” him the money, and then we’ll hit the seven year mark, and poof, the debt is remitted and you’re not getting your money back. Well then: better not make the loan. But no: “Be careful that you do not entertain a mean thought, thinking, ‘The seventh year, the year of remission, is near,’ and therefore view your needy neighbor with hostility and give nothing” (15:9).

It has to have been a difficult challenge for the people of Israel to put this principle into practice; and surely they often failed to live up to it, letting that mean thought control them. Yet if they struggled to live out the generosity to which God called them, we today scarcely even consider the question. When we think of the poor and homeless, we think of them as “those people.” We have lost the biblical perspective that all the people in the community are our brothers and sisters and cousins. And we find it pretty easy to have mean thoughts about them, since we have already shrugged their need away as if they were not really part of our family.

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We are all your children, O Lord: yet we hold fast to the mean thought that we shouldn’t have to give up any of the blessing you have entrusted to us, even though our brothers and sisters are in poverty. Grant us open hearts and open hands, reaching to lift up all the family, so that everyone has enough.

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