CHARITY vs. JUSTICE
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[ Christians who have not read Chapter A - "Why so many suffer so much" won't fully appreciate this chapter on the Hebrew Bible and the next on the Gospels. ]
Before the resurrected Savior had revealed himself to his followers, he joined a pair of them as they walked the road to Emmaus. And Luke 24: 27 records that "beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures." Then Jesus vanished as mysteriously as he had appeared. And the disciples marveled: "Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?" (v. 32) The Bible is a large volume and much of it is like a thick, hard shell of material that must be forced opened in order to reveal the pearls of wisdom hidden inside. We cannot hope to match the lesson given by the Master on that day. But THAT, we believe, is the example that we disciples of Christ ought to strive to follow, and that is what we are striving to accomplish with this website. It's natural for Christians to spend most of their time dwelling on the "New" Testament, but that part of the Bible cannot be understood properly outside of the context of its foundation, what the Jews call the "Law and the Prophets". Paul went so far as to say that the lack of knowledge AND UNDERSTANDING of the teaching of the great prophets, is what prevented many Jews of the time from recognizing Jesus, and I believe the same is true of Christians in our day : Strictly speaking, that last statement may be true, but there is a reason there are so many additional words and commands in the bible, i.e. most of us are not smart enough to figure out, without a lot of additional help, who our neighbors are and precisely how God wants us to act out that love. Since the first generation of Christians were almost all Jews, the New Testament did not need to repeat what had already been said in the "Law and the Prophets" . That, however, cannot be said of Christians today. Today's Christians cannot fully appreciate what the "New" Testament teaches about loving one's neighbor, without a good understanding of the teaching of the "Original" Testament, upon which it is founded. More often than not, the emphasis in the Gospels and Epistles is on loving those who may not have earned that love, i.e. loving OUT OF CHARITY. Although the "Law and the Prophets" occasionally call for charity as well, more often than not what they emphasize is something more basic, and in a sense more urgent, than charity, i.e. doing what is right by others FOR JUSTICE' SAKE. And that contrast is very, very significant. While the New Testament allows for the impression that we must give to the needy WHAT BELONGS TO US ( out of charity ), the "Law and the Prophets" spell out many duties that we have to help the needy, BECAUSE THEY ARE ENTITLED TO THAT HELP, as redress for injustice they have suffered either at our hands, or those of others. The "Law and the Prophets" are full of specific obligations imposed on those who have power over the lives of others in this world (rulers, judges, legislators, employers, businessmen, landlords, and even clergymen) to be just and fair to those who are at their mercy (orphans, widows, debtors, customers, employees, homeless people, the sick, the handicapped and even foreigners and people in prison.) The foundation of the Bible makes it clear that the whole community, not just individuals, is expected to PREVENT injustice to the weak and the vulnerable BEFORE IT HAPPENS, as much as possible, and to REMEDY such injustice AFTER THE FACT, when it cannot.
Although every Christian and Jew is familiar with the opening chapter of the Bible, many don't grasp ITS TREMENDOUS SIGNIFICANCE :
{ Genesis 1: 27-31 }
So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." God said, "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.If the Bible is to be believed, then God created the whole of our world to meet the needs of the people he had created in his own image, and whom he expected to "be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it". In many so-called Christian circles today, the idea that the world should belong to all of its inhabitants is considered COMMUNISM ! It is sad that Karl Marx stole the idea of "From each according to his ability to each according to his need" . But it is sadder still that most Jews and Christians haven't even discovered the theft yet! The whole Communist "evil empire" that was built on that principle was bound to crumble, not because it was COMMUNISM, but because it was ATHEISTIC Communism. Once those who collected from each according to their ability got their hands on wealth, they were no more inclined than capitalists to distribute it to "each according to his need". idea may have flopped because it stripped of one of its most crucial elements, its "raison d'etre", the maker of mankind, the one best equipped to provide the manufacturer's instructions. Now, Biblical scholars who point out that the Bible favors the distribution of the riches of the world which God created among all of those whom He/She puts on earth are called "Communists" contemptuously, because people don't know that what was wrong with Atheistic Communism was the "Atheist" part, NOT the "Communist" part. And how about the author of Leviticus? The whole first chapter of this book is devoted to an idea associated in the minds of many Americans with communism, namely the redistribution of property to the needy. This chapter teaches that the loss of property, especially when forced upon people by misfortune, should be corrected every fifty years, and such property should be returned outright to the original owners, without even compensating the recent owners. (The temporary owners are only to be compensated -- on a pro rata basis-- if and when they have returned the property before the fifty years are up.) Here is the climax of that chapter: People often say that there can be no Peace without Justice. To put some flesh on that skeletal statement, we might say, "Are people who want peace willing to pay its price?" There cannot be peace in a world where some of the people are happy and others miserable. In order to avoid anger and its various manifestations, either of crimes between individuals or war between groups, those who are comfortable need to be willing to share with those who are not. That is the price of peace. The Hebrew Bible offers mankind an incredibly wise formula for avoiding all kinds of human misery, a schedule for world peace, the restoration of justice every seven years or seven times seven years. When there were barely a handful of people in the world, the very first book of the Bible, Genesis { 4:9 } was already teaching the necessity of being concerned about the well-being of others. An emphatic "No" is the way Cain (and many conservative Christians today) would like to answer the rhetorical question "Am I my brother's keeper?" But from beginning to end, the answer the Bible keeps giving to that question is: "If you want God's approval, you must indeed be your brother's, and your sister's, and even your neighbor's keeper ! Here are other early admonitions of part of the bible the Jews call "the Law" : The appeal of this passage to CHARITY is rather unusual for the Hebrew bible, because more often than not the great prophets of old expressed concern for the unfortunate on the grounds of JUSTICE, as in the passage below. In sharp contrast to the hard-hearted attitudes of "Christian Conservatives", the Bible rarely blames the victims of poverty for their plight. Rather -- as we will see in the next chapter -- the great prophets of the Bible blame the high and the mighty of society for those ills and expect the community as a whole to redress what they perceive as INJUSTICES, rather than just misfortunes.
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