A Slippery but Insistent Hand

In the book of Matthew, chapter 5, Jesus delivers a series of laws that aren’t particularly pleasant, one of which is, “Give to him who begs from you.”

When Jesus wants to dish out a nuanced message, he serves the finest. In the parable of the talents, he tells the guy who buries his talent in the ground, “For to everyone who has, more will be given, but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” If someone has nothing, how can you take anything more away? Clearly the message here plumbs well beyond earthly laws of cause and effect, adding and subtracting. And that’s the nuanced message.

The law about giving is glaring sunlight in its simplicity. Jesus doesn’t say, “Give only to the people who will actually improve their lives with the money that you give them.” He doesn’t say, “Don’t give to the guy whose breath registers a blood alcohol level that’s lethal even just to smell it.”

Every time I take a walk in the village of Masoka, I am asked for money. Little children yell, “Mzungu! How are you, Madam? Geeva me mahney!” Old women point to their stomachs, then mouths and put out their palms. One woman grabbed my hand and refused to let go until I tore it away. If that woman could speak English, she could give a message as simple as Christ’s: “You’ve got money, I don’t, that’s not fair. Now make up for it by giving me what you’ve got in your pocket.”

That woman would be simply correct. Is that what Jesus meant with “Give to those who beg of you”? Here’s what I know: giving out of a sense of guilt doesn’t make me feel expansive toward anyone, let alone love.

I once asked Happy, the bursar’s assistant at SMMUCo, if she ever gave to the people sitting or lying on the sidewalk in Moshi Town begging for money. For these people, their disability is visible: eyes that are milky white, legs missing or misshapen. Happy said if she happened to have some coins, she put them in the cup provided.

But very simply, I do not have the money to make a meaningful difference in the lives of the people on the sidewalk or those yanking my arm. Yet, guilt doesn’t make me feel expansive toward anyone. Yet, I have; they don’t, and Christ said I should give.

Perhaps the simple command isn’t meant to even out any unfairness. At some point, I had the idea that when I took a walk in the village, I could bring some coins with me, like the offering I take to church. I had five coins. I had no idea who I would give to until the young guy came along with three friends asking for money for a drink. I didn’t ask a drink of what, I just gave. Then there was a child who wanted my mahney. Then there was the man with the bullhorn who advertised some local political meeting. I came up from behind him, and as he saw me, he hollered through the bullhorn, “Ah, Mzungu! Karibu!” (European! Welcome!) As we walked together, he asked (without the bullhorn) if I had money for a soda. His throat was dry. I gave him my last two coins, and he told me it wasn’t enough to buy a soda. He was very forgiving when I told him that was all I had left. We visited a little while. My two coins gave him no soda, no reversal of fortune. There was just the dust of the road and the rest of the walk home.

I’m not sure Christ’s simple sentence always means money either. On a walk through the village of Masoka, I met up with a gazillion children walking home from school. They rushed to greet me and then said, “Geeva me mahney.” Even if I had mahney, I didn’t have enough to divide a gazillion ways, but that didn’t discourage any of them, and they turned to walk beside me, shoulders and heads surrounding me. I struggled to find a place in the road to set my feet with each step, but gradually we found our stride as a swarming, walking whole. I also had nowhere to put my hands, and so I took the two hands half an inch from mine already and held them. Since I had no Swahili sentences to utter and they’d already run out of their English ones, we walked in silence.

Soon a bus came, and we all ran to the banana trees for cover. After the bus passed by, we searched for each other as the dust settled. The two girls whose hands I held before now took my hands again, as though it were their rightful place. Occasionally the hands would slip from sweat, but they would not let go. I wonder, who did the giving?

Here in Tanzania, I watch people give without being asked to do so, saving the recipient the indignity of having to ask. It’s simply an act of compassion.

I sat with Happy one day at the security gate while she waited for students to register. The guard brought us both overloaded plates of food. Happy had been watching a girl just outside the gate selling bananas. She hadn’t eaten all day, and now Happy scraped some of her food onto another plate. The girl refused the food three times, but when the food was set before her, she ate.

For Happy, giving is a daily practice as ordinary as breathing. And yet it allowed her to see the girl’s need. I only understood this when I went to visit Happy at her home. Of her family, I knew she lived with her mother and a sister. When I sat down to eat, the neighbor boy was called to the table. He seemed to know exactly where he stood in the pecking order: after Mama Happy, after Happy, after Happy’s sister Neema, and definitely after me. But the family made sure he ate, and he was included in the conversation. I found out later that he regularly ate with the family because his stepfather was abusive. Since Social Services isn’t an option, he found a sanctuary in Happy’s household.

Later, another young woman arrived and helped herself to food—Happy’s cousin Dora. When Dora’s parents became disabled with AIDS, Happy’s mother brought her and her twin sister into the home when they were two years old. Mama Happy worked a very small shop selling basic goods, but she journeyed to Dar es Salaam to collect the girls and provide for them indefinitely in spite of an income that would not have been enough to support three or four children. At age 20, Dora is now finishing her last year of secondary school. (Her twin returned to the parents when she was five.) I have not met a household that didn’t have extra children or relatives folded into their lives, and I can only wonder whether they ask themselves if they have enough income and space in the home to do so.

Like the affection of a child that seeps through a slippery but insistent hand, the command to give is simple yet loaded with mystery. The complexity waits to be discovered by the Christian pilgrim in daily life with daily giving.

And while I can only make up answers about what Christ was thinking or intended, I do have the certainty of plentiful opportunities to give, I have an unnuanced command from Christ, and I look at giants everywhere who give as though it were simply the folding of a hand into another.