Advent is the season of waiting.
John the Baptist had been waiting his whole life. When Jesus came on the scene, John sent a delegation to ask if He was the one, or should they expect someone else?
Jesus responded: “Tell John: the blind see and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.” (Lk. 7:22) Or, in other words, “Look around you and see what is happening!”
Jesus was saying at least two things at once: 1) the evidence was in; the work of salvation was in full gear, and 2) He was inviting all who were paying attention to adjust their perspective because the anawim, the Hebrew word for the faithful poor, were receiving the restoration and healing they had been awaiting for so long.
Advent, this time that is at once one of waiting and also completion, teaches us the priorities of God who came first to the lowly, to those who wait for him faithfully, even if often weary from injustice.
“Those who are oppressed by poverty are the object of a preferential love on the part of the Church” because Jesus himself took upon the misery of the human condition and “identified him- self with the least of his brethren.” #2448 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church
In Church social teaching, when the principle of the “preference for the poor and vulnerable” is mentioned, it is firstly because Jesus Christ himself chose weakness as His way of life. Even those around him, the first to receive him, were anawim: Mary and Joseph, too poor for anything but the simple offering of doves at the Temple, and the shepherds who were neither educated nor earners of high salaries—not to mention any other witnesses who also happened to have taken shelter at the stable on the night of his birth.
The classic image of a serene and inti- mate crowd of two at the stable is lovely for its depiction of the hiddenness of Christ’s birth, but I wonder whether there was not an “overflow crowd” from the already-full inns in Bethlehem, noisily leaning in and around this couple and their shepherd visi- tors. I doubt they were alone.
The world is full of people who have “nowhere to lay their head” (Mt 8:20) and find themselves in tucked away corners of structures that can barely be called shelters. Mary and Joseph would not have been isolated cases of homelessness that night but among a crowd of other unfortunates, and in that sense as ordinary as can be.
So when the Church teaches a “preferential option for the poor and vulnerable” it means that Jesus came first, or “preferentially,” to the hordes of ordinary people in material distress—even if he did not come exclusively for them while ignoring the wealthy and the privileged.
The “preference for the poor” means that as we establish our hu- man communities, with all the regulations, practices and policies that are necessary for living in harmony together, we must first consider the needs of the most vulnerable and marginalized and use those needs as our starting point.
“You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor in the land” (Deut.15:11) and “You shall not oppress or afflict a stranger living among you, for you were once strangers in Egypt” (Ex.22:20).
The Old Testament law laid out principles which emphasized looking after the well-being of the most vulnerable in society and not just a select or powerful few, or for the benefit of those who are doing just fine. Today we “opt” to follow the same principles but with Christ in mind, as if He is the One we are serving with a “preferential love.”