On Charity and
Justice
There is enormous need in the world. There is need in my
country, the United States, and there is even more need in poorer parts of the
world. People are suffering in all parts of the world. They suffer from hunger,
illness, violence, and any number of other ills. God calls us Christians (well,
actually, all people, but I’ll focus on Christians) first to be concerned about
people suffering, then to act to alleviate that suffering to whatever extent we
are able. Few of us do that as much as we could, but the call is there
nonetheless.
There is a story in the Old Testament that points to
something important about our response to human suffering. It’s the story of a
drought and the prophet Elijah responding to it in a particular way. The story
begins at 1 Kings 17:1. There Elijah tells evil king Ahab that “there shall be
neither dew nor rain these years except by my word.” Elijah, in other words, is
causing a great drought to come upon Israel and indeed on the lands surrounding
it. Drought causes great suffering in the world today, and it caused great
suffering in the world of ancient Israel too. Egypt has the Nile, and Mesopotamia
has the Tigris and the Euphrates, all of them great rivers. Israel has no such
river. Agriculture in Israel, particularly in ancient times, depended on rain. Harvests
were good in Israel when the right amount of rain fell on the fields at the
right times. When it did not, harvests were bad or even nonexistent. Drought
was a horrific disaster, something of which people lived in constant fear. And
the great prophet Elijah causes such a drought, apparently because he’s mad at
king Ahab for worshipping Baal.
The next significant story in the Old Testament is at 1
Kings 17:8-16. In that story, Elijah has gone to a place called Zarephath, which,
we are told, “belongs to Sidon.” Sidon was a Phoenician city not a Hebrew one.
So Elijah here is among Gentiles not among Jews. He has no reason to believe
that the people there worshipped Israel’s God Yahweh. He encounters a widow. He
first asks her for some water. He also asked her to give him some bread to eat.
The widow replies that she has no bread. She has only a handful of meal and a
little oil. She says “I am now gathering a
couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my
son, that we may eat it, and die.” 1 Kings 17:12 NRSV. This woman and her son
are about to become victims of Elijah’s drought, and they were far from only
ones for whom that was true.
Elijah tells the woman not to be afraid but to bring him
some bread and then to make something for herself and her son. “For thus says Lord the God of Israel: The jar of meal
will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.”[1]
1 Kings 17:14 NRSV. The widow does as Elijah directed her to do. She and her
son eat well. The meal and the oil don’t run out just as Elijah said they would
not.
So we have here a situation in which Elijah happens upon a
Gentile woman and her son who are about to starve to death because of a
drought. It isn’t, however, just any old drought. It is a drought that Elijah
has caused. Elijah’s drought is the larger circumstance that is causing the
widow and her son to believe that they are about to starve to death.
And what does Elijah do? He does charity. He addresses the
immediate need of the widow and her son for food. It is, of course, a very good
thing that he does so. He is acting one on one with someone with a dire need
for food, a need she cannot satisfy herself. Elijah is a great blessing for
this widow and her son. Now they will survive the drought that they were sure
was going to kill them.
But what does Elijah not do? He does not address the larger
circumstance that puts this widow and her son in need of charity. He addresses
the need, but he does not address the cause of the need. We know, though the
widow presumably does not, that Elijah is the one who has created the drought
that has produced the woman’s need. We must, therefore, assume that Elijah
could have ended the drought but did not. He did charity, the work of
addressing people’s immediate needs, but he did not do justice.
Justice is the work of addressing the systems and
institutions that create need among people. That keep people in poverty. That
wrongly imprison them. That discriminate against them in myriad ways because of
the color of their skin, their faith, their sexual orientation, their gender
identity or expression, or the part of the world they come from. Justice is the
difficult, slow work of changing the underlying causes of people’s suffering.
Now, charity and justice are not the same thing, but they
are both vitally and equally important. God calls us Christians to work at both
them. To ignore neither of them. Not to consider one of them more important
than the other. God calls us both to address people’s immediate needs and to
work at changing the systems that put people in need. There is simply no way
for us Christians to avoid those divine calls from God.
