I have a neighbor who has a little maxim he uses to explain much of what he sees on the news or reads about in the local paper. “Rich folks are stupid,” he says to me when a millionaire files for bankruptcy or a politician gets caught embezzling money. That pretty much explains things for my neighbor. He usually doesn’t say much more. If power corrupts, he figures, then money makes people stupid.
Of course, he doesn’t talk that way to rich folks. He’s good at knowing when to smile and when to compliment someone in power. He has made his living in service jobs. But working at restaurants and fancy hotels has only given him more evidence for his main conviction about money. Rich people are stupid because they can’t begin to make a dollar go as far as his single mother could, who raised five kids doing domestic work. What’s more, rich folks think a waiter is their friend when he says, “Yes, Sir” and “Sure is a nice day, ain’t it?”
Anthropologist James C. Scott says that there’s a difference between the way poor people talk “onstage” and “offstage.” Studying forms of everyday resistance among peasants in a small Malaysian village, he noticed how the poor and weak were good at acting like they recognized the authority of the ruling elite in public. “Onstage” they almost always gave the impression of complying with a social order in which they suffered injustice. “Offstage,” however, when no one in authority was around, peasants mocked the system through gossip, slander, stealing, dragging their feet, and sabotaging their masters’ plans.
“It is my guess,” Scott writes, “that just such kinds of resistance are often the most significant and the most effective over the long run … Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines. But just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do the multiple acts of peasant insubordination and evasion create political and economic barrier reefs of their own.” The wisdom of the weak is that quiet tactics have a bigger impact in the long term, especially when the goal is to carve out space for a new economy within the shell of the old.
When Jesus taught Palestinian peasants who were living under occupation in first-century Palestine, he taught tactics for living God’s economy when you can’t drive the Romans out. That’s why he praises the “dishonest manager” in Luke 16 and teaches us the tactic of economic friendship — “use money to make friends” (Luke 16:9). Jesus doesn’t hold this manager up as an example of business ethics. He says, instead, that given what this manager knows, he’s a sharp tack. Within the competitive economy of this world, he uses the wisdom of the weak to win with a poor hand. Engaging in a series of subversive acts offstage, he wins the friendship of the only people who can save his skin onstage. And, sure enough, his scheme works.
A few years ago a friend of mine who works for a Christian NGO was part of an international consultation on how the church could address extreme poverty. This fellow has lived much of his adult life in the slums of mega-cities and knows well the sort of tactical imagination that keeps people alive in those places. As his colleagues in this consultation discussed the best strategy for western Christians to address poverty, my friend made a suggestion. “Wouldn’t it help,” he asked, “if we invited some poor people to come and think with us about how to help them?” There was silence in the room, and then one of the more experienced relief and development workers spoke. “I’m afraid that would just slow us down.”
In our rush to solve problems that are indeed urgent, we often overlook the wisdom of the weak, assuming that the losers in this world’s system don’t have much to offer. But Jesus insists the opposite is true: if we pay attention to the weak, we can learn the tactics of everyday resistance that are ultimately effective. If we’re willing to slow down and listen, the poor can often lead us into God’s economy.
My friends at Jesus People USA in Chicago have seen this with the issue of food security. Feeding the hungry is a concern that lots of people share, and there are all kinds of efforts to make this happen. I remember bringing cans of food to school as a kid, competing with my fellow classmates to see who could grab the most from our parents’ cupboards for the annual Thanksgiving food drive. Nonprofit organizations invest big money in fundraising campaigns for food ministries, and advocates and lobbyists try to convince corporations and governments that it’s in their best interest to meet people’s basic food needs.
No doubt, all of this helps. But every homeless person knows that an ungodly amount of food gets thrown away in the United States every day. Hanging out with homeless friends, folks at Jesus People USA learned “dumpster-diving” — the practice of redeeming discarded food from the trash bins behind grocery stores and restaurants before it’s hauled off to the landfill. Making the rounds with homeless friends who knew the dumping patterns well, they saw that there was more than enough food there to feed everyone in the homeless ministries they sponsored. So they went to the businesses in town with a proposal that it would have been embarrassing to refuse: donate your trash, and we’ll feed the hungry in our city. They’ve been doing it now for years.
When we decide that the weak are not only objects of our charity but also subjects who teach us needed wisdom, it makes new relationships possible. After all, people sense when the time you spend with them is a chore. They might smile and say thank you “onstage,” but you can be sure that the poor will cuss a patronizing church like a sailor as soon as the members are out of earshot. When we enjoy the time we spend with others, and honestly value their wisdom, we don’t only gain new knowledge. We gain something far more valuable: a friendship that wasn’t possible before.
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is author of God’s Economy: Redefining the Health and Wealth Gospel.
