A FEW YEARS AGO, I (Kevin) was a chaplain for a week at a Christian camp. This camp was like most Christian camps, replete with horses, ropes courses, a climbing wall, scores of rambunctious kids, and a troop of eager college-aged counselors. My job as chaplain was to lead a few services and try to encourage the campers and counselors. What I saw in the counselors surprised me.
I distinctly remember having a conversation with one college-aged leader and thinking, “This is the beginning of something different.” Though this was a pretty conservative camp that would draw from pretty conservative churches and hire your run-of-the-mill conservative college kids, I had the sense that this student represented a shift already underway in younger evangelicals. He was reading Jim Wallis’s God’s Politics. He was sick of George W. Bush. He was passionate about social justice. This student was thoughtful, fed up with what he perceived to be do-nothing Christianity, and zealous to make a difference in the world.
Since then we (Kevin and Greg) have spoken at different venues across the country, usually to youngish Christians. From our anecdotal evidence we’ve found no issue more debated, especially on Christian college campuses and among well-educated twenty- and thirty-somethings, than social justice. Younger evangelicals are more concerned about the poor, about digging wells, about sex trafficking, about orphans than at any other time in recent memory. Social justice is hot and is bound to stay that way for some time. One prominent scholar has gone so far as to claim that a renewed interest in social justice, or what he prefers to call a missional or holistic gospel, represents the biggest shift in evangelicalism in the last century.1
But with all the buzz and energy surrounding social justice, there have been few efforts to look at actual texts. Little time has been spent walking through the main “social justice” passages to see what they really say. Well, at the risk of being tedious, we want to do just that. This chapter will include some application along the way, but the meat will be straight-up exegesis. If you want to know what it all means, we’ll get to that in the next chapter where we synthesize our findings with a series of concluding thoughts and summary statements. But right now, we’re going to work our way through twelve common “social justice” texts.
You’ll notice that we point out many of the same themes, same sins, and same misunderstandings in text after text. Our approach may border on being redundant, but we think it is important to go through many texts instead of few so you can see that we are not trying to be selective in our reading and so you’ll get a broader view of what the Bible says about justice. Since many of the passages we expound are whole chapters or large sections, we have not included the Scripture text to which we are referring. We strongly encourage you to work through this chapter with a Bible open.
Leviticus 19 is not the most famous social justice passage, but it is representative of many similar texts. So we’ll start here and spend a fair amount of time on this one.
The climax to this passage and its overarching theme is found in the last half of verse 18: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” As most Christians know, Jesus refers to this as the second great commandment (Matt. 22:39; Mark 12:31). Paul and James also see the command as paradigmatic for the rest of the law (Rom. 13:9; Gal. 5:14; James 2:8). Love, according to the New Testament, is what we should show to the poor and to everyone else. Leviticus 19 is a terrific passage because the love here is so concrete. This passage is not flowery. It doesn’t soar to the heavens. People aren’t writing songs about it and playing it at weddings. It is plain and practical. We’ve all heard that you ought to love your neighbor as yourself. Probably 95 percent of the people in this country agree that loving our neighbor is a good idea. But what does it look like? How do we do it? Verses 9–18 show us how.
This passage applies love to five different areas of life, marked off into five sections by the concluding phrase “I am the LORD” (vv. 9–10, 11–12, 13–14, 15–16, 17–18). You might think of these verses as giving five love languages that every Christian must speak. We must love with our possessions, by our words, in our actions, by our judgments, and with our attitudes.
Loving Others with Our Possessions (vv. 9–10)
Leviticus 19:9–10 quickly summarizes the concept of gleaning—leaving some of your harvest remaining in the fields (or on the vines) so that the poor and the sojourner could gather what is left over. As many people have pointed out, the genius of gleaning is that it required not only generosity on the part of the landowner but also industry on the part of the poor. This isn’t a handout (though there is a place for that too), but an opportunity to work to eat.
Still, we would be wrong to make the gleaning laws nothing but a moral lesson on personal responsibility. The main lesson to be learned is that God’s people are to be generous. The principle for us is this: We must deliberately plan our financial lives so that we have extra left over to give to those in need. Don’t reap to the edge of your fields. And don’t spend all your money on yourself. Think of those who have less than you, and let some of your wealth slip through your fingers. In other words, don’t be stingy. Don’t get every last grape off the vine for yourself. Let others benefit from your harvests. As Paul puts it in the New Testament, we should work hard so that we “may have something to share with anyone in need” (Eph. 4:28).
Loving Others with Our Words (vv. 11–12)
To love is to tell the truth. We see here two contexts where honesty is paramount and sometimes in short supply: in business and in the courts. The first command here is to not steal. But the context suggests that the stealing is taking place by lying, people dealing falsely with each other, as in a business setting. By contrast, God’s people love others by telling the truth in their transactions. No cheating scales, weights, or measurements (vv. 35–36).
The second scene is in the courtroom. Especially in a day without surveillance cameras or DNA testing or tape recording, everything depended on witnesses. That’s why bearing false witness is such a serious crime in the Bible. Someone’s life could literally be ruined by a simple lie. Love—whether for our neighbors or for our enemies—demands that we are careful with our words.
Loving Others by Our Actions (vv. 13–14)
Verse 13 gives the classic and most common example of oppression in the Bible: not giving the agreed-upon wage at the agreed-upon time. Oppression was not the same as inequality. Oppression occurred when day laborers were hired to work in the fields for the day, and at the end of the day the landowner stiffed them of their wages. This was a serious offense to their neighbor and before God, not least of all because the day’s payment was often literally one’s daily bread. People depended on this payment to survive.
