You Can’t Do Everything, but You Can Do Something— Why the People Jesus Saw Must Matter to Us

There are many issues about which faithful Christians may disagree. We may debate politics, economics, public policy, taxation, and the best ways to address human need. But one issue is remarkably difficult to debate if we take Scripture seriously:

God cares deeply about the poor—and expects His people to care about them too.

Concern for the poor is not a peripheral theme of Scripture. It runs like a thread from the Law and the Prophets through the ministry of Jesus and into the life of the early Church. God repeatedly draws attention toward people the world is most likely to overlook: the poor, hungry, widowed, orphaned, sick, imprisoned, displaced, and forgotten.

The question, therefore, is not whether Christians should care about the poor. The more searching question is:

What does our treatment of the poor reveal about our relationship with Jesus?

Jesus and the Poor

When Jesus began His public ministry, He entered the synagogue in Nazareth, opened the scroll of Isaiah, and announced:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.”
— Luke 4:18

Jesus then declared, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” In other words, care for the vulnerable was not an appendix to Jesus’ mission. It was woven into His announcement of the Kingdom itself.

Look at Jesus’ ministry. He noticed beggars others walked past. He touched people others considered unclean. He welcomed children, ate with social outcasts, honored widows, healed the sick, and restored people pushed to the edges of respectable society.

And then Jesus said something even more startling.

In Matthew 25, He described the final judgment in terms of feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting the prisoner. Jesus identifies Himself so closely with vulnerable people that He says, in effect, what you did for them, you did for Me.

That changes everything.

The poor are not merely a “cause” Christians support.

They are people in whom Jesus tells us to recognize Him.

Is God Predisposed Toward the Poor?

Christian theology has sometimes called this the “preferential option for the poor.” The phrase does not mean that God loves wealthy people less or that poverty automatically makes someone righteous. God’s grace is universal.

Rather, Scripture reveals a God who pays particular attention to those who possess the least power to protect themselves.

Why?

Because love moves toward vulnerability.

A good parent loves all of his or her children. But if one child falls and is bleeding, that child receives immediate attention. The parent does not love the others less. Love responds to the child whose need is greatest.

So it is with God.

Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez explains that God’s love is universal while also demonstrating a special concern for those excluded from the “banquet of life.” He insists that the option for the poor is not optional for Christians; it is a consequence of following Christ.

This is why Scripture so often speaks about widows, orphans, immigrants, strangers, debtors, laborers, and the poor. These groups possessed little social power in the ancient world. God repeatedly says, in effect:

I see the people society does not see.

And if we belong to God, we must see them too.

The Witness of the Early Church

The early Christians understood this with remarkable clarity.

St. John Chrysostom, the great fourth-century preacher, warned Christians that wealth itself was not evil; the problem was possessing resources while ignoring neighbors in need. He preached that wealth should “relieve poverty,” rather than exploit it.

His teaching became even more challenging: failure to share our abundance with people in desperate need could itself become a form of robbing the poor.

Basil of Caesarea made essentially the same argument. The extra bread in our possession, he taught, belongs morally to the hungry; unused clothing belongs to those who lack clothing.

These were not modern political activists imposing twenty-first-century categories upon Christianity. These were some of the formative pastors and theologians of the ancient Church.

They understood something we sometimes forget:

Generosity is not an extracurricular activity of discipleship. It is evidence of discipleship.

The Witness of Christians Around the World

Across centuries and cultures, Christians have returned to this conviction.

Gutiérrez argues from Latin America that the poor are often treated as insignificant or even invisible by society—but they are never insignificant before God.

In El Salvador, Archbishop Óscar Romero ministered amid violence, oppression, and enormous economic inequality. Faced with people being tortured and mistreated, Romero declared that “the church cannot remain silent.”

In India, Mother Teresa insisted that people experiencing poverty need more than pity. They need love, respect, and dignity. In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, she reminded the world that the hungry, homeless, sick, unwanted, and abandoned remain people created by the same loving hand of God.

Different traditions. Different nations. Different centuries.

The same Gospel conviction:

We cannot claim to love Jesus while remaining indifferent to people Jesus loves.

“You Can’t Do Everything … So Do Something”

Years ago, I wrote a little book entitled You Can’t Do EVERYTHING … So Do SOMETHING: Small Ways to Change the World. At the heart of that book was a simple conviction:

“The real need for our world is not that we do every part; it’s that we just do our part.”

The book tells the story of a young orphan in sub-Saharan Africa who had lost much of her family to HIV/AIDS. Though she herself possessed very little, each day she saved part of her meager lunch and carried it home to her dying aunt. She could not solve the AIDS crisis. She could not eliminate poverty. She could not repair every injustice around her.

But she could do something.

And she did.

That remains one of the most important lessons for Christian engagement with poverty.

The enormity of suffering can become an excuse for inactivity. We see millions hungry and conclude that our sandwich will not matter. We see systemic poverty and assume our small contribution cannot change anything. We encounter homelessness, addiction, disease, refugees, struggling families, and neglected children and become overwhelmed.

But Jesus never asked one disciple to do everything.

He asked every disciple to do something.

Feed someone.

Welcome someone.

Visit someone.

Clothe someone.

Listen to someone.

Advocate for someone.

Give something.

Notice somebody whom everyone else has stopped noticing.

Faith Must Become Flesh

Christian concern for the poor cannot be reduced to either political ideology or occasional charity. It is deeper than both.

It is Christological.

We care for the poor because Jesus cared for the poor.

We defend human dignity because every person bears the image of God.

We share because everything we possess ultimately belongs to God.

We serve because Jesus said that when we encounter “the least of these,” we encounter Him.

The Church does not have to solve every problem before it can faithfully address one problem. A congregation cannot feed every hungry child, house every homeless family, or repair every broken system.

But every congregation can do something.

Every family can do something.

Every business can do something.

Every follower of Jesus can do something.

And perhaps that is how the Kingdom usually comes—not through one person accomplishing everything, but through millions of ordinary followers of Jesus faithfully doing the something God has placed before them.

The poor are not interruptions to the mission of the Church.

They are among the people to whom Jesus sends the Church.

And when we look into their faces, Jesus says we should look carefully.

Because somewhere among the hungry, the forgotten, the struggling, and the overlooked, we may discover that Jesus has been waiting for us all along.