Social Justice is Not Enough

Most of the large protests and violence are over.  That’s good.  At this point, I don’t see a danger that the issue of social justice and systemic racism is going away anytime soon.  In my opinion, that’s good, too.  We have some work to do.  Anyone who reads the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament) should be fully aware that God is deeply concerned about issues of justice and concern for the poor.  The themes are ever-present in the wisdom literature of Psalms and Proverbs.  The prophets are bold and state it clearly, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8).

For the most part of its history, the Church has fulfilled that mandate.  When pandemics struck the Roman Empire, Christians courageously cared for all the sick, even if the afflicted weren’t believers.  At the time of the earliest plagues, Christians were scorned, even persecuted to the point of death, because their religion was illegal.  It was that level of outrageous love and care that eventually converted the majority of the Empire to the faith.  Throughout most of European history, it was the Church that established hospitals, orphanages, and relief for the poor.  And in America, it was Northern Evangelicals that led the fight for the eventual abolition of slavery.  The Church, when it has been faithful to its call, has always been on the vanguard of social reform.  It is true that conservative Protestants seemed to walk away from social justice concerns in the middle of the twentieth century to engage in theological skirmishes with their liberal cousins. But many conservative Evangelicals have become freshly engaged in ministries of justice and mercy in the last twenty years.  This is all good history and good news.

But it’s not enough.  Jesus was not a social justice warrior.  (Whoa!  Hold on!  I know that may be controversial for some people.  Keep reading!)  I know the first beatitude is “Blessed are the poor.”  I know that Jesus embraced social outcasts and healed many people with diseases.  He said it’s nigh near impossible for a rich person to enter the Kingdom.  But social justice was not the primary mission of Jesus.  When Jesus healed people, he told them to keep it quiet because he didn’t want to build a fan base from his healing powers.  Even when Peter declared that Jesus was the Messiah, he told his disciples to keep it quiet because Jewish people imagined their coming Messiah as a political and social justice champion. His mission went much deeper than the surface issues of the day.  Jesus did acts of mercy and justice as an outgrowth of who he was and as a signpost of the new world he was inaugurating.

Our culture desperately needs justice and acts of mercy.  But that’s not enough.  Injustice and the cruelty of life are symptoms of the sin-virus that infects the whole human race.  Sin – our rebellion against God – is the disease that has turned our good world upside down and made it ugly.  Ultimately, Jesus came to defeat the power of sin by offering himself as a perfect sacrifice for the whole world and rising again on the third day.  That was his mission.  And through his death and resurrection, he offers us a new heart, a new life, a new world – out of which will flow the justice and mercy that God has always intended.  This is the gospel.  This is the remedy that our world is crying out for in this hour.