It was all too easy to cheat workers out of their wages. You could say you didn’t have anything to give. Or you could argue that the work was shabbily done. Or you could simply refuse to pay today, or ever. If the matter was simply one man’s word against another’s, there was little a worker could do to get justice, especially on that day, when what the worker needed was food to eat, not a legal process.
This is exactly the oppression referred to in James 5:1–6. The rich, James says, were living in self-indulgent luxury. These were not the sorts of riches that they plowed back into the company in order to hire more workers. These riches were the ill-gotten kind. The rich had kept back by fraud the wages of the laborers. The injustice James rails against was not because of a relatively low wage or because there was a disparity between rich and poor. The injustice was that the rich had hired help for the harvest, but refused to pay them (v. 4).
The broader principle in these two verses from Leviticus is that God’s people must not take advantage of the weak. Don’t curse the deaf, even if they can’t hear you. Don’t put a stumbling block before the blind, even if they won’t know who did it. God knows. If others don’t know the language in your country, or don’t understand the system, or don’t have the connections, they should elicit our compassion and generosity, not our desire to make a buck at their expense.
Loving Others in Our Judgments (vv. 15–16)
Leviticus 19:15 is an important verse for establishing the fact that justice in the Bible, at least as far as the courtroom is concerned (but beyond the courtroom too, we think), is a fair process, not an equal outcome. “You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor.” Again, this does not mean we don’t care when people have less than we do. This doesn’t mean we should be indifferent to the disadvantages many people have in life through no fault of their own. But it means that justice strives to apply the law equally. In the context of a courtroom, judges should judge without partiality—either for the rich or for the poor.
Imagine two men from your church have a dispute. A poor man from the church has done some work at a rich man’s house. The poor man says he was told he would get $10,000 for the job. The rich man claims he offered $10,000 only if the work was done by a certain date; otherwise it would be $5,000. Now the elders have to decide the case. What do you do? Should the worker get $5,000 or $10,000? What is justice here? According to verse 15, justice means rendering the just verdict. You cannot defer to the great because he will give more to the church if you side with him or because he is more influential in the community. And you can’t in this instance show partiality to the poor man because he could really use the money and the rich man has more than his “fair share” anyway. Justice is always on the side of the truth, and one of the two men is not telling the truth. Charity and generosity and good stewardship are certainly called for in life. But here justice means doing what is fair, not making outcomes the way we think they should be.
Our contention is that social justice in the Bible is not an achieved result but equal treatment and a fair process. No bribes. No backroom deals. No slanderous judgments. No breaking your promises. No taking advantage of the weak. That’s what the Bible means by social justice.2 Ideally, justice is blind. That’s why Lady Justice on our courthouses has her eyes covered. That’s why the US Supreme Court building has inscribed on it the words “Equal Justice Under Law.” Justice means there should be one standard, one law, for anyone and everyone, not different rules for different kinds of people.
Loving Others in Our Attitude (vv. 17–18)
Love is concrete, but it is also affective. “You shall not hate your brother in your heart.” It’s not enough to be polite on the outside and full of rage on the inside. If we are angry with our brother we should “reason frankly” with him and try to work things out. The bottom line is that you are to love as you would want to be loved (as Jesus expressed in the Golden Rule, Matt. 7:12; Luke 6:31). We are responsible not just to treat our neighbors rightly, but to take the necessary steps so that our hearts can feel rightly toward them as well.
So in the end this great commandment to love your neighbor as yourself—this commandment quoted in the New Testament more than any other—boils down to five very elementary, everyday, ordinary commands: share, tell the truth, don’t take advantage of the weak, be fair, talk it out. Simpler than you might think. But still easier said than done.
Our next text outlines the arrangements for the famous Year of Jubilee. This is a favorite for champions of “social justice,” but what the text says may be different than many imagine.
The Year of Jubilee (which probably never took place) was supposed to occur in Israel every fifty years. The celebration had two components to it: a return to the original land allotments, and freedom from servitude.
The First Component Dealt with Land
Leviticus 25 looked forward to the time when Israel would inherit the Promised Land and receive tribal inheritances from God (see Joshua 13ff.). Over time, some people would inevitably be forced to sell some of their land. Whether that was because of death, locusts, bad weather, thieves, poor management, or laziness—no matter what precipitated selling off their land—every family would get its original allotment back during the Year of Jubilee. The poor would get relief; the rich would lose some of the land they had purchased.
Prior to the Jubilee, you could get your land back by paying the redemption price. This price of sale and the price of redemption were both calculated based on how many years remained until the next Jubilee. So in essence you could never really sell or purchase land, only lend or rent it. The original owner had the right to buy back the land at any time. So the sentence at the end of the last paragraph is not exactly accurate. The rich would not lose their land so much as the lease would run out on the land they were renting from their poorer neighbors.
There were other miscellaneous laws concerning walled cities, unwalled villages, and Levitical properties, but the basic principle for Jubilee was pretty straightforward: (1) land could be sold/leased for a price based on the number of years until the Jubilee; (2) land could be purchased back at any time according to the same principle; (3) after fifty years all land titles went back to their original holders.
The Second Component in the Jubilee Dealt with People
There’s a progression going on here. If you were in financial trouble, you could sell/lease some land to your nearest relative. If that wasn’t an option, you could sell/lease some land to a nonrelative. If that didn’t work, or you ran out of land altogether, then you went to the next step: get an interest-free loan (i.e., a loan of subsistence, not a loan of capital), which would be forgiven every seven years. If a loan didn’t fix things, you could sell yourself to another Israelite. In a worst-case scenario, you could sell yourself to a stranger or sojourner living among you. In both of these sell-yourself cases, you could be redeemed by a family member or by yourself at any time. The purchase price was calculated based on the number of years until the Jubilee. If there were more years until the Jubilee, you had to pay more for your freedom; if there were fewer years, you paid less. And if you were still a slave at the Jubilee—an Israelite slave, that is, not a foreign slave—you would automatically be released.
