Abstract
Going Upstream
In the eighth century
Let’s take one example from the Book of Isaiah. Says the prophet: “Cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow” (1:16–17). The context was both social and religious. It was a time of deep injustice. Small farmers were losing their land, widows were being cheated, and the law courts were rigged in favour of the rich.
You have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, By grinding the face of the poor? (3:14–15).
What was even worse was that Israel’s religion was complicit in the exploitation. The temples were thronged with worshippers going through all the right ceremonies while the plight of the poor was ignored. Indeed, those who were cheating the poor were among the most regular at worship and the most fervent in prayer. To Isaiah, such a religion was an obscenity.
Though you offer countless prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves, make yourself clean, remove the evil of your doings (1:15–16).
For Isaiah, to know God is to do justice and, without that, religious practice is little more than a sham. Amos puts it equally powerfully: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (5:24).
If justice is central, not ancillary, to faith, this recasts the perspective of what religion is. In this Jesus is clearly prophetic. William Sloane Coffin rightly sees Jesus as a ‘prophet to the nations”, like Isaiah. “While he walked the earth, Jesus delivered people from paralysis, insanity, leprosy, suppurating wounds, deformity, and muteness. But, again and again, in word and deed, he returned to the plight of the poor, whose poverty, in true prophetic fashion, he considered no historical accident, but the fruit of social injustice. What would he say and do in our hard and uncertain times, in a world of thirteen million refugees, a world one-half of whose children never so much as open their mouths to say ‘aah’ to a doctor, a world in which almost every country is robbing the poor to feed the military?” 1
This goes to the very heart of the Gospel. If the amazing grace of God is given to all then each of us is loved and of value. As Deutero-Isaiah says, “You are precious in my sight, and honoured, and I love you” (43:4). Therefore, all are to be treated with respect and dignity.
In 1554, a brilliant scholar called Muretus, was down on his luck. He fell ill, and, looking ragged and emaciated, was taken into care. The doctors decided his case was hopeless and that they would use him for the purposes of research. Standing by his bed, not knowing who their patient was, one doctor said to another in Latin “Let’s try some experiments on this vile body.” Whereupon Muretus replied in faultless Latin: “Do you call that soul vile for whom Christ was prepared to die?” The logic is irresistible. Because there is no-one who is not loved by God we must “rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow”. “Just as you did it for the least of these who are members of my family, you did it for me” (Matthew 25:40).
The reality of course is that often we neither see nor treat people in this kind of way. At the heart of this failure is a lack of empathy and imagination: As R. S. Thomas writes: We look at people and places as though he had looked at them too; but miss the reflection.
If we can learn to value people because we see them as God does, then we must seek the justice which is the right of all. Or as Kant might say, “Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end”.
None of this is easy. It is not easy because it is demanding and is is rarely going to be uncontroversial—which is one reason many preachers shy away from contemporary dilemmas. I remember during the Gulf War speaking to a Methodist minister and asking him what line he was taking. “I’m trying not to say anything at all,” he said. “I don’t want to upset anyone.” Even if we do find the courage to speak the issues can be complex and sometimes we certainly will get them wrong. None of this means that we can or should be silent.
As Desmond Tutu said, “Christians shouldn’t just be pulling people out of the river. We should be going upstream to find out who’s pushing them in”. Upstream, we find an increasingly unequal world. Seven out of ten people live in countries where inequality has increased over the past three decades. Some of the numbers are stunning—according to Oxfam, the richest 85 people in the world own the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population. In the US, inequality is back to where it was before the Great Depression, and the richest one per cent captured 95 per cent of all income gains since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent got poorer so that former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers warms that the US is creating a “Downton Abbey economy”. In Britain, Oxfam reports the wealth of the richest five people equal that of the bottom twenty per cent of the population. Last year, more than one million people used food banks.
God’s will runs in the direction of equality. As Oliver Cromwell put it, “If there be any one that makes many poor, to make a few rich, that suits not a Commonwealth.” Every Advent we hear the words “Every valley shall be exalted and every hill laid low.” We are mistaken if we believe that is about geology. God is not sorry that he made the Alps. We’re talking here about those inordinate extremes of wealth and poverty which separate people one from another. The insight is clear—since everyone is precious in God’s sight then society must be organized to recognise that value. We need to be “looking up river” to break the cycles of hunger, poverty, and injustice at their source. “Rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”
Footnotes
1
William Sloane Coffin, Credo (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004).