In Leviticus 23, God gives instructions for the Israelites. He says:
When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and for the foreigner residing among you. I am the LORD your God.
Most of us don’t farm in the modern world, but this should give us a real insight into God’s desire for our attitude towards those less fortunate.
The theme continued in the New Testament, for example when Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan. The supposedly virtuous people, the priest and the Levite, ignored the victim of a mugging somewhere on the 19-mile journey between Jerusalem and Jericho. They would have been avid followers of the rituals of the temple, but missed out on reflecting God’s love. Instead, love is shown by someone from the disliked people of Samaria, south of Galilee.
What does leaving the edges of the field mean to us, in a society where most of us don’t farm?
Last year, research from Stewardship found that those they call practising Christians (among adults in the UK) give 6.26% of their income to church and charities. Those who go to church at least once a month but read the Bible less than once a month give 3.04%, while cultural Christians, who are less frequent church attenders, give 1.17%.
The practicing Christians are giving £167 a month, compared to £60 (2022 figure) for an average member of the general public. So people who read the bible and attend church really do take it to heart.
We don’t have to be naive about how we help people in bad situations – handing cash to a drug addict isn’t likely to end well. But the good news is that there are plenty of organised schemes to help those afflicted with addictions, such as Yeldall Manor in Berkshire. I spoke to a couple of people who were half-way through residential recovery there; their lives and relationships had been wrecked but were now on an upward path.
In November, the Financial Times reported that corporate giving by the FTSE 100 had fallen by 34 per cent over the past decade. It said that three-quarters of UK companies outside that blue-chip grouping did not support charities at all.
There are many reasons why this could be the case – one of which is that companies are no longer required to report on their charitable giving. It does, though, rather suggest that the Judeo-Christian idea of not reaping to the very edges of the field have been forgotten in much of the corporate world. And that, in business, things are going in the wrong direction.