What did Jesus say about the poor?

At a Glance

What I said: Blessed are you who are poor, God’s Kingdom is yours (Luke 6:20). When you make a feast, ask the poor, the maimed, the lame, or the blind (Luke 14:13). And I said the nations will be judged by whether they fed the hungry (Matthew 25:35).

What the rest of the Bible says: The law of Moses built care for the poor into the farm, the calendar and the tithe: the edges of every field left for gleaning, a tithe every third year for the stranger, the orphan and the widow, and debts cancelled every seventh year (Leviticus 19:9–10; Deuteronomy 14:28–29; 15:1–2).

When today’s view appeared: The idea that the poor must prove they deserve help is old, but it took its modern shape in the English poor laws of the 1600s to 1800s. The argument that helping the poor should be left to churches and not the government took its modern form in reply to those laws, and again in reply to the welfare programs of the 1900s.

The short answer: I never asked whether the poor deserved it. I fed them.

My first sermon was about the poor.

When I stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth, I read from the scroll of Isaiah and said it was coming true that day: The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor (Luke 4:18).

Not to the hard-working poor. Not to the poor who had made good choices. To the poor.

I grew up among them. Galilee was a land of small farmers, tenants and day laborers. They paid taxes to Herod Antipas, who ruled for Rome, and tithes to the Temple, and many paid rent to landlords. Some had lost their land to debt, and my stories are full of tenants, debtors and hired hands. When I taught my friends to pray, the first thing I told them to ask for themselves was bread for today (Matthew 6:11), because many of them did not know where tomorrow’s would come from.

What I said

Blessed are you who are poor, God’s Kingdom is yours (Luke 6:20).

I told a story about a rich man who dressed in purple and ate well every day, and a beggar named Lazarus who lay at his gate, full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table (Luke 16:20–21). In the story, the rich man never struck Lazarus or cursed him. He simply left him lying there, day after day, until they both died. And then the places were reversed.

I told my host at a dinner: when you make a feast, ask the poor, the maimed, the lame, or the blind; and you will be blessed, because they don’t have the resources to repay you (Luke 14:13–14).

I watched rich people put large gifts into the Temple treasury, and then a widow put in two tiny coins. I said she gave more than all those who are giving into the treasury, for they all gave out of their abundance, but she, out of her poverty, gave all that she had to live on (Mark 12:43–44).

And when I told my friends how the nations would be judged, the first thing I named was: I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat (Matthew 25:35).

I fed five thousand people on a hillside. The gospels do not say I checked whether any of them had worked that week.

What the rest of your Bible says

My people’s law did not leave the poor to chance or to charity. It wrote them into the economy.

A farmer was not to harvest the corners of his field, or go back for what he missed. You shall leave them for the poor and for the foreigner (Leviticus 19:10). Every third year, a tithe of the harvest was stored in the town so that the foreigner living among you, the fatherless, and the widow … shall come, and shall eat and be satisfied (Deuteronomy 14:29). Every seventh year, debts between neighbors were cancelled (Deuteronomy 15:1–2). Every fiftieth year, the land was to go back to the families who had lost it (Leviticus 25:10).

That was not private kindness. It was law, binding on everyone, and it set no test of who deserved it.

The law said: there will be no poor with you (Deuteronomy 15:4), if the people kept it. And a few verses later, honestly: the poor will never cease out of the land. Therefore I command you to surely open your hand to your brother, to your needy, and to your poor (Deuteronomy 15:11).

And the prophets came down hard on rulers who wrote laws against the poor: Woe to those who decree unrighteous decrees … to deprive the needy from justice, and to rob the poor among my people of their rights (Isaiah 10:1–2).

What my followers did with it

The first church in Jerusalem shared what it had: neither was there among them any who lacked … distribution was made to each, according as anyone had need (Acts 4:34–35). Before long, they had a dispute about it, because the widows of the Greek-speaking believers were being left out of the daily food (Acts 6:1). So they appointed seven men to make sure no one was missed.

For centuries, that was what Christians were known for. Around the year 362, the emperor Julian, who wanted to bring back the old gods, complained in a letter that the impious Galileans feed not only their own poor but ours as well.¹ A few years later, Basil, bishop of Caesarea, built a whole new quarter outside his city with housing for the poor, care for the sick, and work for those who could do it.²

But a different idea grew too. In England, the Poor Law of 1601 made every parish responsible for its poor, and divided them into those who could not work, those who could, and those who would not. In 1834, a new law set out to make help so unpleasant that only the truly desperate would ask for it, and tried to send the able-bodied poor into workhouses, where husbands, wives and children were separated.³ The question of who deserved help had become the first question.

What is new

In the United States in 2024, about 35.9 million people lived below the official poverty line, including about one child in seven.⁴

Many American Christians now say that caring for the poor is first the job of churches, families and neighbors, not the government. It is a serious argument, and I will answer it below. But it is not the whole of what your Bible says. The law of Moses was the law of a nation, and it did not leave the poor to private generosity.

And some of what is preached now goes further: that wealth is a sign of God’s favor, and poverty a sign of weak faith.⁵ I said the opposite. I said the poor are blessed.

What You’ll Hear Back

“Jesus said the poor you will always have with you.”

I did: you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want to, you can do them good (Mark 14:7). I was echoing the law of Moses to people who knew it by heart. The verse I was echoing goes on: Therefore I command you to surely open your hand to your brother, to your needy, and to your poor (Deuteronomy 15:11). I was not saying poverty can’t be helped. I was reminding them of the command that comes with it. And notice the rest of my sentence: whenever you want to, you can do them good.

“If anyone will not work, he shall not eat.”

That is from a letter in Paul’s name, not from me: If anyone is not willing to work, don’t let him eat (2 Thessalonians 3:10). It was written to a church where some members had stopped working and were living off the others. Many scholars think it was because they expected me back any day; others think it was an old habit of living off wealthy patrons. It was about people who were not willing to work. It was not about the sick, the old, children, or people who cannot find work. Most of the poor in your country are one of those, or are already working.

“Charity is for the church, not the government.”

Churches should give, and many do, generously. But even all the churches and charities in your country together could not feed the hungry on the scale that is needed.⁶ And the law of Moses did not ask them to. It made gleaning and the third-year tithe the law of the land. You may argue about which programs work, and you should. But the Bible does not tell you to leave the poor to private giving alone.

“Welfare makes people dependent.”

Some help is badly designed, and you are right to want help that lifts people up rather than keeps them down. That is what the Jubilee was for: giving families back their land so they could feed themselves. But I never refused to feed someone because it might make him depend on me. I told you to pray for daily bread. All of you depend on someone.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Deuteronomy 15:1–11.

You will find: the law that says there will be no poor with you, and the law that says the poor will never cease, side by side.

Then read Mark 14:3–9 and Luke 16:19–31, and ask what I meant.

The Short Version

• My first sermon was good news to the poor. I said blessed are you who are poor.
• I told people to invite the poor to their feasts, and said the nations would be judged by whether they fed the hungry.
• The law of Moses wrote the poor into the law of the land: gleaning, the third-year tithe, the seventh-year release of debts.
• The poor you always have with you was an echo of a law that says open your hand.
• The idea that the poor must first prove they deserve help is old, but it is not mine.