Last week, on the way to the grocery, I passed a little clump of people standing at the curb. It included a man, a woman, and a child who looked to be about three years old. The man was holding a sign asking for help in feeding his family and paying the rent.

The man looked sturdy enough, and the woman and child were neatly dressed. They weren’t typical of the homeless and hopeless characters who frequented the parking lot in front of the grocery store. For some reason, the sight gave me a flashback to a discussion that we had had in the Sunday School class I was teaching. The members of the class were from seventy to ninety years old and had lived through a depression, several wars, and several recessions. Most of them had seen some hard times.

The discussion had to do with whether our professed Christianity required us to help people like the ones I saw or whether there was a more nuanced, but equally obedient way. Some held that it was simple: we are required to feed the hungry. Others said that the Bible said that we are to take care of our families first. And one or two mentioned the Biblical injunction that we are to work for our food. Strangely, there’s a proof text in the Bible for each of these positions, so we spent about forty minutes debating this without coming to a real conclusion.

It was, as usual, several days later when I sorted out the discussion and came to my own conclusion. The basic question the class members kept asking was whether these people deserved our help. Were they authentic in their need, or just trying to cadge a couple of bucks from people who actually worked for a living? Since we didn’t know the backstory of the people we were talking about, whatever we believed was just supposition. My too-late realization was that it didn’t matter.

I concluded that it was probable that none of us deserved the good things we received, and I considered myself an excellent case in point.

Did I deserve to be born to parents who not only modeled good lives but instilled hope and ambition into their children? I might just as easily have been born into a family so intent on getting to tomorrow that they had no concept of planning for the day after tomorrow.

Did I deserve to have been raised in a supportive environment that looked to my safety and encouraged my hopes? What would I have been like if I had been raised in an environment that squashed my hopes and left me with no moral concept of a good life?

Did I deserve to be born white, male, and straight so that I could attempt to succeed without dragging one or more of the things that substracted privilege behind me? How does one even think about being born into the most privileged group in the country?

My conclusion was that, if I had been given so much that I had not earned and could not show that I deserved, it was worse than self-righteous for me to question whether anyone deserved anything that I could not provide.

I should just be grateful that I had not received my just desserts.

I should be like the businessman seated, fidgeting and trying to smile in front of a photographer’s camera. He was waiting to get a corporate portrait taken. The photographer noticed how nervous the businessman was and tried to put him at ease.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I guarantee that I’ll do you justice.”

The businessman shook his head. “That’s just it. I don’t want justice,” he said. “I want mercy.”

I think that’s the position that most of us are in when we count our many blessings, blessings we didn’t earn and have done nothing to deserve. We just have them. A fact that should make us very wary of judging others who have not been born to or have not experienced those same blessings.

The answer to the question, so far as I’m concerned, is that Christianity requires that we give without judgment, accepting the Biblical statement that only God knows the heart.  

And, for anyone wondering whether I stopped and gave the family something to help with the rent, that’s none of your business.