Crime shows seem to have always been a staple of prime time television. I remember Columbo and The Rockford Files. Now it’s CSI (in all its many flavours), Crossing Jordan, Law and Order, and all kinds of spin-offs. Judging by what we watch on TV, we seem to be fascinated with the mechanics of justice.
Then there’s all the courtroom shows, including reality shows like “Judge Judy” or “The People’s Court.” Justice, or the pursuit of justice, seems to sell well on TV.
This isn’t anything new. People have always been interested in justice; what it is, how it works. The passages that were read for us from Deut 10 and Ps 9 are thousands of years old and they talk about justice, especially about God’s concern for justice.
I’ll come back to those passages in a few minutes but first I’d like us to look at a courtroom scene. It’s found in Micah 6:1-8 and God is going to court against his own people.
Listen to what the Lord says: “Stand up,
plead your case before the mountains; let the hills hear what you have to say.
Hear, O mountains, the Lord’s accusation; listen, you everlasting foundations
of the earth. For the Lord has a case against his people; he is lodging a
charge against
In Old Testament times if you wanted to
lodge a court case you didn’t go downtown to the courthouse. You went to the
city gates. There you could always find some of the elders of the city, men who
were considered to be wise, and you would call them together to hear your case
and bring their wisdom to bear on the situation. So God calls together the
mountains and the hills, the oldest things around, if you like “the elders of
creation,” to hear his case against the people of
“My people, what have I done to you? How have
I burdened you? Answer me. I brought you up out of
In verses 3-5 God is saying to his people, “Why have
you rejected me? I haven’t done anything to burden you. In fact I’m the one
that bent over backwards to save you out of
The people’s response to God’s charge is, “Let’s get more religious.”
With what shall I come before the Lord and
bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with
ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
And the religiosity just gets out of hand. Burnt offerings – thousands of rams – ten thousand rivers of oil – even to the point of offering their own children in sacrifice.
All of this sets up what must be one of the most wonderful verses in scripture.
He has showed you, O man, what is good. And
what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk
humbly with your God.
This is one of the clearest statements in
the Bible of just what it is that God requires of us. We often seem to make
following God really complicated. But it’s not rocket science. He asks us to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with God.
Micah was a country boy. Although he
lived and worked in the big city of
One of the things that he saw was
the wealth and prosperity of the city.
One of the big reasons for that success was that the economy was changing. For generations it had been a barter economy. That meant that is you needed a new shovel for the farm you’d go down to the local metal worker and say something like, “How about I give you four chickens for a shovel.”
But things were changing. Someone had introduced the idea of money, so instead of the farmer offering four chickens for a shovel; shovels now cost four dollars. If you wanted a shovel you had to go sell your chickens for cash then use the cash to buy the shovel. That may seem very normal to us, but it was really strange to many people in Micah’s day.
[
In Micah’s the switch to money also made it easier for some people to get rich at others’ expense. If they were selling grain for instance, they’d use a light weight to measure the amount of grain they sold and a heavier weight to measure the gold they charged for it. And then, when your wealth is expressed in silver and gold it’s a lot easier to build up a lot of it. Four dollars takes up a lot less space than four chickens – and you don’t have to feed them! So the gap between rich and poor was getting wider.
When economic systems change people get hurt,
especially the weak and vulnerable. It happened in Micah’s day when
So what does God ask of us when everything is changing around us, when the poor are getting poorer and when vulnerable people are being trodden underfoot?
He calls us to “act justly and to
love mercy and to walk humbly with God.”
Micah says that God has told us to “act justly,” or better yet to “do justice.” What does that mean for us today? We often talk about getting justice. The Bible talks about doing justice. Those are two very different things, not least because our idea of justice is very different from what the Bible means by justice.
Slide of “Justice”
The Western model of justice
- Impartial “Equal before the law”
- Scientific “Just the facts ma’am”
- Retributive “Making the punishment fit the crime”
Rooted in Roman law “to each man his due”
To those who do right – reward
To those who do wrong – punishment
This is not what the Bible means by “justice.”
