“There
Will Be No Poor Among You”
Deuteronomy
26:1-11
God has promised (15:4) that there will be no poor in the
Promised Land if the Israelites will “strictly obey the voice of the Lord your
God.” That’s not unreasonable. God is giving them a land “flowing with milk
and honey.” All they have to do is work
the land and it will bear bountiful harvests—if they obey God’s commands. This is a one-sided bargain. The Israelites get a fertile land in exchange
for obeying God—commands that will assure abundant life for all.
In today’s reading, we see how God intends for this to work
out. The liturgy described here is for
the Feast of Weeks, one of two Israelite harvest festivals. This was an opportunity for the Israelites to
thank God for the gift of land and for a bountiful harvest. The liturgy was simple. It consisted of three parts: a confession of faith; a presentation of
first fruits; and a community meal.
The confession of faith is a brief summation of Israel’s
history. It begins with the statement
that God chose a nomadic shepherd (Abraham) and his offspring (Isaac and Jacob)
to be the founders of the nation. To
escape famine, they left Canaan for Egypt, where their son and brother Joseph was
in charge of Pharaoh’s food conservation program. While in Egypt, Jacob’s descendants
multiplied exponentially until they became a threat to their hosts.
The Egyptians felt they had no choice but to enslave the
Israelites, which they did with a vengeance, treating them harshly, punishing
them brutally, and instituting the cruelest form of population
control—genocide. Israel cried to God
for salvation, and God rescued them, “with a mighty hand and an outstretched
arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and wonders.” God brought them out of slavery, through the
wilderness, and into the Promised Land.
After recognizing God’s mighty acts, the presenter offered
the first fruits of his harvest to the priest.
In God’s name, the priest accepted the gift. Notice that the offering consisted of the first fruits. This was the sacred portion—God’s portion, and the presenter
certified that he had not used God’s portion for any other purpose.
The liturgy concluded with a community meal. Although the sacred writer doesn’t tell us,
we can assume that all presentations were made at the same time, which means
the meal would have been huge. Everyone
was invited—everyone ate. No one was left out because he or she had
nothing to bring, or didn’t own farmland, or was an outsider.
The Levites were there, the priestly class, who had no
inheritance of land because their calling was to serve God and the people. They could not raise crops, so they were
provided for.
The sojourners were there, foreigners who lived among the
Israelites. They could not grow crops
because the land was a gift from God to Israel.
But God commanded from the beginning that foreigners should be welcomed,
accepted, and fed. No one was excluded
because he—or she—was not an Israelite.
The Israelites had been mistreated foreigners in Egypt, and God wanted
them to remember their experience and not repeat it.
The widows and orphans were there, those who could not
care for themselves and who had no one to care for them. The inability to raise crops was not a reason
to be excluded from the bountiful harvest God had provided on God’s land for
God’s people.
“There will be no poor among you,” God said. Then God showed the nation how that would
work. God still speaks today, and says,
“There will be no poor among you.” God
shows us how to provide. Will our
harvest be blessed because we obey God’s commands?
