For most of us, though, loving our neighbor involves reaching out to those neighbors whom we see by giving them practical aid, and/or donating to and working at local food pantries and clothing ministries, ministering with the homeless, and addicts, in the United States, and helping other local groups. Some of us reach farther afield by sending donations to help the neighbors we do not see who live in foreign countries.
But there's another integral component to merciful love: justice. In another great command, God calls us to "act justly, love tenderly, and walk humbly with our God." (Micah 6:8) What does it mean to act justly? How is justice different from the average Christian's private charity?
There is a famous parable that explains the difference between charity and social justice. Once there was a town which was built just beyond the curve of a large river. One day some of the town's children noticed three bodies floating down the river, and ran for help. Townspeople came quickly and pulled the bodies out. One was dead, so they reverently buried him. One was sick, so they took her to a hospital. One was a healthy child, whom they placed with a loving family. Day after day, bodies came floating down the river. The townspeople became quite adept at pulling them out and taking care of their needs. They developed great systems for on-the-spot and follow-up care, and were quite proud of their town's unselfish generosity.
But there was one thing that no one in the town ever thought of doing. Despite their generosity, no one ever thought to go up the river and beyond the bend that hid from their sight what was going on in the world above them, to find out why daily all those bodies kept floating down the river.
Private charity responds to those floating homeless, sick, wounded, and dead bodies, but does not of itself try to discover the reasons that they are there. Social justice goes up the river to try to change the reasons, the systems, that create homeless, sick, wounded, and dead bodies. Social justice looks at political, economic, social, and religious systems within which we all live to see what exactly is causing some of us to be unduly penalized and some of us to be unduly privileged.
"Thus social justice has to do with issues such as poverty, inequality, war, racism, sexism, abortion, and lack of concern for ecology because what lies at the root of each of these is not so much someone's private sin or some individual's private inadequacy, but rather a huge, blind system that is inherently unfair.
"Hence justice differs from private charity: Charity is about giving a hungry person some bread, while justice is about trying to change the system so that nobody has excess bread while some have none; charity is about treating your neighbors with respect, while justice is trying to get at the deeper roots of racism; and charity is about helping specific victims of war, while justice is about trying to change the things in the world that ultimately lead to war.Charity is appeased when some rich person gives money to the poor while justice asks why one person can be that rich when so many are poor....Social justice is about trying to organize the economic, political, and social structure of the world so that it values equally each individual and more properly values the environment." (Fr. Ronald Rolheiser, in "The Holy Longing.")
The world has changed so radically that today the Christian churches have placed a greater emphasis than ever before on social justice. Until the industrial revolution, the main moral focus of the Christian churches was on the family, the unit on which the existence of the culture depended. So they emphasized monogamy, sex as linked to marriage and procreation, mutual respect within marriage, and the duties of parents and children towards each other.
But the industrial revolution brought a whole host of new issues: exploitation of workers, urban poverty, slums, anonymous urban living, people living isolated from family structures. So the churches began to teach about new values: "the necessity of just wages, moral checks to unbridled capitalism, the rights of unions to exist, private and government responsibilities to the poor....As the world's moral problems widened, so too did the church's spirituality.
"Finally, just within the past generation or two, there has been another major development. As the questions of world community, gender, race, overpopulation, ecology, and abortion begin constellating in a new way, the churches' moral agenda as regards social justice is also widening and refining in a way so as to reflect this development. Hence, today the Christian churches are very much focused on the moral issues surrounding gender, race, class, and historical privilege." (Rolheiser)
Today, our understanding of social justice has widened again. American theologian Elizabeth Johnson summarizes "Postmodern spiritual experience prizes not isolation but essential connectedness; not body-mind dualism, but the holistic, embodied person; not patriarchy but inclusive feminism; not militarism but expenditure for the enhancement of life; not tribal nationalism, but global justice." (in "The Search for the Living God.")
When we look to structural sinfulness, we can see how unjust structures are the root causes of many problems, such as the fact that millions of babies, far more than would be warranted by medical issues, are aborted in the U.S. each year. I have yet to meet a pro-choice friend who doesn't believe that during an abortion, a human life is ended. But many lament the fact that women are continually faced with a patriarchal system that turns a deaf ear and blind eye to rape, that produces husbands and boy friends who demand that babies be aborted, and leaves desperate women without economic or social support structures. Even if Roe versus Wade were reversed, the culture, the structures themselves, would continue to demand abortions. Hence the need for more people to work for just structures to support pregnant women.
"When a particular woman enters a hospital or a clinic seeking an abortion she is more than a simple individual making a private decision. She is the tip of a cultural pinecone. Behind her, helping push her into that clinic and that decision, stands an entire system (economic, political, cultural, mythical, and sexual). Her problem is as much political as it is personal. How so?
