I Read a Quarter of the Bible and Thought I Knew It
I spent years in the Bible and still missed how much of it is about justice.
I was immersed in an individualized concept of faith, in which I need to have my quiet time every day so that I can grow closer to God. I thought that way for many years. And when I got out my Bible and my journal, I would often either read the letters of Paul, so I could think more about my sins or my salvation, or Psalms, so I could use its gritty language about my feelings.
Which means I felt like I read the Bible a lot, and knew the Bible well, but I was actually reading more like a quarter of it. I would hardly spend time in the Gospels, much less in the Torah or the Prophets. Without realizing it, I was skipping much of its message, especially what it has to say about communal responsibility.
Take a verse like Micah 6:8. I'd heard it, like most of us have. It's hard to avoid "do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly" on wall hangings and bookmarks. But I'd never actually sat with it, not with the kind of attention I gave Paul's letters. I had no idea how much its context ran through the entirety of Scripture.
The word for justice there is mishpatמִשְׁפָּט. It’s used over 420 times in the Hebrew Bible. And shaphat שָׁפַט, the verb at the root of it mishpat, is used over 200 times. For comparison, the word that means to have faith, believe, or trust, aman אָמַן, is used109 times.
And this isn’t even counting another Hebrew word for justice, tsedeqahצְדָקָה , used 157 times. Or a Greek word for justice, dikaiosyneδικαιοσύνη, used 92 times. (In fairness, we might not know that since the translators insist on using the righteousness for that one.)
That's not a stray statistic. Justice is a central message of the Bible. It’s a book that has more to say about how we treat our neighbor than what we believe about God. Most of us don’t know that. Not because it isn't there, but because of what we were taught to look for, and how we were taught to read.
As a result, many people experience a disconnect between justice and faith. People like me, who didn’t develop a solid foundation of how much the Scriptures have to say about justice. Which means those of us working towards justice often don't know how to connect our faith into it, even if we sense deep down that faith is part of the motivation.
If you're like me, you don't need someone to convince you that justice matters. You need help working through the disconnect.
Justice has been core to Lisa's work for years, as a prison chaplain rooted in abolition. I have wrestled with it, too, and taught with her on the importance of justice work in our faith praxis. But I have also struggled to find my place in ongoing work.
Operation Metro Surge shifted something for me personally, as I dove more deeply into support for my immigrant neighbors. But it also shifted something in us as we watched a wider community try to engage. The need to strengthen our voices and share what we have learned became more clear. So, after ten years of leading cohorts as spaces for personal formation, we knew it was time to build something that moved people into action.
That's the Justice & Faith Cohort.
From October through April, this cohort will dive in together, with opening and closing gatherings, and twice monthly circles in between. There's a curriculum that will root us in learning from both the Bible and justice movements that have come before. We will wrestle with and learn from each other.
I'm grateful for how much I've learned from Lisa. I hope you'll learn from both of us.
Steph
