When I was leading the church in Urbana, I heard a sermon by a famous preacher who spoke on the need to be people of justice in our communities. Great message. To bring justice, he argued with good intentions, we should look for useful guides like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to guide us. It made sense to me. I remembered the little pyramid from a textbook in a class I once took. Every person has needs, and in order to get to the top need of transcendence, which is where religion and spirituality is found, you needed your foundational needs to be met. Foundational needs are things like food and water. In other words, to get to Jesus, we need to work on meeting people’s base physical needs. His argument was based on miracles; Jesus would heal a physical ailment to signal to a spiritual reality.

With good intentions, I remember taking this idea to the elder group and then weaving this idea into a couple of sermons.

I was wrong.

We absolutely should be a people of justice. And we should seek to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, get clean water to the thirsty, and to house the sojourner. We should be generous in meeting physical needs in hopes that it may lead to meeting spiritual needs.

But Jesus, the great Teacher, reminds me that heavenly wisdom always surpasses human wisdom. While following the pyramid bottom up sounds good, Jesus reminds us that he himself is the foundation.

In speaking with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, Jesus tells the woman that, though she drinks water, she will continue to struggle with thirst all the days of her life. But if she were to drink from the water of Christ, she would never thirst again.

You see, once we get our soul right with God, it changes the relationship we have with our needs. Jesus changes how we drink water, how we view our shelter, our food, our communion with others, and our identity. Jesus changes everything. If we begin with anything besides Christ, we are doomed to view that thing in the wrong lens.

I think of housing, most obviously. Surely, we all need shelter. But the size and quality of that shelter changes drastically when you choose to follow Jesus. In fact, Jesus may very well require your home from you! Suddenly, keeping up with the Jones’s becomes surrendering our home to Jesus.

Think of community. According to the hierarchy, we need relationships with friends before coming to Jesus. But Jesus fundamentally changes how we see other people and thereby how we go about relationships. Not saying you can’t or won’t have friends without Jesus, but the lens Jesus places on friendship is different than the perspective of the world.

Not only does Jesus change how we receive our needs being met, but Jesus also changes how we go about helping meet others’ needs.

While I will be helping anyone I can with a physical need, I am actively aware of God in our midst and the desire God has for that person to know God. Not that I will Bible beat someone, but that I will prayerfully be the warm touch of God to every person I encounter. A person may be physically hungry, but their soul hungers more. They may thirst, but their soul thirsts more. They may need a friend, but their soul seeks communion with God. I will, and you should, give real food to the hungry, real water to the thirsty, and befriend the lonely. But in doing so, aim to meet their physical and soul needs.

Jesus, in being both God and man, removes the separation between the physical and the spiritual. We live in a world based on Greek thought, which prioritized the spiritual world over the physical. I am not trying to do this here. Rather, I am trying to melt the physical and the spiritual into one, giving primacy to following the Way of Jesus who meets both our physical and spiritual needs. I also am trying to recognize that the flesh is weak and our desires often run rampant in our physical bodies. When we place the body in service of the Spirit in us, we better organize our physical needs.

If Jesus is found in the part of the transcendence at the top of Maslow’s Pyramid, I recommend we move the top to the bottom, allowing Jesus to work out all our needs in and through himself.

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