Charity and your Social Credit Score
The Needy and the Worthy Matthew 5:38-6:4
It is a weird rule in our society that the only people who can ask for help are the ones who don’t need it. Here’s what I mean by that. A fireman who stands on the street corner and asks me to put money in his boot is respectable. Since the boot is clean and hasn’t been worn; I don’t ask him what he wants the money for. He is presumed to have a worthy purpose and to be above questioning1. But a similar fellow with worn boots on his feet, and no spare unworn boots to carry in his hands and without the uniform which marks him as an official seems shady. If the fellow at the red light has a hungry look then we assume that he is actually thirsty, and we know, somehow instinctively, that his need for booze makes him unworthy of our compassion. A kid can sell donuts on the street so long as we know that she won’t spend the money herself2 but give it to some socially approved cause. If the kid looks well fed and idle we don’t care what she does with the money we give her. In short, you can beg on the street corner as long as when you are done you go to a nice home in a respectable neighborhood and your refrigerator is well-stocked. But the parent who would permit a hungry child to beg is worse than one who would let him starve. Where charity is concerned there is a gulf fixed wide as the one between Heaven and Hell, between Lazarus and Dives, between the Needy and the Worthy.
We demand that the alms-giver ensures that his money is used well. But its not the same if I spend my money on something morally indifferent. For example, I don’t know anything about the ethics of Krispy Kreme and as long as I buy my donuts straight from them, without a virtuous middleman and a worthy cause, nobody expects me to ask. When I go to the beach I don’t check into the hiring practices of the hotel or the ethics of The Crab Shack.
At least we haven’t up until now but more and more our betters are telling us that we ought, and soon perhaps must, consider the social standing of those with whom we do business. Having our personal business and leisure interfered with like this seems like, well like, commie BS and a huge infringement on our freedoms of association and commerce and expression but really it is only an extension of the strangely strict requirements on the giving of charity3. If I give somebody a ride in my truck or the change in my pocket I am expected to check their bona fides, not so much for my safety but for the good of society. Our beggars have to be respectable and our hobos solid members of the community. This higher level of responsibility, or at least earlier elevation to a higher level, is because when we give alms society recognizes that we are doing a much more serious thing than common trade and takes considerable interest in seeing that it is done scrupulously. When we give alms, we are providing a material good in exchange for an intangible compensation, which in our text Jesus calls glory but our society is beginning to know it under the name of Social Credit.
6 “Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be seen by them. Otherwise you have no reward from your Father in heaven. 2 Therefore, when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory from men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. Matthew 6
Giving charity in our society is a transaction like any other. Smart givers will maximize the value of their investment. It can’t just be given it has to look right. Media experts and Image Consultants must be consulted beforehand so that good works are seen by the distributors of social credit and seen in the right light. Ron DeSantis was mocked recently because while feeding the needy he was focused on preparing the meal rather than on shaking hands and smiling for the cameras and this was said to demonstrate his failure to understand which part of the activity was essential and which part was merely incidental. When feeding the hungry you have to hire a trumpet player; cooks are optional. The hungry people have to come from the right background and the food, the location and all of the particulars must be well chosen. The naked folks that we are clothing can’t just be random guys with no clothes but rather their nakedness has to fit into and reinforce society’s view of itself if we want to clothe them in our swag.4 Mercy and charity must be given only to those who are in need through no fault of their own and to such as will use the charity appropriately. In short those to whom we show mercy must be worthy. This lack of genuineness, this confusion between the important and valuable on one hand and the trivial and worthless on the other is impossible to miss. This is all clear enough so far, but I do have one big problem with this text.
3 But when you do a charitable deed, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 that your charitable deed may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will Himself reward you openly.
I am a Free Grace Absolutist and Jesus’ talk here of our good works receiving a reward from God is intensely problematic for me, offensive even. After over a month of intense wrestling with these words, trying to fit them in to my system in some way or other I am driven at last to a dark and frightening conclusion. I have no choice but to believe that, Jesus is actually saying exactly what He appears to be saying. I have tried and tried to make every less scandalous interpretation fit but I can’t do it. It seems to be the case that He genuinely intends to reward the giving of alms with spiritual blessings, if we meet certain requirements, namely the giving being obscure, disfavored, and thus not part of the Social Credit Economy; sincere rather than mercenary. Let the pearl clutching commence.
I am going to boil it down to four reasons why Christ would do something so seemingly out of character as to conditionally reward works5.
