A surprising flip of the script on generosity

I came across something surprising in Leviticus 25 yesterday (admittedly, not a sentence I utter very often). Verse 35 states: “If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and are unable to support themselves among you, help them as you would a foreigner and stranger, so they can continue to live among you.” (NIV)

What was surprising to me in this text was that it would seem to be a reversal of how we might typically think about generosity. I imagine that the more typical line of thought might be that we should be encouraged to think about strangers just as generously as we would about our friends and neighbors—that the harder thing is to be open and generous to strangers, and the easier thing to be so to those near us and like us. 

But that is not what it says. The text seems to take for granted that the audience would naturally show kindness and generosity to strangers—and that they find it hard to do the same for their neighbors. 

Is this true, and do we struggle in a similar way today? 

I think we do. 

After reflecting on the verse, I could envision in my mind the ways in which we are impatient with, and even despising toward, people in our own nation and neighborhoods who struggle with poverty—particularly those who are struggling to find work. We imagine that they aren’t trying as hard as they could, and are somehow at least partially to blame for their circumstances. We are less suspicious, sometimes, of the need of strangers in other parts of the world—their poverty seems more legitimate somehow, more pure. 

I heard a story on the radio this week illustrating this. It was a story about a group of people in a close geographical region that had created a voluntary network for sharing wealth. People that had abundance could contribute from their extra funds, and those in need could apply for modest monthly assistance. One featured person told how he had been helped when he was out of work, and that after he had found a job he had been glad to become one of the contributors. However—and here is where the story illustrates the Leviticus text—he went on to say that recently he had been feeling like he wanted to give his money oversees instead. He said that his money would go farther there. That’s true, in a sense. But notice: he accepted the money from his neighbors, even though living in that urban area meant their money wouldn’t “go that far.” Now, when it was his turn to give (I’m not mocking him—I think this is relatable for all of us!), he seems to find it more natural to give to “a foreigner and stranger” than to a neighbor. There seemed to be a bit of a disconnect between his view of his own need when he was out of work, and his view of the need of his neighbors in similar circumstances. (Note, in case anyone heard the same story or will at some point: oddly, his second reason was that he wanted to give to people he knew—which conflicted rather noticeably with the first. But that is a logical inconsistency more than an interesting insight, and so I have chosen to simplify by just engaging the first reason on its own terms.)

The story of course calls to mind Christ’s words to the hypocrites in Matthew 23: “You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.” Clearly, it doesn’t need to be the one or the other. Leviticus similarly seems to call us to take the generous impulse that comes more naturally to us and to apply it just as faithfully where it does not come as natural. There are many places in scripture that highlight that kind of call, so that is not that surprising. 

What seemed surprising to me in this reading was how well it zooms right in on our tendency to question and weigh how worthy a person is of generosity, whether practical or spiritual. How ungrateful that is, when we have each of us been the recipient of so much generosity and assistance, both from God and from human sources. Regardless of whether we actually think we are more inclined to help a stranger or a neighbor, the text presses us to admit and own that our generosity is more conditional than we might have thought, and it calls us to live differently. May this surprising bit of life instruction—found in a surprising biblical location!—help our impulses of generosity grow to become ever more faithful to the charity that is the heart of God.