Today, our ways of giving to the poor involve less direct interaction with the people who are poor. Almsgiving, on the other hand, was specifically a way for the donor to interact with the recipient. In fact, the interaction was the primary focus of almsgiving. Jews in Jesus’ time understood that God was present, or incarnate, among the poor. To interact with the poor was to interact with God. The importance of this act was so great that, by Jesus’ time, many Jewish texts considered almsgiving to be of equal or greater value than sacrifices made in the temple.
Through alms, individual Jews interacted with those who were poor and thereby interacted with God. Observant Jews would have seen beggars as an opportunity to carry out an important ritual: giving alms.
For Jesus, there was something important and unique about interacting with those who receive our gifts. We should take note of this. If our giving does not include interactions with those who are poor, we may be missing something that was vital to Jesus’ understanding of how people interact with God.
This message is excerpted from the Bible study “Give in secret” by Emma Crossen in the June 2015 Gather magazine.
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