A Call for Caution
We’ve simplified things quite a bit, but this is the general outline for the Jubilee provisions. Knowing that the Year of Jubilee provided for the release of slaves and the reallocation of property, many Christians equate the Year of Jubilee with forced redistribution programs. But advocating such an approach based on Leviticus 25 runs into a lot of problems.
1. We are not an ancient, agrarian society. Most of us don’t deal with land and farming. None of us deals with slaves or indentured servants or walled cities. More to the point, land is not our chief source of capital. Some of the richest people in the country may live in a penthouse in Manhattan and own very little land, while a farmer in South Dakota might have thousands of acres and a lower standard of living. So freeing slaves and returning land to its original owners just isn’t the world most of us live in.
2. Most importantly, our property has not been assigned directly by God. This is the real bugaboo for trying to apply the Year of Jubilee directly. What is “year one” for landholders? Last year? 1776? 1492? The Year of Jubilee makes sense only when it is seen in the context of the Holy Land. Canaan was God’s gift to Israel. He wanted his people to have it. He wanted the original tribes and clans to keep their original inheritance. True, the Year of Jubilee was about helping the poor, but it was also about the perpetuity of the original land allotments. The whole thing holds together because God had assigned specific properties to specific tribes (and not in equal amounts either). The ownership of the land had been defined by God himself. That’s why it could not truly be sold, but only leased.
3. Our economy is not based on a fixed piece of land. Consequently, the pie of wealth is not fixed either. In Israel (like most places in the ancient world), if someone got rich, it was probably because someone else had gotten poorer. The rich got rich because the poor got poor. Or, at the very least, the poor getting poor enabled the rich to get richer. If you squandered your money or lost it, you would have no choice but to sell your land or yourself. Bad break for you, good break for someone else. Prosperity, for the most part, was a zero-sum game.
But in a modern economy, wealth can be created. This isn’t to say the rich never exploit the poor. That happens too. But in a capitalist economy, the rich can get richer while the poor also get richer. This is, in fact, what has happened in virtually every country over the last two centuries. Almost across the board, people live longer and have more, even if many people do not have anywhere near as much as people in the industrialized world enjoy.
4. Modern nations are not under the Mosaic covenant. We aren’t promised miraculous harvests in the sixth year. The blessings and curses for the covenant people in Leviticus 26 don’t make sense in our context, and don’t directly apply to America or any other nation.
5. Most of us are not Jews. If you read the Jubilee laws carefully, you’ll notice that they distinguish sharply between Israelites and foreigners. The Year of Jubilee was good news for the Israelite, but didn’t do anything to help the non-Israelite. In fact, if a stranger lived among the Israelites and acquired land, he would lose it all at the Jubilee and have no land in Israel to return to. If a foreigner was made a slave, he wasn’t released. But if he had a Hebrew slave, he had to release him and his family. So if we want to make the Year of Jubilee our model for justice, how would we apply this distinction? Between legal citizens and nonlegal residents? Between people from our country and people from outside our country? Between Christians and non-Christians?
We’re not saying the Year of Jubilee was unjust—only that its aim was something other than “social justice” in the way people often use the phrase today. The Year of Jubilee was about keeping the Israelites free and in the specific land allotments God gave them. Certainly an important part of Jubilee was the alleviation of poverty and God’s care for his people. But if you weren’t part of God’s people, it didn’t do much to help you.
Now What?
We mention the five points above to caution us from applying the Year of Jubilee in a feel-good way that doesn’t do justice (ironically) to the text. But none of this is to say that Jubilee has no ramifications for how we look at wealth and poverty. There are several applications.
1. We do well when we give opportunities for the poor to succeed. Of course, we should not be ruthless to the poor. We should not take advantage of the weak. But more than that, we should look for ways to give them a fresh start.
The great thing about these Jubilee laws is that they didn’t just give a lump sum of cash to poor people (though that can be called for in some situations). Jubilee did something better. It gave the poor opportunities. It gave them access to capital (i.e., land). It granted them new freedoms. It was intelligent assistance. Not everyone should be given a handout, but everyone needs the opportunities that make economic self-sufficiency possible. The Year of Jubilee didn’t do for people what they needed to do themselves. But it gave the poor tribes, clans, and families another opportunity, by God’s grace, to make something of themselves.
2. The Bible supports the existence of private property. The land in Israel was owned not by the state, but by individuals, families, clans, and tribes. In fact, the property rights were guaranteed to the original landowners in perpetuity by God himself. The permanence of the landholding served as an encouragement to cultivation, development, and initiative. This was their land and they had the right to earn a living by it. There are few factors more crucial to economic prosperity than the right of personal property and a strong rule of law to protect this right.3
3. The Bible relativizes private property. The right to own property was not absolute, but derivative. The true owner of all land was God (see Lev. 25:23). “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof” (Ps. 24:1). Jubilee reminded the people that they weren’t going to get the big prize in this life. The Israelites had to give back newly acquired land every fifty years. We have to give everything back every seventy or eighty years (Ps. 90:10). Private property is not what we ought to be living for.
