Faith & Justice
DO JUSTICE. LOVE MERCY. WALK HUMBLY.
Friends of Justice is a ministry rooted in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. In the wake of the Tulia drug sting, Baptist preachers, retired night club owners, school teachers, meat packers, nurses, nurses aids and forklift drivers gathered in the home of Alan and Nancy Bean. Every Sunday night we sang songs inspired by Exodus story: “Pharaoh’s army got drownded, O Mary, don’t you weep”. “Go down Moses, way down in Egypt land. Tell old Pharaoh to let my people go.” We read the Bible and we prayed.
But why? What do religious leaders and accused drug dealers have in common?
MADE IN GOD’S IMAGE
Jewish and Christian scriptures reveal that God is a lover and defender of the poor, the outcast, the stranger, and the desperate. God created all people in the image of God, so that we could reflect God’s glory to all creation. The God of the Bible is a God of justice, who holds judges and rulers to account when they dehumanize people who are made in God’s image. When governments deny equal justice to poor people, they are defying the Creator.
The Bible shows us God’s heart for the poor and downtrodden, and tells us that if we want to be the people of God, we must defend the poor. This doesn’t just mean showing compassion. In the Bible, being poor isn’t just about material needs; the poor are described as those who are vulnerable to wrongful prosecution, who languish in prison, who have no allies to defend themselves from arbitrary treatment by police and judges. That’s why God hates poverty, because it means that people are being stripped of their humanity and denied the rights and protections of citizenship. Governments exist to protect the weak from the strong and restrain evil, so that people can live in safety and dignity and reflect God’s glory. When governments act as if only some people are created in the image of God, people of faith must hold their leaders to a higher standard.
THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES
In the Bible, we learn that God has acted throughout history to reveal his love and justice and to defend the poor and downtrodden from their oppressors. The Law of Moses was revealed to a ragtag assemblage of newly-liberated slaves. “The stranger (foreigner) who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself” Moses said. Why? Two reasons are given. Because “You were strangers in the land of Egypt,” and because “I am the LORD your God.” (Leviticus 19:33)
The God of Moses was particularly critical of rich and powerful people who used the criminal justice system to further their own ends. “You shall not pervert the justice due to your poor in his suit. Keep far from false charges, and do not slay the innocent and righteous, for I will not acquit the wicked.” (Exodus 23:6)
In the world of the Bible, no one “grinds the face of the poor” with impunity. A nation that crushes vulnerable people in the courts is headed for trouble.
When the Assyrians swept away the northern kingdom of Israel in the 8th century BC, the prophets saw it as God’s judgment. “Thus says the LORD,” Amos writes, “For three transgressions of Israel and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes—they trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and turn aside the afflicted.” (Amos 2: 6, 7)
The prophet Isaiah agreed. “Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right.”
When King Nebuchadnezzar and the armies of Babylon swept down on Jerusalem in the 6th century BC, the prophet Ezekiel provided a similar explanation. “The people of the land have practiced extortion and committed robbery; they have oppressed the poor and needy; and have extorted from the sojourners without redress. And I sought for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found none. Therefore I have poured out my indignation upon them; I have consumed them with the fire of my wrath.”
JESUS
The Christian New Testament builds from the traditional teaching that God loves and defends the poor. A Jewish peasant girl (her name is Miriam, after the sister of Moses) learns that she has been chosen as the mother of Jesus. She launches into a psalm of praise: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. He has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, he has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.” (Luke 1: 46-53).
A few decades later, Jesus was asked to read the Hebrew Scriptures in his home synagogue in the northern town of Nazareth. The young Rabbi turned to the 61st chapter of the prophet Isaiah. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”
Jesus closed the book and said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” As a careful student of the Hebrew Bible, Jesus knew that only a lover and defender of the poor could speak as a prophet of God. “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets,” Jesus told his disciples. “I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.”
At the very close of his ministry, under the shadow of the cross, Jesus told his disciples how things would be at the close of the age. The Son of Man would tell his disciples: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.”
“The righteous” are confused. When had they seen the Son of Man hungry and thirsty, or as a stranger, or naked, or in prison?” And “the King” will answer, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sister, you did it to me.”
Christians believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, and this resurrection is also intricately linked to God’s love for the poor and the outcast. The death and resurrection of Jesus reveals God’s perfect love and justice, to break the power of sin and death that kept humanity from reflecting God’s glory. From the liberation of Hebrew slaves to the resurrection of the Son of man, the Jewish and Christian Scriptures proclaim God’s protective love for the poor.
PROCLAIMING THE WHOLE GOSPEL
Friends of Justice believes in proclaiming the whole Gospel. The Gospel is good news for all people, but it’s especially good news to the poor and downtrodden. When the church stands up for the poor, people see God’s love and justice in us. The Gospel has the power to raise up communities across race and class divides, to show the world that God is holy, loving, and faithful (2 Corinthians 5:21).
It is not enough for the church to extend compassion to the poor, while letting judges and administrators treat them like trash. If we allow our judicial system to devalue people who are made in God’s image, we are not really being faithful to God. Governments invent lofty rationales to justify crushing the poor underfoot, and claim that it serves some higher purpose—either God, or some principle that they exalt above God. Some legal scholars have even suggested that we cannot trouble ourselves with “morality” in the criminal justice system, because the only higher power in the universe is Efficiency. But the Bible teaches that all people are made in God’s image, and there is no higher reality than God’s reality. That’s why the church must proclaim the Gospel in our nation’s criminal justice system, “so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10).
And that’s why Friends of Justice steps into the breach when poor, vulnerable people are stripped of their due process protections. Whenever Jesus, disguised as a poor, vulnerable defendant, stands silent before his accusers, the Friends of Justice will speak, we will pray, we will sing hymns of faith. It’s who we are. It’s what we do.
