Can anyone understand why God, the maker of all things, the Pantakraton, the Lord of All, would leave his throne and hang out with the Poor and Homeless?

Jesus remarked to Judas Iscariot, ‘You always have the poor with you’ (John 12:8).

Looking around our cities, towns and homeless camps of our world, we might make this remark more specific and say, ‘we always have the homeless with us.’ Jesus had some powerful things to say about the situation of the homeless, and did many things for them. He was also a homeless person himself.

Jesus did not start life at home or in a hospital. He was born in a stable and his crib was an eating trough for animals. That’s how his life began, as a homeless baby, born to parents who were sleeping rough. He had hardly come into the world when Mary and Joseph took him across the border to escape the murderous intentions of King Herod the Great. Jesus became a baby on the run, a homeless asylum-seeker in Egypt.

During the years when he was growing up in Nazareth, Jesus did enjoy a home to live in. But, once he was baptised by John and began his public ministry, he became again a homeless person, he said: ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’ (Matt 8:20; Luke 9:58).

Foxes can be safe because they live in warm burrows down in the earth; birds can be safe and sound in their nests, high up in trees: but Jesus did not have that kind of safety and security.

He had no home he could call his own, no fixed dwelling where he could lay his head on a pillow and go to sleep at night. He lived his life out in the open, sometimes alone and sometimes sleeping rough at night.

At the end, Jesus did not die at home or in a hospital, being supported by the kind of care that dying people can expect. He died by slow torture as a kind of barbarous entertainment for curious spectators.

Who is more homeless than a person nailed up on a cross? Jesus had been stripped of his clothes to die in agony, with no home, no possessions, no bank account and hardly a friend within sight.

In his own particular way, Jesus was born, lived and died as a homeless person, the brother and friend of all homeless people, the poor, rough sleepers, the unclean, the sick, the perpetual drunk and the beggars.

Jesus repeatedly showed his practical concern for homeless people.

1. The possessed man and a leper in Mark’s Gospel,
tells at length the story of a demoniac (Mark 5:1-20). Behaving in a violent, anti-social and self-destructive manner, this man lived among the tombs and belonged to the realm of the living dead, an outcast from society, someone with whom no one wanted or dared to live. Without being asked, Jesus delivered the demoniac from the evil spirits who tortured him and restored him to a normal existence. No longer feared and despised, the man could once again share a home and take his place in society.

2. Ignoring the law about keeping his distance from other people,
a leper came close to Jesus, fell at his feet and said: ‘If you choose, you can make me clean’ (Mark 1:40-45). Jesus’s heart went out to the poor man; he touched his ravaged face and cured him. The homeless leper no longer had to sleep rough but could now return to his home and family.

3. Teaching his followers, Jesus also spoke about homeless people in parables,
In the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), Jesus told the story of a traveller who had been robbed and was left lying badly wounded at the side of a country road. It is a parable that we all have re-enacted with failure.
In the story Jesus told of, the Samaritan found a man lying in the road. The Samaritan personally took charge of the situation, he used the wine that he was carrying to clean the traveller’s wounds and provide a kind of antiseptic. He applied some olive oil as a salve to soothe the pain. Then he tore up some spare clothing to bandage the wounds.
Then loading the traveller on his own mount, he took him down the hill to the inn, and spent the night looking after him. The following morning he paid the innkeeper’s two denarii, the amount that could cover a two month stay in an ancient inn, and promised to return and pay for any further expenses.
Caring for the wounded man cost the Samaritan some wine, oil, clothing, money and an unexpected, overnight delay. The parable has put two questions to Christians ever since: Will you let your heart go out to those in distress? Will you care for them, even at considerable personal expense?

4. The Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31),
a homeless person in terrible need.
The rich man is you and me; we live in a house, have family & friends, eat good food with plenty of leftovers, but our sin is one of omission: we ignore the destitute persons at our doorstep.
We live our lives oblivious to the Homeless at our doorstep, in our streets, in our parks, outside our churches; we dress, eat, sleep in comfort, we go on holidays seeking happiness instead of holiness.

While Lazarus (the Homeless) suffer on our doorsteps.

The painful contrast continues after death, but now in a strikingly reversed manner.
The rich man in torment in the underworld and Lazarus (the Homeless) at the side of Abraham in Paradise.

5. The Last Judgment (Matt 25:31-46),
puts before us six kinds of people: the hungry, the thirsty, the strangers, the naked, the sick, and prisoners. The distress they suffer involves most of them being Homeless.

In speaking of the last judgment, however, Jesus goes as far to identify himself with those in terrible distress. He is the stranger, he is the wounded traveller, he is the beggar covered with sores. Such people bring us the very face of Jesus. In and through the homeless, the strangers, the prisoners, the hungry and sick, Jesus continues to be in agony; in them his passion goes on.

All of God’s teaching vigorously reminds us to care for widows, strangers, orphans and people in distress. But none of them took the step that Jesus did, identifying himself with the homeless and all in terrible need.
This remains the heart of his challenge to all of us, to Help the Homeless.