Justice in the Bible is not, first and foremost, about weighing evidence and finding someone guilty or innocent. It’s much broader than that. It’s about the creation of a community where people can live in peace and harmony. It’s about striving towards the kind of society that Micah himself describes in chapter 4 verse 4, “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid.”
But God is a realist. He realises that for this kind of society to exist, then someone has to look out for the little guy.
Listen again to some of the words we
heard read earlier. 17 For the Lord
your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome,
who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. 18 He defends the
cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and
clothing. 19 And you are to love those who are aliens, for
you yourselves were aliens in
The Lord reigns forever; he has established
his throne for judgment. He will judge the world in righteousness; he will
govern the peoples with justice. The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed,
a stronghold in times of trouble. (Ps 9:7-10)
The Lord looked and was displeased that there
was no justice. He saw that there was no one, he was appalled that there was
no one to intervene; (Is 59.15-16)
Again and again, when the Bible talks about justice, in the next breath it talks about the vulnerable; the poor, widows, orphans, immigrants, those who have no voice in society. These are the people who need a just society, who need someone to intervene.
[Shane Claiborne lives in a community house in a poor
neighbourhood of
“About a hundred of
us gathered in
“We did that week
after week, with the police watching over us and the media standing by. And
then, one night after worship as we slept under the "Love" sign
(which we had covered with a big question mark), the police circled the park and
arrested all of us.”
Later, Claiborne stood before a judge, wearing a shirt
that read, "Jesus was homeless." The judge was intrigued, admitting
that he didn't know Jesus had been homeless. The judge said that the real issue
at stake was the constitutionality of the law, then declared:
“Let me remind the
court that, if it weren't for people who broke unjust laws, we wouldn't have
the freedom that we have. We'd still have slavery. That's the story of this
country, from the Boston Tea Party to the civil rights movement. These people
are not criminals; they are freedom fighters. I find them all not guilty, on
every charge.”
The newspapers announced it as a "Revolutionary
Court Decision," and Claiborne writes that the judge asked him for a
"Jesus was homeless" T-shirt.]
Micah says that we are to “do justice” and to “love mercy.”
If you think of justice in the modern,
western way you almost always end up talking about justice and mercy as if they
were opposed to each other, that you can do one or the other, but not both. But
it’s clear in scripture that mercy and justice are closely linked. Zechariah
7:8-10 says, 8 And the word of the Lord
came again to Zechariah: 9 “This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and
compassion to one another. 10 Do not oppress the widow or the
fatherless, the alien or the poor. In your hearts do not think evil of each
other.’
Showing mercy and compassion to one another is part of administering true justice.
Historically the church has been good at mercy and compassion (helping those in need) but not as good at doing justice (dealing with the reasons why people are in need.)
Oscar Romero, who was a catholic Archbishop
in
Doing justice is often more costly than being merciful. It can cost your time, your money, your safety, your comfort. It cost Oscar Romero his life. It cost John Tarzwell his life.
[Canadian member of Operation Mobilization – first met him at the Canadian office in Port Colbourne in 1987 – met him again in Sept 1989 when we arrived in Peshawar – office manager for the NGO we worked with – helped us settle in and make friends – was also helping an Afghan family escape a hezb-i islami hit squad – succeeded – but they came for him instead – kidnapped on Nov 1, 1989 and presumed killed – his body never found]
The last part of Micah’s definition of what God has called us to is “walk humbly with your God.” I’m not going to talk about that today, not because it isn’t important but because we’ve already talked about that in the first two messages in this series, on “holiness” and “humility.” You can check those out on the website. The address is on the front of the programme.
1. Doing justice is part of our calling as people of God
2. Doing justice is often costly
3. Doing justice will usually put you on the same side as the vulnerable and marginalised in society
4. That’s a good place to be, because God is there too
[Bono at national prayer breakfast in
I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill… I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff… maybe, maybe not… But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.
God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house… God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives… God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war… God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us, if we are with them. "If you remove the yolk from your midst, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, and if you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in darkness and your gloom with become like midday and the Lord will continually guide you and satisfy your desire in scorched places"”] (Is 58)