Note from Rowland: This is a brilliant sermon, in my view, except for one word – in the last paragraph. The word is ‘unknowable’…

Harry T. Cook

11/09/08

Amos 5: 18-24

The little man from the little village of Tekoa about 10 miles due south of Jerusalem set down his pruning shears and shepherd’s crook (maybe he worked two jobs to make ends meet; we surely understand that) and made his way over rugged terrain 20 miles north-by-northeast to a foreign king’s court to tell him that justice ought to flow down with the same ease as water.

About the same percentage of people who still stubbornly believe Earth was created as it is today only 6000 years no doubt also believe that the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. coined the expression: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Dr. King used it well, but Amos, the little man from Tekoa, said it first.

Amos said it, if not directly to, then for the benefit of a king named Jeroboam II who was riding high in mid-eighth century B.C. either unaware or uncaring of the economic injustices that were startlingly obvious just beyond the palace walls. Who cannot love the Elizabethan cadence of that verse, “Let justice flow down like waters?” Yet it assumes that justice and water have the same properties. They do not. Water being fluid will inevitably seek its level, gravity being the agency of its doing so. It cannot help it. Going downhill is its nature, whether in cataract or rivulet. Justice, on the other hand, is not natural at all. It has to be arrived at and administered, often against human nature. Human nature is so simple as not turning the other cheek when one’s own is whacked but whacking the other guy’s cheek. Justice is the settlement of the issue that caused the whacking in the first place with strong admonition accompanied by no-nonsense incentive to whack no more. Justice does not flow down like water. It is conjured up out of thoughtful human initiative. That’s why Amos was banished from Jeroboam’s court and why things did not improve there insofar as justice was concerned. Amos was great at grit and oratory but did not have what it took to effect the justice he knew was due those forgotten and neglected and oppressed across the moat and over the wall. Justice is not like water. It doesn’t flow; it has to be extracted, organized and administered.

Time can do that. It did it to the Roman Empire which eventually collapsed of its own rotten weight. Time did it to the post-bellum South in America, but well more than a 100 years and several acts of Congress had to pass before it was done.

Justice may yet be administered to those who got obscenely wealthy on the backs of strivers who were suckered into sub-prime mortgages and now look for the sheriff to arrive any day with foreclosure orders in hand. Justice may yet be administered to those who not only didn’t look the other way when human beings were tortured in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib but were actually conspirators at a sanitary remove from the actual atrocities. Justice is said by some to be an attribute of an omnipotent deity. If that be true, why is injustice so frequently the rule and justice the exception? Why did the slave trade prosper, and why was slavery acceptable even to such revered founders of this country as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson? Why did 260,000-plus soldiers of the Union and the Confederacy have to die in the war to end slavery? Why did justice not flow down like waters? Because justice by nature does not flow down.

The great calling of people who would be religious in this and any time is to become extractors, effectors and ministers of justice. One loves one’s neighbor as oneself by making sure that he and you are respecters and doers of justice. One loves one’s enemy by causing him to yield when behaving unjustly and then to receive justice, however stern, when he ceases and desists. Another eighth century B.C. figure named Micah once asked this classic rhetorical question: “And what does Yahweh require of you, but to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly?”

“Justice” there is the object of the verb “to do.”

Justice doesn’t flow. Justice is done, or it is not done. If it is done, it is done, insofar as we know, not by an invisible, unknowable deity, but by caring, merciful human beings who understand that life without justice is like lungs without air. Not pleasant and not long.

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© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.