We Christians are often really good at doing charity. Those
of us who are able to do it give money to any number of worthwhile charitable
institutions and causes. We give money to food banks, shelter and housing
programs, medical assistance programs, educational programs, and any number of
other organizations that do good charitable work. Many of us who are able to do
it give of our time as well as of our treasure to these organizations. We
volunteer in countless ways with countless charitable organizations. It is a
very good thing that we do. Charity makes the lives of a whole lot of people
better. Doing charity is our duty as Christians.
It is, however, not our only duty. God also calls to do justice.
God calls us to do what we can to undo unjust systems and institutions that put
so many people in so much need in the first place. It is, however, true that it’s
a lot easier to do charity than to work for justice. It isn’t often easy to
know just what we should do. Injustice arises in numerous different ways. There
is the systemic racism that produces different results for similarly situated
people because of what we call their race. The same thing, or at least
something very similar, happens to people because of their gender, sexual
orientation, or sexual expression. There is the injustice that results from
conservative politicians enacting a tax code that favors the rich over everyone
else in unconscionable ways. What are we to do, actually?
Justice is about the polis. It is about the ways we live
together in society. It is, therefore, unavoidably political. We hear people
say “keep your religion out of politics.” We hear it over and over again,
mostly from secular people who are objecting to the conservative politics of
conservative Christians.[2]
But Christianity is political. Jesus had more to say about how God calls us to
live together than he had to say about anything else. He called, and calls, us
to do the work of building the kingdom of God on earth; and “kingdom” is
nothing if it isn’t political. In Matthew’s the Beatitudes, for example, Jesus
says not one thing about belief. He speaks about people and the people like
peacemakers who do God’s will on earth.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is unavoidably political, especially
but not exclusively in the Gospel of Luke. There Mary sings of the downfall of
the wealthy and the lifting up of the poor. Luke 1:46-55. Luke’s Beatitudes don’t
just bless the poor, they condemn the rich. Luke 6:20 and 24. There is simply
no doubt that in conflicts between the rich and the poor, God is on the side of
the poor. That’s why the Roman Catholic Church speaks of God’s “preferential
option for the poor.” Economic and tax policies make people poor, and
politicians set economic and tax policies.
God does not call us to keep our religion out of politics.
Rather, God calls us to do exactly the opposite. God calls us to build the
realm ( the kingdom) of God on earth, and there is no way to do that without
being political. The problem with religion and politics in this country isn’t
that people of faith act in politics on the basis of their faith. It is that
very vocal people who get the Christian faith all wrong speak so loudly of the
politics they have gotten all wrong.
So. God calls us to both charity and justice. God does not
call us to do what Elijah did in the story of the widow of Zarephath. He did
charity, which is a very good thing; but he could have done justice, but he
didn’t, which is a very bad thing. God calls us both to be like Elijah and not
to be like Elijah. Do charity. Feed the widow and her son. Jesus condemned
religious figures among others who oppress the poor. See Mark 12:38-13:2.[3]
God calls us to active, creative, but always nonviolent resistance to evil. See
Matthew 5:38-44.[4]
Resistance to evil certainly includes reforming the institutions and systems
that produce the evil in the first place, and doing that is necessarily
political.
So God puts both charity and justice before us and calls us
to act on both of them. We Christians are a whole lot better at charity than we
are at justice. Tragically, the most vocal Christians among us advocate
policies that produce injustice not justice; but God will have none of it. God
never supports calls for policies that harm God’s people (and all people are
God’s people). God calls us to lives of both charity and justice. So let’s keep
doing charity, and let’s get on with doing a much better job of promoting
justice than most of us most commonly do.
[1] When
in the Old Testament the word Lord is spelled this way, in what are called
small caps, it means that the Hebrew being translated is Yahweh, the name of
Israel’s God.
[2] “Conservative
Christian” is an oxymoron, but never mind—for now.
[3] These
verses include the story known as the “widow’s mite.” Preachers use it in
stewardship sermons all the time. This story absolutely is not about
stewardship. It is about the temple authorities lording it over the people and
making people as poor as the widow is. It ends with Jesus saying their “house,”
that is, the temple will be destroyed just as they destroyed the widow’s house.
[4]
These famous verses do not call us to meek passivity in the face of evil as
they are so often said to do. For an explanation, read Walter Wink’s book The
Powers That Be.
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