The Other Jesus

“Though there may be times when your hands are empty,

your heart is always full, and you can give things out of that.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess

It was the eighth day of Christmas, and you had better believe that if I had a true love somewhere, she hadn’t given me anything. The calendar had just turned over to January 2002, and although we were only a few days into the month, I had already spent everything I had. My guitar and amplifier were in an Austin pawn shop, never to return. The transmission had fallen out of my Volvo station wagon a few weeks before, and although T. was letting me use her old Volvo sedan now to haul Jake and Chandler around Austin, school started in two weeks, and when it did, I had no way to drive the 100 miles to work.

It was true that I had two checks coming from writing gigs I’d finished, but I had been expecting one for weeks and the other for months, and I wasn’t rushing to check the mail any more. Bills get airlifted to your mailbox; the checks seem to take some kind of banana boat by way of Guatemala.

The point really, is this: two days into the month I was out of money, and I knew this because my four-year-old son Chandler and I had just driven T.’s car up to the post office and mailed off my paycheck in pieces to my creditors, while my teenage son Jake waited back at my apartment for us to return.

The night was cold and dark, and the wind cut through my clothes as Chandler and I walked back to the car. A shape moved out of the darkness to stand next to the rear bumper—a small black woman in a navy blue hooded sweatshirt. She could have been forty; she could have been sixty.

She was shivering.

“Can you help me please?” she asked. It’s the same thing I have heard—you have heard—everywhere, the world over. I’ve been panhandled in New York and New Orleans and Nairobi. And when I hear it, or something like it, my answer almost always used to be “I’m sorry.”

Which is what I told this woman on this night, stepping forward a bit to put myself between her and Chandler. She was not an imposing figure, but she had stepped out of the darkness, and he was a little frightened.

Now, I know the Homeless Polka. If I say “I’m sorry,” they’re supposed to say something like “Okay, God bless you.”

You put your left foot in. You put your left foot out.

But this woman didn’t know the steps. She didn’t move from the back of the car.

No—she stepped closer.

She stepped closer, and she looked me in the eye, and she said, “Please. I haven’t eaten for two days. I’m cold. Can’t you give me ten dollars?”

And I believed that she was hungry, and I believed that she was cold. I could hear it in her voice.

I could see it in her eyes.

But what I said, again, was “I’m sorry,” a little more forcefully this time. “I can’t help you.” Chandler was huddled behind me, holding onto my leg, and I dropped a hand for him to hold.

“Please,” she said. “Please. Just ten dollars.”

I shook my head. I opened the back door and lifted Chandler inside, out of the cold, keeping one eye on her. I didn’t know what to make of things. She should have been walking away. But she wasn’t. As I belted him in his car seat, I could see her through the side window, no more than three feet away.

She was crying when I finished with Chandler and straightened back up, her face contorted. “Please,” she said. “Can’t you give me something? Anything?”

I had eighteen dollars in my wallet, all I had left from my paycheck. I didn’t know where the next eighteen was coming from. All I knew was that I didn’t know how I was going to buy groceries until my next paycheck, and I was getting ready to lose my guitar and my amp, and if I couldn’t get a car to get to school, I was going to lose my job.

I looked at her, at her crumpled face, at her tears. I looked at her and I said, just barely controlling my anger, “Go away. You’re scaring my child. I can’t help you.”

And she just stood there, looking at me, like maybe she didn’t understand me, or maybe she didn’t want to, so I kept talking. “I can’t help you. I can’t even take care of my kids. Don’t ask me for help.”

I was, even in those days, as Maya Angelou has said, trying to be a Christian. I taught compassion and justice. I wanted to help her.

But I closed Chandler’s door, and then shaking my head, I got into the car and turned the key.

As the engine started, she ran off for the far end of the parking lot. I could hear her calling to a man getting into a Mercedes. I did not stay long enough to see if she reached him, if he stopped to listen. I backed up, and then we lurched out into the street.

“Why did that person want money?” Chandler asked in his tiny mouse’s voice as we headed down 6^th Street on our way home.

I thought for a moment before I answered. “She said that she was hungry,” I told him. “She said she was cold.”

“But we don’t have any money,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

I turned right onto Lamar, and we drove in silence for a bit, both of us thinking.

“Are we going to tell Jacob about that person?” he asked.

“Do you want to?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

He ran up the sidewalk to my apartment and threw the door open. “A person at the post office was hungry,” Chandler breathlessly announced as soon as we were inside.

Jake put a finger in his book and arched his eyebrow at me for a translation.

“A homeless woman asked me for money at the post office,” I said quietly.

Jake is a Joan Baez soul in a Shaquille O’Neal body. He has size fourteen shoes and a size fourteen heart. He looked at my face and he said, “Dad, you can’t help everyone.”

“I know,” I said. Chandler had started shrugging off his clothes right there in the living room, so I sent him back to get ready for his bath.

“You help people,” Jake went on. “All the time.”

“Yes,” I said. I sat down heavily on the arm of the couch. “People.” I looked down at the floor. “But this was a person.”

He nodded and opened his book. I bit my lip, got up, and went back to run the water for Chandler’s bath. The warm water felt good on my hand after the cold walk from the car, and it felt good to be in for the evening. After Chandler climbed into the bath, I started emptying my pockets onto the bathroom counter.

I opened my wallet, pulled out the bills and laid them down on the counter, one by one: a ten, a five, three ones. About sixty cents in change. Five Fender medium guitar picks, in case my ship came in and my guitar came home.

Chandler had the beginnings of an eye infection, and since T. had gone out of town for a day or two, I was doctor on duty. I decided to wash his face carefully with soap, although this idea did not meet with his favor.