4. Our God is the God of second chances. A text like this might be used to support modern bankruptcy laws and prisoner rehabilitation. It would certainly support the existence of a social safety net—by the state some might argue, but certainly within the family and the covenant community. Jubilee intended to give at least some people a chance at a fresh start, and it’s good to provide the same chance for the poor and disadvantaged in our day. In the New Testament, this theme gets transposed to a spiritual key, teaching us that we should be willing to forgive and release others from their spiritual debts against us (Matt. 18:21–35).
5. Jesus is Jubilee. When Jesus read from the Isaiah scroll in Luke 4, his simple message was, in effect, “I am Jubilee.” He did not lay out a plan to accomplish social reform. Instead he stated matter-of-factly, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). All that Jubilee pointed to and more were realized at the revealing of Jesus in Nazareth. The best news of Leviticus 25 found its fullest expression in the good news of Jesus Christ.4
The first chapter of Isaiah begins with the Lord’s stinging rebuke of Judah and Jerusalem (v. 1). They are rebellious children (v. 2), lacking in understanding (v. 3). Judah is a “sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity” (v. 4). Because of their rebellion, God’s people have been struck down, bruised, bloodied, and besieged (vv. 5–8). Of course, God offers the hope of forgiveness and cleansing (v. 10), but the dominant theme in the chapter is one of disappointment. God’s people have been wicked.
How so?
Well, their failure was not for lack of religious observance. They were meeting together for worship and keeping the festivals of the Lord. But the Lord was not impressed. He could no longer endure their iniquity and solemn assembly (v. 13). He had come to hate their feasts and was burdened with their perfunctory obedience (v. 14). The Lord would not even listen to their prayers (v. 15).
Their problem was one that recurs often in prophetic literature: they were getting the details of religion right but not the heart of it. Outside of “church” the Israelites were doing evil, not good (vv. 16–17). In particular, they were guilty of injustice toward the fatherless and the widow, the basic categories in the Bible for the helpless and vulnerable (v. 17).
What was the injustice?
Your princes are rebels
and companions of thieves.
Everyone loves a bribe
and runs after gifts.
They do not bring justice to the fatherless,
and the widow’s cause does not come to them. (v. 23)
The Lord was angry with his people because the leaders were oppressing the weak, taking bribes to side with the rich and powerful instead of treating fairly the orphan and the widow.
We’ll see this in other passages, too, but Isaiah 1 is a great example of the Bible saying both more and less about social justice than we think.
On the “more” side, we see that Jerusalem is called a “whore” because of her injustice (v. 21). Oppressing the poor and the helpless is not a negligible offense. In fact, it renders all their religious obedience null and void. Until they would “seek justice” and “correct oppression,” God promises that Judah would be “eaten by the sword” (vv. 17, 20).
But on the “less” side, notice that the oppression here was not a disparity between rich and poor or even that the poor in society were not taken care of. There are other biblical passages that require the covenant community to take care of the poor in their midst (which is not identical to taking care of the poor in the entire “mixed” society), but this passage is about oppression, a term not to be equated with poverty.
The injustice was not that there were poor people in society. Poverty does not inherently indicate injustice. God’s people were guilty of injustice because they were defrauding the weak and helpless in order to line their own pockets. Specifically, God was angry with the kings because “in the ancient Near East, the concerns for justice, oppression, and the helpless were the special province of the king.”5 Justice called for Judah’s king (and any other pertinent officials) to stop taking bribes and start defending the just cause of the helpless instead of cheating them. The prophetic rebuke of Isaiah 1 belongs on the men and women guilty of these crimes.
Isaiah 58 is the more famous cousin of Isaiah 1, but they both deal with the same theme: God is not impressed with fastidious religious observance when the daily lives of his people are filled with wickedness. God says, in effect, “Your fasting and sackcloth are meaningless to me so long as you continue in rank disobedience to more important commands.”
How were the Israelites sinful? They oppressed their workers, which usually meant defrauding them of agreed-upon wages (v. 3; James 5:4). They quarreled and “hit with a wicked fist” (Isa. 58:4). They conducted business and sought their own pleasure on the Sabbath (v. 13).
What should God’s people have done? They should have loosed the bonds of injustice and let the oppressed go free (v. 6). They should have shared bread with the hungry, clothed the naked, and welcomed in the homeless poor (v. 7). God promised “your light [shall] break forth like the dawn and your healing shall spring up speedily,” but only when the Israelites acted righteously and poured themselves out for the hungry and the afflicted (vv. 8–10).
Clearly, caring for the poor, the hungry, the afflicted is not just a liberal thing to do. It is a biblical thing to do. We must allow this uncomfortable chapter to discomfort us a bit. Those of us in conservative circles can get all sorts of religious ritual right, but it counts for nothing and less than nothing if we do not love our neighbors as ourselves.
Calvin summarizes:
Uprightness and righteousness are divided into two parts; first, that we should injure nobody; and secondly, that we should bestow our wealth and abundance on the poor and needy. And these two ought to be joined together; for it is not enough to abstain from acts of injustice, if thou refuse thy assistance to the needy; nor will it be of much avail to render thine aid to the needy, if at the same time thou rob some of that which thou bestowest on others. . . . These two parts, therefore, must be held together, provided only that we have our love of our neighbour approved and accepted by God.6
The implications of Isaiah 58 are straightforward: God’s people should hate oppression and love to help the poor.
The basic command of Jeremiah 22 is given in verse 3: “Do justice and righteousness.” God’s people (technically the kings in this verse) are commanded to do justice. We cannot obey God and ignore the divine call to justice. In fact, the Lord told the kings of Judah that judging the cause of the poor and needy (rightly) is to know him (vv. 15–16). It didn’t matter their titles, their wealth, or their religious observance; if the kings oppressed the poor instead of treating them fairly and mercifully, they proved their own ignorance of God. And if they continued in such flagrant disobedience, the kings and their kingdom would be wiped away (vv. 24–30).
