The Man in the Tar Paper Shack

After the temptation in the wilderness, according to Luke, Jesus went to Nazareth. “He came to Nazareth where he had been brought up, and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day.” In modern parlance, Jesus made it his habit to go to church.

This sentence would seem to be something of a rebuke to that company of church members who, come the Lord’s Day, take lightly their appointment with God. A question haunts the edge of the mind: “Why did he go?” Were there not hypocrites in that synagogue? Consider the obvious faults of that Nazareth congregation. If those two clergymen who passed by the poor, desperate, done-in man on the Jericho road were a fair sample of the religious leadership of the day, I wonder that Jesus ever went near the place. But Luke, who checked all things for accuracy, says: “He went as his custom was into the synagogue on the sabbath day.”

Why did he go? He knew what some of us must still learn—that although God can be found under the quiet pageant of the night sky, or beside the tumbling descent of a mountain stream, or even on the fourteenth green of some country club, the one place the human soul most surely encounters God is in the prayerful gathering of his people. “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” he would say to the oncoming generations with the gentle expectation that they would not “forsake the assembling of themselves together.”

Thus Jesus stepped across the threshold of his home town’s place of worship despite its erring people, its faulty preachers, and a sprinkling of hypocrites, because he had earnest business with his Father. It is a rebuke to those who, absenting themselves from this appointed hour in our modern times, improvise flippant excuses.

On this particular Sabbath, the ruling elder extended an invitation to Jesus to read the Scripture and comment. The portion chosen opens what we know today as Isaiah 61:

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,

because the Lord has anointed me

to bring good tidings to the poor;

he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

His Galilean accent lifted those words off the sacred scroll and set them ringing over the quiet room. He finished the reading with this startling comment: “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.”

A ripple of whispered excitement moved through the congregation over this word—the holy word of their prophet coming to fruition before their eyes. They were on hand, they were in the front seats, and God was fulfilling his ancient promises!

Let us take a look at one of these promises, about to have its joyous realization: Good news was to be the portion of the poor. Here is something hard to take in from a safe distance. To be desperately, hauntingly poor is something not many of us have endured. I confess I tried to drink in what these words might mean to an empty-handed impoverished person and found I could not until I became such a person.

Mentally I removed my Kuppenheimer and replaced its soft warmth with an assortment of soiled, ill-fitting, ragged pants, coat and shirt. The Florsheims were gone from my feet, and in their place were laceless, worn tennis shoes lined with old pieces of newspaper to turn back the thrust of a cold pavement. There was no longer an office door bearing my name, no longer a bi-monthly check, no insurance or hospitalization. I closed the door on my comfortable brick home in a fine Washington residential district and took up quarters in a tar paper shack in shanty town. In fancy I became poor. No food! No money! No job! No resources! Barren, cold, lonely!

As the man in the tar paper shack, I asked myself, “What would be good news to me?” Would it be a knock on that paper-thin door and a messenger bringing a letter to inform me that I had come into a small fortune? Anyone who does not believe such a letter would not be the kind of news to set a soul to shouting and dancing just has no imagination. To make a sudden leap from rags to riches is in the same category of good news as that a condemned man receives when he is reprieved five minutes before the time of his execution.

However thrilling it might be to be catapulted out of hapless poverty to a condition of affluence, Jesus never ran a strike-it-rich program. Good news to the poor means something more than a gigantic give-away to all those miserable in tar paper shacks.

One difficulty in all this is that we are not accustomed to relating theology and economics. God hath joined these two, and twentieth-century man puts them asunder—and a sorry sundering of holy things it has been. The Jews of Jesus’ day related theology and economics, but misunderstood the union and ended up with a strange perversion of the relationship.

Wealth and well-being to the first-century Jew was a sign of God’s favor. Poverty, bad circumstances, the fall of Siloam’s tower on a group of workmen, were supposedly irrefutable proof of man’s iniquity. Huddled on the ground yonder, draped in his pitiful rags, is a man born blind. His sightless plight raises but one poignant question for the disciples: “Lord, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Let boils strike Job’s flesh and death whittle a path through his family and even Job’s friends counsel: “Confess your sin, Job, for you know they that plow iniquity and sow wickedness reap the same.” The man in the graystone mansion—the peerless saint! The man in the tar paper shack—the miserable sinner!

Now it is bad enough to be poor, but to have this extra burden of the community’s considering you God’s outcast makes poverty twice intolerable. But suppose there comes to your tar paper shack someone to take away this stigma of your exigency, to give you a new status before men. In some ways, this is more wonderful than taking away your poverty.

Here is why this is so: Self-respect and dignity are worth much more than fine gold. This was the good news to the poor man in the tar paper dwelling. Someone had come on the scene to give him standing and make it indelibly clear that he is not God’s outcast but God’s greatly beloved.

Wealth and abundance are not the yardsticks of man’s acceptance by his Creator. Nor are poverty, haplessness, or suffering the criteria of man’s rejection. Operation sin holds forth above the tracks no less than below the tracks. The efficacy of the Cross to make reparation for guilt and sin reaches down the streets of both the healthy bank president and the not-so-healthy, illiterate poor man. Both the man in the graystone and the man in the tar paper shack can and must take hold of this redeeming act by the same handle of faith. The Cross makes both men neighbors.

When men began to comprehend this message of God’s love and to see the act of Calvary in terms of grace, it began to dawn upon them that every person must have divine worth, whether he lived in an exclusive neighborhood or in some frightful shanty town. With this new look at the world’s poor and suffering, there dawned a new day for the world’s miserables. But as long as these poor people were envisioned as victims of their own unworthiness, punished by God, who would dare lift a hand toward them lest they would seem to be put in the position of fighting God?

Today, to remember Jesus is also to remember that man in the tar paper shack in Brooklyn, the man in the mud hut in Tanganyika, the homeless refugee along the Gaza strip, or the watery-eyed derelict of the bowery, cannot be left out of our thinking and Christian concern.

Yes, good news to the poor! They have worth!

Let us not forget that poverty is not always economic. The family in the suburban ranch house with wall-to-wall carpeting, Van Gogh’s in the living room, a station wagon and a sports car in the garage, can also be poor. Contrariwise, the family in shanty-town with old copies of the Washington Post for wall paper, no trace of anything on the floor and no garage, can be rich.

To be without friends is poverty. To be without health is poverty. To be without God is the most terrible insufficiency of all. And great is this company!

This is our mission. For this we are anointed! For this purpose the Spirit of the Lord is upon us—to proclaim good news to the poor!

If you are lonely, “what a friend you have in Jesus.”

If your soul is prisoner to some brutal sin, “there is mercy with the Lord.”

If you are weary, bruised and mangled by the Fall, Jesus, our great high priest, has made atonement.

Whatever your poverty, the same Christ of that Nazareth synagogue waits even now at your elbow to bestow his salvation, his peace, his companionship, and the riches of his love.

It is for you dwelling in the mansion. It is for you in the tar paper shack.

END

Lee Shane is Pastor of the National Baptist Memorial Church, Washington, D. C. In 1957 when he was pastor of the Calvary Baptist Church, Charleston, West Virginia, he won the American Baptist Award for the best locally produced television program. He is now Chairman of the national Radio and TV Committee for the American Baptist Convention.

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