“Keep your eyes closed,” I told him.

“Will it hurt?” he kept asking.

“I’ll do my best,” is what I said.

When we were done, when I had rinsed all the soap from his face, I asked him to open his eyes. He did it slowly, in stages, like someone emerging from a dark cave into the light.

“It didn’t hurt,” he said to me in wonder.

“No,” I said.

“Why not?” he asked. He asked why about everything in those days. Why did Stevie Ray Vaughn die? Why isn’t Grampa Jerry my daddy? Why do they call it a refrigerator? Why didn’t I get soap in my eyes?

“Because I washed your face very carefully,” I told him. “Because I washed it with love.” I was pretty proud of myself.

“Oh,” he said. “I want to play now.”

“Okay,” I said. I got up so he could splash.

I saw the ten dollar bill sitting on the corner.

Now, I have never been the kind of Christian who believes that giving your money away is the ticket to prosperity. I do not believe in a God who offers you a return on your investments.

But what I believed in, even then, was a Messiah who said, “I was hungry and you fed me. I was naked, and you clothed me,” a God who wants us to make a difference in the world, regardless of the cost.

And so I was ashamed. I knew that what I had done was rational, logical, that I was cash poor, that my income stream did not indicate a move toward philanthropy at the present time.

But I was ashamed, just the same.

It’s fortunate that I also believe in a God of the second chance, a savior who could look past his own suffering to say to a dying but repentant thief, “Today you will be with me in Paradise,” a God who believes it is never too late to wake up from sleep and do the right thing.

So I called Jake into the bathroom. “Can you watch Chandler for a few minutes?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. And although I think he knew exactly what I was doing, he asked, “Where are you going?”

“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” I said, stuffed the ten into my pocket, and went back out into the cold.

Maybe you think you know the happy ending to my story. I certainly thought I did. As I drove back down to the post office, I was already seeing it in my head, how I would give her the money, how I would tell her I would pray for her, how I would ask her to pray for me, a PhD one paycheck from the pavement himself.

But the vast parking lot was empty. I got out and checked the alcoves of the building, I checked the stairs leading down to 5^th Street, I checked under the stairs. I went back and sat on my trunk for a few minutes, shivering, thinking that she still might magically appear.

But, of course, she did not. I saw a figure disappear into an alley across the street, and I breathed a prayer for that person, whoever it was.

I breathed a prayer that the man in the Mercedes had been more generous than me.

And then I went home to my boys. Chandler was out of the bath, warm and pink and ready for bed. Both of them looked up at me inquisitively as I walked in, and I shook my head.

“She was gone,” I said.

“Why?” Chandler asked.

“Maybe somebody else helped her,” I said. But I didn’t really believe that.

I sat again on the arm of the couch. “You guys sit down,” I directed, and they did, side by side, mammoth teenager, dainty little four year old.

“I think,” I said, speaking slowly and carefully, “that I made a mistake tonight.” (“Mistake” was a word T. and I had used with Chandler.) “I thought I knew better than this. But tonight I chose not to help someone who needed help. Tonight I chose to think about myself. I think that—for me—that was the wrong choice. It’s not the example I want to set for you. I’m sorry.”

Jake started to say, “But at least you went back—“ and I raised my hand.

“You don’t have to make me feel better,” I said. “I think it’s okay if I just feel sad for awhile.”

“Okay,” he said. And so I did.

On my second trip to the post office, I had imagined how it would feel to give her that ten, how my heart would have been lifted, how I would have known that I was doing the right thing.

I did—I do—believe in a God of second chances. But I also believe that sometimes we only have one chance to do the right thing, and if we don’t take it, the situation shifts and that chance is gone forever. I thought I had learned this lesson, that my eyes were open, but when the trial came, I was tired and I was cold and I was afraid, and I did the wrong thing.

But maybe next time, the lesson will stick, and I will do something different. Maybe I will be different. Maybe my boys will be different. Or maybe you will.

Dr. King used to say, “The time is always right to do what is right.” And what he meant by that and what I mean by that are the same thing, I think. We have to pursue social justice if we ever want to have a truly just society. But I want to take it a step farther, as I know Dr. King also did. Like him, I believe we are called to act as Christ’s hands, to help others, that doing the right thing is much much much more important than not doing what some folks say is the wrong thing. It may in fact be the only important thing.

I believe that there’s a reason Jesus inaugurated his ministry in the Gospel of Luke by reading from the Prophet Isaiah and telling his listeners that he had come to proclaim jubilee—the ritual redistribution of wealth to help the poor and forgive the debtor.

And I believe that maybe it is our fear that has kept us from hearing all those radical gospel messages, that keeps Jesus from truly being let loose in the world.

There’s a story from the Talmud that I love, a story in which a master, the Prophet Elijah, sends his student Yoshua ben Levi to seek the Messiah sitting among the lepers at the city gate unwrapping their bandages to let their festering wounds air. “You will know him,” Elijah said, “because unlike the other lepers, he will only unwrap one of his bandages at a time, for he wishes to be ready to come on a moment’s notice.”

So Yoshua ben Levi came to the gate and found the Messiah and asked when he was coming, and when the Messiah answered, “Today,” he returned joyfully to Elijah and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And at last, when night fell, he turned to Elijah, and cried, “Master, the Messiah has deceived me. He told me that he would come today, and I’ve been waiting patiently! He’s not coming!”

“You misunderstood,” Elijah said gently. “He said, “Today, if only you would listen to my voice.”

The Voice of God comes to us in many ways. And if only we would listen, we might hear it telling us, “Be not afraid. I am coming to bring tidings of joy for all people.”

All people.

Oh that today we would listen to his voice.