In a recent bishopric meeting, (sorry, this may become a regular thing) we were discussing how best to use fast-offering funds to assist members in need. As often happens, the conversation turned practical: what kinds of aid are appropriate, where lines should be drawn, and how to exercise discernment rather than reflex. At one point, our bishop recalled a conversation he had with a neighboring bishop. He asked him whether they ever used funds to help members pay their mortgage.
The response was immediate and confident: that’s a drug that’s hard to quit.
The meaning was clear. Once someone receives help with housing, they become dependent. Better not to start something that will be difficult to stop.
The comment passed quickly, but it lingered with me. Not because it was cruel—it wasn’t offered with malice—but because of the worldview it revealed. The metaphor itself was doing a great deal of work. Housing assistance was framed not as stabilization, mercy, or mutual care, but as addiction. The recipient, implicitly, was recast as someone whose moral agency weakens in the presence of help. Aid becomes a substance; charity becomes a risk.
Almost immediately, my mind went to King Benjamin’s sermon.
“Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand…
But I say unto you, O man, whosoever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent.”
King Benjamin anticipates not generosity gone wrong, but generosity withheld. He names the familiar justifications we use to protect ourselves from obligation—the stories we tell about why help will ultimately harm the one who asks for it. His answer is not managerial. It is theological.
“Are we not all beggars?”
That question reframes the entire discussion. It collapses the imagined distance between giver and receiver. It refuses the fantasy that need is a personal failure rather than a shared human condition. And it makes the logic of “staying our hands” spiritually dangerous, not prudent.
This raised an unavoidable question: is the claim actually true? Do people get “hooked” on housing assistance? Or is this a culturally inherited talking point—one that sounds like wisdom but functions primarily to justify restraint?
When we look beyond intuition to evidence and lived experience, the addiction metaphor quickly breaks down. Housing assistance is not a consumable good. It is not discretionary. Rent and mortgage payments are fixed obligations that do not diminish desire through satisfaction. Most people who need help with housing are responding to acute disruption—job loss, illness, divorce, inflation—not seeking an easier way of life. The idea that such assistance creates dependency misunderstands both the nature of the need and the psychology of receiving help.
More importantly, it ignores a central truth: most people do not like asking for help. Particularly in religious communities that prize self-reliance, requesting financial assistance is often accompanied by shame, fear of judgment, and a sense of personal failure. If dependency were easy or attractive, bishops would not spend so much time reassuring members that it is acceptable to receive help.
The concern about “dependency” usually rests on a deeper set of assumptions—that people will choose reliance if allowed, that suffering is an effective motivator, and that charity must be tightly rationed to preserve moral character. These assumptions feel responsible. They sound like stewardship. But they owe more to modern individualism than to scripture.
King Benjamin does not instruct his people to calculate incentives. He does not ask whether generosity will produce the desired behavioral outcomes. Instead, he ties mercy directly to one’s own standing before God:
“For the sake of retaining a remission of your sins…”
This is not sentimental charity. It is costly, ongoing, and relational. Mercy here is not a one-time transaction that leaves both parties unchanged. It is a posture toward reality—one that acknowledges that we all live, continually, on borrowed breath.
None of this is to say that discernment doesn’t matter, or that aid should be thoughtless. Dependency can exist, but it does not arise from too much mercy. It arises when help is stripped of relationship, dignity, and shared responsibility. The answer to that risk is not withholding, but accompaniment—walking with someone through instability rather than policing them from a distance.
The “drug” metaphor ultimately reveals less about recipients of aid than about our own anxieties. We are afraid that mercy will not be clean. That it will ask more of us than we planned to give. That once we see someone’s need clearly, we may be unable to unsee it.
And that fear, more than misplaced generosity, is what King Benjamin warns against.
If we are all beggars, then the question is not whether help might be misused. The question is whether we are willing to remain in relationship long enough for mercy to do its slow, human work.
All of this places us squarely within the scandal of Jesus’s own ministry.
From the beginning, Jesus does not merely soften moral edges; he rearranges the furniture of righteousness.
As his work gathers momentum, his most prominent sermon—on the mount if you’re reading Matthew, on the plain if you’re with Luke—opens with a declaration that would have sounded less like comfort and more like provocation.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
Or, if you prefer Luke, Jesus doesn’t bother with the qualifier. He simply says, “Blessed are you poor,” and lets the statement detonate without softening the blast.
In a world where status, position, power, pedigree, and material abundance were widely understood as evidence of divine favor, this was not pious encouragement. It was a theological reversal. To suggest that the poor—not the disciplined, not the respectable, not the visibly successful—were the most blessed would have sounded dangerously close to heresy.
And Jesus doesn’t stop there. He turns directly toward those insulated by wealth and issues a warning that still makes us uncomfortable:
“It is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.”
Why turn the world upside down like this? After all, it’s difficult to argue against the safety, security, and options that riches provide. Wealth works. It cushions. It protects. It creates distance from risk, from need, from vulnerability.
But that distance is precisely the problem.
Jesus is not importing impossibility. He doesn’t say the rich cannot enter the kingdom—only that it is hard. And then, almost immediately, he guards against despair: “With God, nothing shall be impossible.” The door is not locked. But it is narrow in a particular way. What must be preserved—even in abundance—is the posture of dependence.
This is where Jesus and King Benjamin are speaking the same language.
King Benjamin’s question—“Are we not all beggars?”—is not rhetorical humility. It is an ontological claim. It insists that dependence is not a temporary condition to be outgrown, but the permanent truth of human life before God. Breath itself is borrowed. Stability is provisional. Self-sufficiency is, at best, a useful fiction.
When we talk about aid as “a drug that’s hard to quit,” we reveal how deeply we fear that truth. We worry that receiving help will deform someone’s character, as if dependence were an aberration rather than the ground of grace. But Jesus’s scandalous insistence is that the kingdom does not belong to those who manage need well—it belongs to those who know they have it.
The danger of wealth, then, is not possession but insulation. Riches make it easier to forget that we are beggars. They allow us to imagine that need is something that happens to other people, and that mercy is something we extend from a safe distance rather than a shared condition we inhabit together.
This is why Jesus blesses the poor and unsettles the rich. Not because poverty is virtuous or wealth is evil, but because the kingdom of God is built on dependence, and anything that dulls our awareness of that reality makes entry harder.
Seen this way, King Benjamin’s warning lands with even greater force. Withholding mercy in the name of prudence is not neutral. It is spiritually corrosive. It trains us to believe that need disqualifies rather than binds us together.
If Jesus is right—and if King Benjamin is right—then the risk is not that generosity will make someone dependent. The greater risk is that security will convince us we never were.
Discussion questions
- How does our fear of creating “dependency” shape the way we see people who ask for help—and what does King Benjamin’s reminder that “we are all beggars” ask us to see instead?
- When Jesus blesses the poor and warns the rich, what does that teach us about the kind of spiritual posture we should cultivate when we give—or receive—help?
Wheat & Tares 