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Dear Adults: Millennials Don’t Want A “Free Ride”.
Also, we’re, like, 30 now.
The Israelites of our Lord and Savior’s day believed that if something terrible happened to you, it was divine punishment. Things that could destroy a person’s quality of life, if they didn’t get help from the wider community. But you know what? The blind could be led. The lame could be carried. The bleeding could be ministered to. Human beings have clearly been caring for their sick and hurt since before history — mended Neolithic femurs have proven this. Clearly, it’s not that difficult.
And yet the blatant neglect of the least of these was one of the things that got Jesus’ goat the most. Easy as it is to extend some form of help, the society we read about in the Bible more often left people to rot as part of their punishment for obviously making God angry with them.
We like to sit in our pews and shake our heads over how archaic and ridiculous that sounds. We pat ourselves on the back for how far we’ve come. How does a whole culture even get to that point, where arbitrary bad fortune is enough excuse to leave a struggling person to drown?
