COMMENTARY: Where Jesus served, we must, too

ALOFT ON AMERICAN AIRLINES (RNS) On an airplane bound for a family visit, I fly over Manhattan and New Jersey, where the financial geniuses who brought us the Great Recession are planning how to handle vast fortunes being heaped on them in year-end bonuses. In a slight nod to public opinion, bonuses averaging nearly $600,000 […]

ALOFT ON AMERICAN AIRLINES (RNS) On an airplane bound for a family visit, I fly over Manhattan and New Jersey, where the financial geniuses who brought us the Great Recession are planning how to handle vast fortunes being heaped on them in year-end bonuses.

In a slight nod to public opinion, bonuses averaging nearly $600,000 and ranging up to eight figures are being paid this year mainly in stock, not cash. Not to worry. Despite worsening unemployment for everyone else, Wall Street’s paychecks will soar back to pre-recession levels — up 19 percent at JPMorgan Chase, for example — as if the $700 billion federal bailout were a blip on someone else’s radar.

Our flight soars above Rust Belt states where entire communities watch the post-industrial economy leave them behind and the fraud of “trickle-down economics” is revealed as the same old top-down plundering.


I know before landing that my home state of Indiana has turned strangely gray, with unemployed auto workers struggling, state services under budget pressure, cities imploding, strip malls empty. Not even the triumphant Colts can make this recession end.

We will land, of course, and will have to face headlines of disaster and the inescapable consequences of cruelty and plundering.

Take, for example, Haiti, where a massive earthquake has plunged the hemisphere’s poorest country even deeper into despair and suffering. Millions are troubled by scenes from Haiti and are trying their best to respond. Governments waging war elsewhere are sending relief to Haiti, citizens are making donations, and soldiers and medical workers are flying in.

Little has changed, however, on Wall Street, where a vast chasm separates them from ragged Lazarus at the gate. Like the financiers who recently held their annual come-in-drag victory banquet at a posh hotel, they party on as if other people’s misery weren’t their concern.

For those who drink deeply from wealth they didn’t create, human suffering is just one more “play” in the quest for gain. Even as Goldman Sachs’ chief defended $20 billion in bonuses as necessary to retain key staff, it was revealed that those very staff had sold defective investments and then bet against anyone stupid enough to purchase them.

While an estimated 30 percent of mortgage-paying citizens are “under water” in their loans, Wall Streeters are rolling the dice again with risky new investments.


As Christians settle into Epiphany and Sunday teachings focus on the early ministry of Jesus, we should notice where he conducted that ministry. Not 30,000 feet in the air, not safe behind a gate in suburban New Jersey, not in the counting-house sneering at the wretched Lazarus, not in the corridors of power where politicians reward themselves at the expense of a troubled nation.

Jesus was in Haiti, using his hands to dig out the wounded. Jesus was in the towns and homes where bailouts don’t cushion falls and hard times don’t end. Jesus was on the ground, caring for the least of these even as the privileged and prosperous do what they always do.

If Christianity is to make any enduring difference in a world where nature and humanity can be unbearably cruel, we must remember where Jesus served. And, as confusing as we find this world, that is where we must serve, too.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)

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