Jesus Was Homeless?
It's complicated
Happy Friday everyone!
You may have noticed that I didn’t produce a newsletter last week. Sorry about that! I’m at work on a lot of projects, including some work on my next book proposal (!!!!) I’ll announce more soon, but I hope that a lot more pieces and news will come over time. Stay tuned… you’ll be the first to know!
Today’s post is about a statement I’ve had a complicated, evolving relationship with. Enjoy!
When I first heard Shane Claiborne say “Jesus was homeless," it rocked my world.
I’m sure he wasn’t the first one to say it, but it my introduction to the connection. Taken from the verse where Jesus states that “Foxes have holds, and birds have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head,” Shane drew this connection with the hopes of countering the negative narratives about homelessness and the people who experience it. Perhaps, if we understood Jesus was homeless, it could help us see unhoused people differently. At the time, it certainly helped my perspective shift.
But over time, I began to grow less comfortable with this framing. Especially as I began my career actually working with people experiencing homelessness, the comparison felt off. Wasn’t Jesus’ lifestyle one that he chose? His ministry took him from town to town, and while he often slept encamped and in the homes of others, wasn’t this far more common in that time period than it is? It felt a bit like apples and oranges, and more than anything I was wary that the comparison might feed into a common myth, which is that homelessness is a choice that individuals make for themselves. If Jesus was homeless, and Jesus chose that lifestyle, does that mean all homeless people choose it?
The more time I spent in this vocation, though, the more I found that mode of thinking challenged. It was largely informed by a condescending view of homelessness; I needed to differentiate the “homelessness” of Jesus and that of my new acquaintances because I wanted to make sure we all felt adequately sorry for them. This is how many people, churches, politicians, and organizations choose to talk about homelessness. It sounds more like a commercial that airs at 2am with a Sarah McLachlan song playing in the background, leveraging sympathy in exchange for money.
You’ll never hear me sugar-coating homelessness. It’s critical that we understand the inherent dangers and risks we subject people to through our disregard—people who experience homelessness would much rather live indoors with all the safety and comfort it provides. There’s also little excuse with all the excess wealth in this country that anyone should have to live outside.
But I’ve also had the honor of witnessing ways that the experience of homelessness exposes some of the lies and flaws of how the “rest of us” live. As people are forced to live in nomadic, dependent lifestyles, they learn to depend on one another. They form relationships and communities that exist outside of the dynamics of the marketplace. I’m current reading, “A People’s History of Poverty in America,” and it makes this point so crucially—just as we understand that money doesn’t buy happiness, we must also recognize that homelessness or poverty does not mean everyone is miserable.
In many ways, I think this is why Jesus, the early church, and religious orders throughout history have chosen existences that include degrees of poverty and nomadic lifestyles. The point is not to glamorize the dangers and vulnerabilities of poverty, but to live as witnesses to interdependency and as resistors to dehumanizing economics.
This is far too much to project onto those experiencing homelessness. However, recognizing all of these dynamics at work helps us see the issue more clearly. It influences how eager we are to force unhoused people into job programs, as though our highest view of human existence is participation in the 40-hour work week. It also critiques the way many housed Americans live—expanding our square-footage while becoming ever more isolated and lonely. It demands that we understand homelessness as an indictment of systems that actually make all of us less human.
So was Jesus homeless? I’m not actually sure where I land. I’m much more comfortable saying that Jesus is homeless, in line with the consistent teaching that Christ can be found in the face of the most marginalized people among us. If Jesus is homeless, we can hold the full experience and reality of homelessness: that the crisis of homelessness calls us to repentance for the ways we have allowed people to suffer unnecessarily, and that it also beckons us to learn from people who exist outside of the numbing comforts of privilege.
Thank you Kevin for wrestling with these topics. Your writing challenges me to look at my own ministry with our unhoused neighbors. One difference with Jesus and his disciples that came to mind, at least as depicted in the Bible, is that they seemed to have no difficulty getting food most days. Also, they were welcomed into the homes of a number of people. Most of the unhoused people I know personally, struggle with food insecurity daily and rarely are welcomed into people’s homes.
This is so on point. There are totally so many ways we come to say things as part of the “sales and marketing/rebranding” effort “for” oppressed people that, in an effort to fend off some stigma or prejudice, ends up just creating a new reductive message that also takes away from the complexity of real human beings, their nuances of experiences, and their agency.
You reminded me of sections from two books: At Home on the Street is an ethnography about folks experiencing homelessness that holds together the unjust structural causes with the diverse complexities of individuals in the street as week as anything. Also the last chapter of A Theology of Liberation where Gutierrez wrestled with these (seemingly) contradictory ways that poverty functions in the Christian tradition and spiritual life.