Better Than The Statue of Liberty

Here's a quote. See if you can place it. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Sure you can. Most of us know that's written on a plaque on the Statue of Liberty. Many today wonder, not in a positive sense, if it should be removed because we don't seem to be quite so willing anymore to embrace all "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses." Is it false advertising? But ... just who are these tired and poor and huddled masses? On the statue, it's those tired, poor, huddled masses from around the world. And, no, we aren't willing or even able to take them all.

At the opening of Jesus's public ministry, He walked into a synagogue in Nazareth one Sabbath, opened a scroll from Isaiah, and read.

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." (Luke 4:18-19)

He went on to say, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (Luke 4:21). The Social Justice Warrior types want us to believe that the Gospel (He did say He proclaimed the "good news") is just that. Jesus had come to proclaim liberty to captives, sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and relief for the marginalized. (They add that last one because Jesus didn't know what it meant back then.) And the Synoptic Gospels bear out that Jesus helped some (and so should we) poor and some blind and gave some relief to some oppressed (I don't recall Him freeing any captives), but quite clearly He did not finish that task. Instead, He told His followers, "You always have the poor with you, but you will not always have Me" (Matt 26:11). Apparently it was not His plan to end poverty, blindness, captivity, or oppression. If it was, He failed. So what was Jesus talking about? Jesus was talking about the actually marginalized rather than socially marginalized -- those removed from a relationship with God, those who were under God's wrath (Rom 1:18). In the Beatitudes Jesus refers to "the poor" and "those who hunger and thirst" and "the meek" and so on (Matt 5:3-12), but He clearly isn't talking about those lacking funds or food or the like. He's talking about the poor in spirit and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. While we tend to focus on the very real, but very temporal versions of "poor" and "captive" and such, Jesus was looking at the much deeper problem of spiritual poverty, spiritual starvation, and spiritual captivity (Matt 20:28). These kinds of things are bigger problems because 1) they have eternal consequences and 2) we aren't even aware of them, so we can't find a remedy for them.

Jesus said "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" because the solution to the spiritual darkness -- the spiritual marginalization that all humans suffer -- had arrived. Three years later, He died and declared "It is finished" because at that moment He made "peace by the blood of His cross" (Col 1:20) and canceled our certificate of debt for sin by nailing it to the cross (Col 2:14). Jesus spent His ministry distributing kindness and help to the needy -- physical and spiritual -- to illustrate that He was there to do so and capable of doing it. In fact, look at the account of the paralytic in Capernaum. You remember. His friends tried to get him in to see Jesus to be healed, but they couldn't (The KJV says "They could not come nigh unto Him for the press" (Mark 4:2) -- apparently the media was everywhere.), so they opened up the roof and dropped him in. Jesus did not tend first to his very obvious ailment. Instead, He said, "Son, your sins are forgiven" (Mark 2:5). This, of course, upset the religious leaders there, so Jesus went on to say, "Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Rise, take up your bed and walk'? But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins" -- He said to the paralytic -- "I say to you, rise, pick up your bed, and go home" (Mark 2:9-11). The primary concern was freedom for the captives to Satan, liberty for the spiritually oppressed, resources for the poor in spirit, sight for the spiritually blind. In that sense, then, Jesus was vastly better than the Statue of Liberty because the solutions He brought to the "tired," "poor," "huddled masses" was a permanent solution, restoring a relationship with His Father and given freely because His resources are infinite. Now that is really good news.