"Democracy....in the ideal...is a fair system, but in practice, it is not. Those who enter the arena with historical privileges, with stronger voices, and with more valued skills reap more benefits than the others. Conversely, those who have not been historically privileged, who have weaker voices, or possess less valued skills end up being disprivileged and find themselves at the bottom of the chain. It is no accident that laissez-faire democracy has rarely been kind to the poor.
"In such a system, to be entirely voiceless, as are the unborn, is to be exceedingly vulnerable and in the ever-present danger of being decertified right out of existence. That is one of the systemic issues underlying abortion. There is another, more important one.
"We live in a system, a cultural one, within which it is acceptable for men and women to have sex with each other even though they are in no way committed to each other and do not wish to have children with each other. In such a system, abortion is inevitable and no laws and no law enforcement can stop it because the system will continually keep producing someone (who could be anyone) who finds herself pregnant and isolated in a way that would make the birth of this child from this man at this time an existential impossibility for her. In such a climate you will always have abortion and the particular woman who is seeking the abortion is dealing as much with a political issue as she is with a personal one. She is the tip of a pinecone behind which stands a whole culture that has chosen to dissociate sex from marriage and procreation. In such a system, wherein sex is an extension of dating, abortion will always happen. Abortion can stop only if the system changes. This does not excuse abortion, but it does explain it." (Rolheiser)
Today, a U.S. political system which is unjustly stressing national isolationism is both a morally bankrupt system, and a spiritually naive one. Today's global spirituality stresses global interconnectedness and global responsibility. With few exceptions, Christian churches today teach the following principles:
"God intended the earth for all persons equally. Thus the riches of this world should flow equally and fairly to all people....
"No person, group of persons, or nation may have a surplus of goods if others lack the basic necessities. That is the present situation within our world, where some individuals and nations have excess, while others lack the basic necessities. This is immoral, goes directly against the teachings of Christ, and must be redressed....
"We are obliged, morally, to come to the aid of those in need. In giving such aid, we are not doing charity, but serving justice. Helping the poor is not an issue of personal virtue and generosity, but something that is demanded of us by the very order of things." (Rolheiser)
Building a wall is not going to solve anything unless unjust global systems, some fueled by United States policies, change. For example, the U.S. has directed foreign assistance to Central American state security forces with shaky human rights records. Our Central American Free Trade Agreement was supposed to bring jobs to the region and reduce migration to the U.S. Instead it has enriched the already-rich and multinational corporations and displaced small farmers.
Mexicans aren't entering our country currently, as much as people from other countries. And a new wall won't stop them:
"If he (President Trump) builds it, they will still come.
"They will come from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, where a deadly mix of poverty, violence and corruption leaves families with no other option but to flee north. They will pay a coyote anywhere from $5,000 to $14,000 for three chances to roll the dice and make it across the border. They will risk extortion, kidnapping, and rape on the 2,500 mile trek north....When the road ends, they will walk for miles in the punishing desert heat of Northern Mexico...." ( Ashley McKinless, "Beyond the Wall," in "America" magazine's Jan. 23, 2017 issue)
Coming from countries whose economic systems still reward the rich and corrupt, and murder the innocent who protest, are these individuals and families economic migrants, who are subject to deportation, or refugees, who can claim a legitimate right to asylum?
Merciful Love demands both private charity and social justice from us. Do we content ourselves with a simple, non-threatening "take" on God's commands by only doing works of simple, non-demanding private charity? Or, do we choose to open our eyes to those strangers who are our brothers and sisters under God, who are suffering under unjust political and economic systems, and choose to also work for justice? Do we open our eyes and our hearts to the suffering and the rights of these neighbors of ours who many feel threaten the U.S. way of life? Or do we make them feel as invisible as the man beaten by robbers in Jesus' parable as we ignore them from our heights of economic privilege?
THE IMMIGRANT
I see you but you do not see me
I am made invisible by your special powers
Not mine. I have no power.
Your shiny car passes me
It does not have a speck of dirt
But I am filthy
Only my sweat shines at the bus stop
As I did today in the fields
I smell like dirt
I know you are not hungry
Because I see you in your red car
Driving to a fancy restaurant
You do not know I am hungry
Because you cannot see me
I had no lunch today
My belly hurts
But you cannot hear my emptiness
You only hear the music in your car
I see you but you do not see me
Perhaps all of me was left
In the woods where I slept last night
Or maybe the mosquitos sucked my life away
One by one as they found me on the ground
Because I had no blanket to cover me
So I itch. They saw me though you do not.
I dream of home. My mother and my sisters
Hungry, waiting for the money I will send for food.
"America...you will make lots of money
Our stomachs will be full
And your sisters will have shoes"
I hope my boss pays me this week
I look at my boots
These boots took me 15 days through the desert
Now they will bring me through the fields
And I wonder...
Is it the car that makes me invisible
Because I see you but
You do not see me
(written by Patricia Byrne, a retired community health nurse and hospital chaplain, who serves at St. Martin de Porres Community Outreach Ministry, in Ft. Myers, Florida. This poem appears in the January 2017 issue of "Sojourners" magazine)