So doing justice is hugely important. But what does it mean? Thankfully, Jeremiah 22 gives us some answers.
Jeremiah 21 and 22 were not addressed to anyone and everyone (though the chapters apply in various ways to all). These were words directly for the kings of Judah (21:3; 22:1, 11, 18). Ancient kings had tremendous power to do good or evil. To put it anachronistically, they wielded, all by themselves, executive, legislative, and judicial authority. They tried cases, made decrees, and enforced laws, just or unjust.
Tragically, in the waning years of Judah’s sovereignty, the kings acted unjustly on all three accounts. Their one overarching vice, what Phil Ryken calls “luxury by tyranny,”7 took many forms:
Doing justice, against this backdrop of crimes, was not terribly complicated. It meant the kings would do the following: judge the poor fairly instead of exploiting them, stop cheating the poor and lining their royal pockets through oppression, and quit snuffing out the weak in order to get their land or their stuff. No king, or any Israelite for that matter, guilty of these sins could possibly know, in a covenantal sense, the God of Israel. To know God was to obey him.
So here’s the point for us: Christians who do not cheat, swindle, rob, murder, accept bribes, defraud, and hold back agreed-upon wages are probably doing justice. Christians guilty of these things are probably not Christians at all.
The fifth chapter of Amos contains some of the most striking and most famous justice language in the Bible. The Lord rebukes his people for turning “justice into wormwood” (v. 7), for hating the one who speaks the truth (v. 10), for trampling on the poor (v. 11; see also 4:1), for turning aside the needy in the gate (5:12). Because of their sin, the Lord despises Israel’s feasts and assemblies (v. 21) and threatens to visit the land with darkness and not light (vv. 18–20). The only hope for God’s people is that they “seek good, and not evil,” that they establish justice in the gate (vv. 14–15). Or, to quote the concluding exhortation made famous by Martin Luther King Jr., Israel must
let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (v. 24)
Clearly, God cares about justice and the poor. Conversely, his wrath burns against those who commit injustice and trample the poor. So what are the specific sins condemned by Amos?
Kicking the poor when they were down instead of giving them a hand up. It seems the wealthy were selling the poor into slavery even when the poor owed as little as a pair of sandals (2:6–7). This was cruelty instead of mercy.
Doing “justice” for the highest bidder. In ancient Israel the leading men of the town would gather at the city gate to decide the cases that came to them. Instead of making fair judgment based on the truth, the men of Amos’s day accepted bribes and paid no attention to the righteous plea of the poor (5:10, 12).
Arbitrary, excessive taxation on the poor to benefit the rich (5:11). The situation in Israel was the opposite of our current situation in America, where the very rich provide almost all the income tax revenue and the very poor pay no income tax at all and benefit from various programs and services paid for, in large part, by the taxes of the wealthy.
A smug assurance on the part of the rich who live in the lap of luxury on the backs of the poor. The wealthy in Amos’s day, like many in ours, were proud of their wealth. They reveled in it (4:1; 6:4–7). They felt secure in it (6:1). To make matters worse, their getting richer had been made possible by the poor getting poorer. They had cheated, perverted justice and, according to one commentator, made their money by “outrageous seizure” and illegal “land grabbing” (cf. Isa. 5:8).8
Amos 5 reaffirms what we’ve seen in the previous Old Testament passages. God hates injustice. But injustice must be defined on the Bible’s terms, not ours. Injustice implies a corrupted judicial system, an arbitrary legal code, and outright cruelty to the poor.
Micah 6:8 is the most beloved “social justice” passage of all. It is powerful, elegant, and straightforward. Micah 6 begins with a covenant lawsuit against Judah (“plead your case,” v. 1). Later the question is asked, “With what shall I come before the LORD?” (v. 6). Should God’s people bring a burnt offering or a thousand rams or a river of oil (vv. 6–7)? Is perfunctory ritual obedience pleasing to God? No! “He has told you, O man, what is good” (v. 8). And what is that? The Lord requires that his people
do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with [their] God. (v. 8)
But what does it mean to “do justice”? That’s the million-dollar question. And it must be answered exegetically. Micah unpacks his notion of justice by chastising Judah for all her injustice.
Some in Judah were coveting fields and seizing them, oppressing others through corruption and lawbreaking (2:2). Ralph Smith argues:
The chief offenders were a relatively small group of greedy, powerful business men who spent their nights devising schemes to get possession of the land of the small farmers. The next day they carried out their schemes because they had sufficient economic, political and judicial power to accomplish their goals even when their goals deprived a man and his household of their inheritance which was a part of covenant right.9
In other words, these men were land-grabbers, taking what they did not own. And they had the power to get away with it. They weren’t just buying more land—they were stealing it, in violation of the eighth commandment and in opposition to the stipulations about safeguarding a family inheritance.
In chapter 3, Micah inveighs against the “heads of Jacob and rulers of the house of Israel” (v. 1). This is probably a reference to the local magistrates who made judgments at the gate of the city. These men were like circuit court judges, responsible for administering blind justice that paid no attention to the status of the supplicant. Second Chronicles 19 explains how Jehoshaphat appointed judges who were to “judge not for man but for the LORD. He is with you in giving judgment. Now then, let the fear of the LORD be upon you. Be careful what you do, for there is no injustice with the LORD our God, or partiality or taking bribes” (2 Chron. 19:6–7). In this important chapter, the Chronicler gives us a clear picture of the quintessential picture of justice: judges who decide cases fairly and impartially. But tragically, the men in Micah’s day did not “know justice.” They hated the good and loved the evil (Mic. 3:2). They acted like cannibals toward their own people, chewing them up with their perverted power (vv. 1–3). They seem to have been especially cruel to the helpless poor (v. 5).