It isn’t about the giver of the alms. It is about His ragamuffins. I said above that the world’s charity is supremely concerned with the worthiness of the recipient, that you can’t signal your virtue and receive valid Social Credit by giving to the unworthy. But the unworthy, those who are marginalized not because of systemic injustices or institutional prejudices etc. etc., but rather those who are hungry because they spent the grocery money on hookers and blow, those who are sick because they took a needle they shouldn’t have6, those who are in prison because they are a real threat to those around them, these are the people that Christ will go to any lengths to provide for. It's not just that He cares for the black sheep. He deliberately leaves, abandons, the ninety nine for us, and if you just give us a cup of water when we are thirsty He will remember and reward that forever, no matter who it offends.
Money printer. I am subverting your expectations by comparing the abundant mercy of the Gospel to reckless Central Bankers. Feel your mind blown by my cleverness. It’s a comment on the Parable of the Unjust Steward. H/T Fr. Robert Capon and Crazy Al Satterfield He intends to break the charity economy and destroy all Social Credit. Our buying and selling of mercy and grace(falsely so called) is offensive to His gospel. So He rewards the work that brings it down. It should, by the way, be offensive to us as well. There is more evil done by ‘charities’ and ‘non-governmental organization’ do gooder busybodies than by any other group in this world today. Social justice is the most doublespeak of names and is the cause of the most absurd injustice to be found. But more broadly our Pharasaical, ostentatious righteousness is stinking up the joint. Christ responds by firing up His Mercyprinter and flooding the market with no concern for the worthiness of the recipients. His goodness makes our goodness worthless and meaningless7. This is all a good thing because we sorta paint ourselves as givers of charity but in truth we are far more likely to be recipients8. This is, I think, what makes this text so tough for me. With the New Testament you can almost always paint yourself and your audience as the ‘needy’ recipient of charity and good works, typically the text works very nicely for painting yourself as the bad guy or at least the needy guy, which is what I prefer to do, but here Christ explicitly addresses us as the givers of charity and the doers of good works. It is easy for me to show that everything you have is worthless-that you are poor and then I simply preach the Gospel to the poor and you are included. The only gospel that I know how to preach is very skeptical about the rich and the worthy, about those who have any goodness of their own and so with this text I find myself on the wrong foot. Fortunately, the reward which He promises functions to crash the charity economy, like a cryptocurrency that isn’t a scam if we can imagine such a thing, and make us all poor. In the kingdom of Mammon, Christ is the first and greatest insurrectionist.
He intends to display sovereign freedom over all systems, even the truest and best. I still believe in absolute free grace all the time, and soon we will return to our regularly scheduled programming. But one thing to see in this text is that just as Christ will not accept any system stipulating to whom His love and mercy may come, He will not tolerate anyone dictating to Him how it happens or what consequences He may annex to which causes. He is not subject to Law or systems but is their Lord and Master and we can know for certain that all laws and systems, like the Sabbath, are made for man and not man for the law or system. He acts through earthly means, without means, or directly contrary to means. He might even, if He sovereignly chooses, give His gifts as a reward for acts of mercy, or regenerate in the waters of Baptism, or be present in bread and wine, or give grace to those who have not fulfilled any terms of any covenant. No one can fence in His goodness.
But the fourth and final reason why Christ is willing to entice us with a reward is because this reward cannot be desired for mercenary reasons or in an envious, acquisitive way. To see why that is, we have to go back to the close of Chapter 5.
38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39 But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. 40 If anyone wants to sue you and take away your tunic, let him have your cloak also. 41 And whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two. 42 Give to him who asks you, and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away.43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you,
Christ demands of us more than the Law ever could. As I said before, the Sermon on the Mount is the Law turned up to eleven.
Moses’ law rightly limited the scope of vengeance, to ‘an eye for an eye’. He made everybody equal and the requirements of Roman law which Christ refers to here are the same in principle, though they take the part of the conquering Romans over the conquered Jews. But Christ goes much further than even the oppressive and unfair demands made against a conquered people, demanding that we forfeit all of our rights, because He will not have us participate in the marketplace of righteousness at all, regarding it as Mammon and ‘Caesar’s’ or even the domain of ‘the Beast’. He will not have us buy and sell right and wrong, justice and vengeance, at any price. Rather, He says let yourself be plundered, let yourself be ‘done wrong’ and cheated as a way of abstracting and extracting yourself from the whole thing not because we despise the material world, not because we are disdainful Buddhists or scornful Gnostics who view the world as illusory and contaminating, not because we have no use for the things that we surrender as if we were disembodied spirits, but rather because there is something which He would rather give us and the two are incompatible. And before we get to the specifics of what the reward is, I just want to say clearly that the reward is incompatible with receiving the earthly rewards for charity. Those who receive one are excluded from the other. To have social credit is to forfeit treasure in heaven and those who have treasure in heaven are the despised scum of this earth, disrespected, and on their way to being deplatformed, and debanked. To be righteous in the eyes of man, particularly yourself, is to be filthy in the eyes of God. And to be righteous in the eyes of God, by grace through faith, is to be wicked and presumptuous in the eyes of the world. This is an Either/Or and cannot be made into a Both/And. What then is the reward for which we are advised to sacrifice our part in society, or rather to give up this life entirely for?