Shot through this corruption was a greedy love of money. The “heads” made decisions based on bribes. The priests taught for a price. And the prophets practiced divination for money (v. 11). As we’ve seen time after time in these “social justice” passages, the classic form of injustice is siding with the rich against the poor because the former will pay you for it and the latter cannot do anything to stop you. The rich, for Micah and the prophets in general, tended to be greedy bribers who took land by force, spoke lies to get their way, and oppressed the poor to increase their wealth (6:11–12). This is the sort of rich person the Lord disdains.
So what does Micah, and the Lord through him, mean by “doing justice”? He means we should not steal, bribe, or cheat. Conversely, we should, when we are in the position to do so, render fair and impartial judgments. And at all times in whatever calling, we should do good, not evil.
The Old Testament is passionate about doing justice. But Christians haven’t always given much thought to what the Bible means by that phrase. Doing justice is not the same as redistribution, nor does it encompass everything a godly Israelite would do in obedience to Yahweh. Injustice refers to those who oppress, cheat, or make judicial decisions with partiality. Doing justice, then, implies fairness, decency, and honesty. Just as importantly, we see that the righteous person does more than simply refrain from evil. He positively seeks to help the weak, give to the needy, and, as he is able, addresses situations of rank injustice.
Matthew 25 has become a favorite passage for many progressives and younger evangelicals. Even in the mainstream media it seems hardly a week goes by without someone referencing Jesus’s command to welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, and clothe the naked. And few biblical phrases have gotten as much traction as “the least of these.” Whole movements have emerged whose central tenet is to care for “the least of these” à la Matthew 25. The implications—whether increased government spending, increased concern for “social justice,” or a general shame over not doing enough—are usually thought to be obvious from the text.
But in popular usage of the phrase, there’s almost no careful examination of what Jesus actually means by “the least of these.” For example, one accomplished Christian scholar (though admittedly not a biblical scholar) argues that Christ makes “our treatment of strangers” a “measure of righteousness.” He then quotes from Matthew 25:34–40, followed by this conclusion: “To welcome the stranger—those outside of the community of faith—is to welcome Christ. Believer or nonbeliever, attractive or unattractive, admirable or disreputable, upstanding or vile—the stranger is marked by the image of God.”10 Now it’s certainly true that we all are made in God’s image. It’s also true, on other grounds, that dealing kindly with strangers, even those outside the church, is a godly thing to do (Gal. 6:10). But it’s difficult to conclude that this is Jesus’s point in Matthew 25.
The “Least of These” in Context
So who are “the least of these” if they are not society’s poor and downtrodden? “The least of these” refers to other Christians in need, in particular itinerant Christian teachers dependent on hospitality from their family of faith. Let’s look at the evidence that supports this conclusion.
1. In Matthew 25:45 Jesus uses the phrase “the least of these,” but in verse 40 he uses the more exact phrase “the least of these my brothers.” The two phrases refer to the same group. So the more complete phrase in verse 40 should be used to explain the shorter phrase in verse 45. The reference to “my brothers” cannot be a reference to all of suffering humanity. “Brother” is not used that way in the New Testament. The word always refers to a physical-blood brother (or sister) or to the spiritual family of God. Clearly Jesus is not asking us to care only for his physical family. So he must be insisting that whatever we do for our fellow Christians in need, we do for him.
This interpretation is confirmed when we look at the last time before chapter 25 where Jesus talks about “brothers.” In Matthew 23, Jesus tells the crowds and disciples (v. 1) that they are all brothers (v. 8). The group of “brothers” is narrowed in the following verses to those who have one Father, who is in heaven (v. 9), and have one instructor, Christ (v. 10). Jesus does not call all people everywhere brothers. Those who belong to him and do his will are his brothers (Mark 3:35).
2. Likewise, it makes more sense to think Jesus is comparing service to fellow believers with service to him rather than imagining him to be saying, “You should see my image in the faces of the poor.” Granted, Jesus was a “man of sorrows,” so to understand that sufferers may be able to identify with Jesus in a special way is wholly appropriate. But in the rest of the New Testament it’s the body of Christ that represents Christ on earth, not the poor. Christ “in us” is the promise of the gospel for those who believe, not for those living in a certain economic condition. Matthew 25 equates caring for Jesus’s spiritual family with caring for Jesus. The passage does not offer the generic message, “Care for the poor and you’re caring for me.”
3. The word “least” is the superlative from of mikroi (little ones), which always refers to the disciples in Matthew’s Gospel (10:42; 18:6, 10, 14; see also 11:11).
4. The similarity between Matthew 10 and Matthew 25 is not accidental. The pertinent sections in each chapter are talking about the same thing.
Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me. The one who receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and the one who receives a righteous person because he is a righteous person will receive a righteous person’s reward. And whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward. (Matt. 10:40–42)
Clearly, Jesus is speaking here of disciples. The context is Jesus’s sending out his disciples to do itinerant ministry (10:5–15). In the face of persecution and a hostile world (10:16–39), Jesus wants to encourage his followers to care for the traveling minister no matter the cost. The disciples would be solely dependent upon the good will of others to welcome them, feed them, and support them in their traveling work. So Jesus assures his followers that to show love in this way is actually to love him.11
Summary
In conclusion, Matthew 25 is certainly about caring for the needy. But the needy in view are fellow Christians, especially those dependent on our hospitality and generosity for their ministry. “The least of these” is not a blanket statement about the church’s responsibility to meet the needs of all the poor (though we do not want to be indifferent to hurting people). Nor should the phrase be used as a general cover for anything and everything we want to promote under the banner of fighting poverty. What Jesus says is this: if we are too embarrassed, too lazy, or too cowardly to support fellow Christians at our doorstep who depend on our assistance and are suffering for the sake of the gospel, we will go to hell. We should not make this passage say anything more or anything less.
The details of the story of the Good Samaritan are familiar to most Christians. A Jewish man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he was attacked by robbers. As he lay beaten and bloodied on the road, three men passed by. The first two were religious leaders in Israel: first a priest, then a Levite. Both did nothing. Finally, there came a Samaritan—a “half-breed,” a man from an ethnically and religiously dirty people. He alone stopped to help the man lying half dead in the street.
The point of Jesus’s story is simple: “Go, and do likewise” (Luke 10:37). Jesus tells this story because a lawyer is putting him to the test (v. 25). This man wants to know how to have eternal life. After Jesus tells him to love God and love his neighbor, the lawyer, “desiring to justify himself,” asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” (v. 29). The lawyer is hoping to define neighbor quite narrowly, but Jesus moves in an opposite direction. The gist of the parable is: don’t worry about figuring out “who is my neighbor?” but concentrate instead on being a good neighbor (v. 36).
What does all this mean for “social justice”? Most importantly, it means we must not limit our love to the people we like to love. The parable of the Good Samaritan is the narrative equivalent to Paul’s command in Galatians 6:10 to do good to all people as we have opportunity. Not every need will be presented to us as dramatically and with as much “ought” as a man half dead lying all alone in the road, but where need exists, race, nationality, gender, color, and political allegiance must not stop us from being the neighbor Christ calls us to be. Bock’s summary is apt: “The issue is not who we may or may not serve, but serving where need exists. We are not to seek to limit who our neighbors might be. Rather, we are to be a neighbor to those whose needs we can meet.”12
In the well-known parable of the rich man and Lazarus, a man who lived an opulent life ends up tormented in death, while a poor man who scratched a miserable existence in life is taken to Abraham’s side in death. In classic Lukan style, the afterlife results in a great reversal: those on top wind up on the bottom and those on the bottom find themselves on top (16:25; cf. the Magnificat in chapter 1 and the Beatitudes in chapter 6).
It is sometimes assumed that the point of the passage is that rich people are bad for being rich, especially when there are so many poor people in the world. But this is not exactly the point. After all, why would heaven be described as “Abraham’s side” if rich people (like Abraham!) are automatically excluded from heaven? No, the rich man in Luke 16 is not damned for having more than Lazarus. He is condemned because he has violated the axiom Jesus laid down earlier in the chapter: “You cannot serve God and money” (16:13). This rich man is like the rich fool of chapter 12, convinced that life consists in the abundance of one’s possessions (12:15), all the while ignorant of being spiritually impoverished (12:21).
Jesus is not against lavish feasting at the proper time. Just look at the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15. Nor does he assume we are implicated by conducting business in a fallen, greedy world. See the parable of the shrewd manager in Luke 16. But Jesus is steadfastly opposed to those who love things more than God. This is why Luke records the story of the rich young ruler. Yes, wealth is a monumental danger. It can be a deadly snare (1 Tim. 6:9). It is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom. But not impossible (Luke 18:27). It’s no coincidence that the story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19 follows the rich young ruler in chapter 18. Zacchaeus demonstrates how the rich can be saved. They don’t have to divest themselves of everything above necessity, but they must repent of swindling, make amends for wrongdoing, and give generously from their abundance.
Moreover, the rich man in Luke 16 is damned because he ignores poor Lazarus at his gate. His sin is a sin of omission. But this omission is more than a general failure to “do more” or “do enough.” His extravagant wealth makes him blind to the needs right in front of him. As John Schneider puts it:
The strong obligation-generating power is in the immediate moral proximity of someone in dire need. What makes the behavior of the rich people in these parables so very hideous and damnable is not that they had wealth, or even that they enjoyed it. It is that they did so, like the rich in Amos, in spiritual obliviousness to grievous human suffering that was as near to them, in the moral sense, as it could be. It was not merely that they neglected “the poor,” but that they neglected a human being in need directly in front of them.13
Lazarus, not the poor in abstract, was the rich man’s test, and the rich man failed.
Paul’s well-known instructions to the Corinthians on generosity can be divided into four parts: the look of generosity (8:1–7), the motivation for generosity (8:8–15), the administration of generosity (8:16–9:5), and the blessing of generosity (9:6–15). The recurring theme in both chapters is grace. Some form of the word appears ten times in these two chapters (8:1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 16, 19; 9:8, 14, 15). Paul goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the Corinthians have been given grace, they ought to be motivated by grace, their generosity will be grace to others, and it will result in more grace for them. Paul is not afraid to speak about money, but—and this is good advice for preachers—he couches the whole discussion in grace instead of shame.
One passage, 2 Corinthians 8:13–15, is particularly relevant to our examination of social justice:
For I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of fairness your abundance at the present time should supply their need, so that their abundance may supply your need, that there may be fairness. As it is written, “Whoever gathered much had nothing left over, and whoever gathered little had no lack.”
The basic principle here is pretty easy to understand: Christians with more than enough ought to share with Christians who don’t have enough. This, Paul says, is only fair. It’s interesting that Paul does not use the common Greek word for justice (something from the dik- root), but the unusual word isotēs, meaning equality or fairness. Still, the concept is related to justice. Just as God provided manna for everyone in the wilderness (Ex. 16:18), so the church is to be God’s manna equalizer now. If we have extra, we ought to share with our brothers and sisters who have too little so that there is some measure of isotēs.