45 that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
The reward we seek cannot be desired in a mercenary way, that is because the reward is simply to be a child to the Father, to be one who gives grace to the unworthy. This is not the desire to copy someone successful in the world so that you may have success like theirs. The doing of these things, giving to those who can make no return, being gracious to enemies, endurance of persecution is itself the reward. He constantly refers to this reward but never describes it as anything except being the Father’s son, being like the father. Doing the things that the Father does is enough reward for a son, is your completion and perfection. The fulfillment and consummation of your destiny is to be gracious. Neither more nor less is acceptable.
46 For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so? 48 Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.
The first and most fundamental rule of the Gospel is that God is not like we think that He is. We didn’t get some brain adjustment when we prayed a prayer or walked an aisle or got dunked in a tank. The Gospel always remains alien to our minds, if you want to say that it is because our minds are fallen then that is fine but my opinion is that the Way of the Cross is eternally above the comprehension of any creature. It can only be always new because it is never a part of us. To understand it, is to measure God Himself, a task which will remain beyond us forever.
The great Steve Brown(Keylife Ministries) wrote a book called Three Free Sins, in which he asked us to imagine that Christ was giving us three free sins in order to help us realise the truth that Christ has forgiven all of our sins. It is strange how offensive the thought of three free sins is to people who say we believe in the forgiveness of all our sins. And I think that in our passage today, Christ puts on His bookkeeper hat for just a moment, promising rewards and dealing in the commodities of charity and righteousness, just so that we can see that despite what we say that that is still how we think of our lives and how we still think of Him. His real goal is not to change our behavior but to shed some light on the hidden and misunderstood Father. We imagine that the Father is obsessed with justice and wants to fix society and all of its ills like we do, but if He was like that then He would have done it by now. No obstacle to His will exists or can be imagined. And don’t tell me that it is a slow process because I think that we can all see that today is not better than yesterday, except solely in the fact that it is nearer to His return. But if the Father wanted Social Justice then society would be just. What would be lost is more than what would be gained. The chance to love and show mercy, to give and to receive, to truly participate in one another’s life in ways which bless the giver and the recipient is worth far more than any equality or justice, certainly more than any material good. Maybe the wino and I know9 and God knows something that our social credit seeking foolishness can’t see, namely that the wino really does need a bottle of Thunderbird and that everyone benefits when our self-righteousness is put out to pasture10. Let’s not allow the present darkness to make our love grow cold or let our own stupidity keep us from seeing that it is only a few very transient circumstances that have us on the giving end of charity rather than the receiving. Let us give as if we have freely received and remember that we ourselves are the least of these and in need of daily bread and wine which we cannot provide for ourselves. We stand in need of being visited in our sickness and imprisonment. And our daily cry is ‘Come quickly Lord Jesus, and bring the good stuff.’
Our idolatry of officialdom is also at play in this example obviously, especially officials who it is felt we can honor in a noncontroversial way, such as the manly, risk taking fireman who saves lives and takes noones freedoms.
This isn’t a ‘gender inclusive’ she. I have just always seen girl (scouts?) doing this.
With I should add more formalized enforcement. Social Credit has previously been enforced as a matter of taste but is becoming a matter of law, as it is enforced even if not as it is written.
Why is visiting prisoners so disfavored as a charitable work these days? Is it because of presumed unworthiness, lack of photogenicity, or simply because the demographic from which prisoners are drawn is not sought as a source of Social Credit? Lack of supply(of social credit to be obtained) has killed the demand for this work of mercy.
I apologize for using listing, the absolute worst and most boring way to write or read anything. My lack of creativity is my only excuse.
drug reference or jab at the jabs? the ambiguity draws you in
or at least makes its inherent worthlessness unmistakable
Add snarky Bidenomics reference here.
RIP to the great Jimmy Buffett
As long as it isn’t put out to stud.
There is a famous story about a yielded person doing exactly what the Holy Spirit directed him to do: get in your car, go buy a quart of milk, drive, turn left, turn right, stop: go knock on the door and hand it to the person. The person's complete faith turned out to be an answer to prayer for someone who desparately needed and prayed for said milk.
But who are we to judge, or even to know, when God needs a wino to get a bottle of Thunderbird? Jesus Himself was insistent that He only did what the Father directed Him to do. And He tells us to do the same.
I just read this posting, which seems relevant. https://www.missiodeicatholic.org/p/an-important-message-for-you-dictated
I am not saying that I am good at this: my wife would say that I am often injecting what I think is right in places that it does not belong. I guess that is wisdom.
This is so GOOD!