Calvin’s application is wise:
Let us now apply the history to Paul’s object. The Lord has not prescribed to us an homer, or any other measure, according to which the food of each day is to be regulated, but he has enjoined upon us frugality and temperance, and has forbidden that any one should go to excess, taking advantage of his abundance. Let those, then, that have riches, whether they have been left by inheritance or procured by industry and efforts, consider that their abundance was not intended to be laid out in intemperance or excess, but in relieving the necessities of the brethren.14
That’s the basic principle: relieve the necessities of the brethren. But Paul is careful to guard against potential misunderstandings of this principle. For starters, the phrase “at the present time” suggests not only that the Corinthians may need help in the future, but that the present offering is a unique opportunity. The Greeks in Corinth have received spiritual blessings from the Jews; now they have an opportunity to present a material blessing to their brothers and sisters suffering from famine in Jerusalem (Rom. 15:22–29). The need of the hour is dire. Sometimes we forget that Paul’s eagerness to help the poor (Gal. 2:10) is not a blanket statement about wanting to help his community flourish, but a specific goal to essentially provide disaster relief to a sister church in Jerusalem.
Further, Paul makes clear that he is not asking the rich to trade places with the poor (2 Cor. 8:13). He does not expect that everyone will have the same amount and same kind of everything. Jesus’s disciples did not all have the same economic profile. Some were middle-class fishermen, one was a well-off tax collector, some women in the larger group were quite well-to-do (Luke 8:1–3), and others may have been quite poor. Jesus frequently warned against the dangers of money (Matt. 6:19–24), but he never insisted on a strict egalitarianism, nor did he espouse an austere utilitarianism (Matt. 26:6–13).
Just as crucially, we should note that Paul goes out of his way to explain that his appeal for generosity is neither a command (2 Cor. 8:8) nor an exaction (9:5). He has not come to tax the Corinthians, nor to impose a redistribution plan. “This is not a rigid and imposed ‘equality,’ as in communism,” writes Paul Barnett. “The initiative to give and the dimension of the gift lie with the giver.”15 Whatever redistribution takes place is to be strictly voluntary as God moves in the hearts of the Corinthians to see the grace they have been given and seek the grace they will receive through their generosity. Acts 5 makes a similar point. The early church had all things in common (Acts 4:32–34), but it’s clear this was a voluntary sharing from privately held goods. Peter rebuked Ananias and Sapphira for lying about their gift, but he also made clear that the problem was not that they owned property or that they kept some for themselves (Acts 5:4). The problem was their deception. As we give to meet the needs of our church family, then, the generosity must be honestly, cheerfully, and freely given.
The book of James is all about faith counting for something. While Paul stresses that faith alone justifies (Rom. 3:28), James emphasizes that the faith that justifies is not alone (James 2:24). “Show me your faith apart from your works,” he challenges, “and I will show you my faith by my works” (2:18). James will not allow us to settle for a coasting, comfortable faith.
There are many ways for our faith to “work.” Some of these relate to the poor. We should visit orphans and widows in their afflictions (1:27). We should treat the poor with dignity and not show partiality to the rich (2:1–7). We must not oppress the poor by cheating them of the payment we promised (5:1–6). The Bible condemns in the strongest terms fraud and favoritism. More than that, we are positively enjoined to show special compassion to the most helpless among us. If we truly believe the gospel of God’s grace, we will be transformed to show grace to others in their time of need.
You may want to reread the previous three sentences, for they provide a good summary of the Bible’s teaching on social justice: no fraud, no favoritism, help the weak, freely give as we have abundantly received.
But there is still much more that needs to be said by way of conclusion and to point the way forward on this hotly debated topic. That’s what the next chapter is for.
1Scot McKnight, "Jesus Creed" blog, January 29, 2010, http://blog.beliefnet.com/ jesuscreed/2010/01/20th-centurys-biggest-change-i.html.
2We'll discuss the origin and meaning of this term in more depth in the next chapter.
3See Hernando DeSoto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2003), for a detailed discussion of this idea.
4For more on Luke 4, see the discussions above in chapters 2 and 4.
5John Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah: Chapters 1–39, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 99.
6John Calvin, Calvin's Commentaries, vol. 8, Isaiah 33–66 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 233.
7Philip Graham Ryken, Jeremiah and Lamentations: From Sorrow to Hope (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), 328–30.
8William Rainey Harper, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary of Amos and Hosea (1905; repr., Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1973), 49.
9Ralph L. Smith, Micah–Malachi, Word Biblical Commentary (Nashville: Nelson, 1984), 24.
10James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 245. See also Richard Stearns, The Hole in Our Gospel (Nashville: Nelson, 2009), 292–93, for a similar conclusion.
11One of the first postcanon documents, The Didache, demonstrates that caring for traveling ministers was a pressing issue in the first centuries of the church's history. The Didache, which has been compared to a church constitution, contains fifteen short chapters, three of which deal with the protocol for welcoming itinerant teachers, apostles, and prophets. Some so-called ministers, the document concludes, are cheats looking for a handout. But as for the true teacher, "welcome him as you would the Lord" (11:2). See also Craig Blomberg, Matthew, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman, 1992), 378.
12Darrell L. Bock, Luke 9:51–24:53, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), 1035.
13John R. Schneider, The Good of Affluence: Seeking God in a Culture of Wealth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 178.
14John Calvin, Calvin's Commentaries, vol. 20, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), 297.
15Paul Barnett, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 415.