By Zdravko Plantak, PhD
In Mic. 6:8 we read: “He has told you, O man, what is good; What does the Lord require of you? To do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God!”
This is an extraordinary text that many regard as the pinnacle of religious and moral thought. The Talmud says that this verse, “by virtue of its three principles of doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God encapsulated the essence of all 613 commandments communicated to Moses.” A current biblical thinker describes it as “rightly celebrated as the supreme definition of ethical religion.”
In 1897, Charles W. Elliot, president of Harvard University, chose the second part of Mic. 6:8 to be inscribed above a statue symbolizing religion in the new Library of Congress building. In 1977, Jimmy Carter made it a focal point of his presidential inaugural address. So, one might ask, “What’s all the fuss? What does the Lord actually require from us?” Or, even more directly to God: “What do You want from us?”
You and I, “we mortals,” are reminded that God showed us what is good—what is “a better way,” what is truly moral, and what God requires in our life’s journey!
And we are given what one commentator calls “a trilogy of spiritual qualities that are as social as they are personal in nature.” Ronald Hyman, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, suggested that this triplet’s conciseness and its emphasis on only three verbs—doing, loving, walking— connected to three basic moral values—justice, mercy, and humility—make it comprehensible and easy to remember. “The series of three pairs of ‘a verb tied to a moral value’ creates an appealing poetic rhythm. Together, they constitute a series that is a moral guideline for behavior among humans; a goal worth striving for.”
How will “acting justly” look in faith communities, and specifically in a Seventh-day Adventist community? Honestly, every one of us will have to wrestle with this question in the local community, the place where every “tire rubs the road.” Each of us has the responsibility to figure out how we will implement the notion of “doing acts of justice” and how we will fight for justice in a very unjust world. We seriously committed Christians are invited to ask ourselves how our world would look if acts of justice were being done for the underdogs and the marginalized, for the poorest of the poor, for the unarmed children in schools, for those who are defenseless and helpless. How will I become the voice for the voiceless and the power for the powerless (Prov. 31:3) in the world in which there are still more than 1.2 billion people who live in abject poverty in which 22,000 children still die each day from poverty and from diseases that we can prevent with drugs or health education? Three million children die from malnutrition every year.
How will we, as an alternative and remnant community, act justly when neo-Nazis and white supremacists start walking on our streets threatening to get rid of the Jews, or the blacks, or those who are by some other designation different, or marginal? But, of course, there will also be many others who will never come face to face with us—and yet, doing justice will mean that we will need to advocate for them as well.
So, what is the first thing that God actually requires when He commands us to act justly (mishpat)? The Hebrew term mishpat is not a colorless word but is defined again and again. For example, Ps. 82:3 gives the word a shine: “Give justice to the weak, and the orphan; maintain the
right of the lowly and destitute.” Martha Moore-Keish (of Columbia Theological Seminary), put it this way: God calls us back to justice, “which means caring for the poor and needy, the widow, and orphan. . . . Provide for your neighbor, says the Lord through Micah. Stop offering sacrifices to me and start offering sustenance to those who need it most.”
Please notice that the prophet does not say “admire justice,” or pay lip service in sermons or small group discussions, but act justly. The Bible is interested in the deeds, in the place where the rubber actually interacts with the road, in our practices and not only our theories. Let us not belittle deeds and practices which we employ in our faith-life. Our personal and professional lives are supposed to include a resolute resistance to the crying injustices in the world, and there are so many such sighs and cries that we hear daily in recent times.
“It is not enough to wish for justice or to complain because it is lacking. This is a dynamic concept that calls on God’s people to work for fairness and equality for all, particularly the weak and the powerless who are exploited by others” (New Interpreter’s Commentary). It is not even enough to come to worship on the right Sabbath day, as Amos and Isaiah explained to God’s people. (See, for example, Am. 5:18-24. and Isa. 58.) This is the first requirement. There is a story about a lady who came to a professional photographer seeking to get special portrait photos taken. She said to him: “I demand that these photos do me justice.” The artist looked at her from several angles, and then looked once again and he replied, “Madam, you do not need as much justice as you need grace.”
Frederick Buechner suggested that “justice also does not preclude mercy. It makes mercy possible. Justice is the pitch of the roof and the structure of the walls. Mercy is the patter of rain on the roof and the life sheltered by the walls. Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things.”
And this connection brings us to the second requirement, which says: love mercy. To love people is one thing and to love mercy or kindness is another. Please note that here love is not a noun but a verb. We are not aiming at love but we love kindness and mercy. The object of love, in Micah’s case, is to pursue hesed—another rich Hebrew term with deep and varied meaning that can hardly be conveyed by any single English word. It is usually rendered as “faithfulness,” “loyalty,” “charity,” “merciful treatment of others,” or “kindness to those we are in a relationship with.”
In the 17th century, Stephen Charnock explained it beautifully: “The justice and mercy of God are united in a joint applause. . . . An eternal marriage is made between mercy and justice; both shake hands, and not only acquiesce but rejoice, . . . both pleased and both gratified. . . .” The third part of this profound threefold guide to moral life that God desires is a culmination because the first two parts deal with human-to-human relationships and this final part reflects the human-to-divine relationship. We mortals are requested to walk humbly with our God.
Walking is a metaphor for a life journey. Being on the way is more important than arriving. Christians are followers of the Way and often we are told that there are two possible paths, the wider one that leads us astray (or even to death), and the narrower one that yields life. (Deut. 30:15-20 and Matt. 7:13-14) Micah’s passage summons us to the path of “justice” and “kindness.” So, how are we to walk on that journey? Humility has often been misrepresented. Over the centuries, humility was described as groveling self-abasement through fraudulent piety.7
Nothing, however, could be further from the intent here in Micah. Walking humbly is opposite to walking proudly and pompously, or strutting. Prov. 30:28-31 illustrates such macho images of self-exhibiting as strutting—like a lion, a rooster, a he-goat, and a king.
Walter Brueggemann writes about such posturing in the following way: (Please note that this was written and published before the most recent political climate.) “As we have seen recently with so many ‘self-righteous’ politicians and ministers, such a strutting way often leads to embarrassment. . . . Such prideful strutting bespeaks arrogance, self-sufficiency, autonomy, the need to occupy center stage, the sense that I am the only one on the set.”
Pride of the one who struts depends on self-enhancement and self-congratulations, which leads to narcissism. Walking with your own ego is the dreariest and ugliest kind of walk that leads to ultimate alienation. Notice that the God we walk humbly with is called “your” God. What do we know about our God? It begs the question if we know what God is really like. It seems that American Christianity has recently made Jesus in our image, and “the American Jesus,” as we have seen in the recent examples of lack of discernment in terrible alliances between evangelical Christian leaders and politicians, leads to the often totally failed American Christianity. Our faith community needs to be warned, as the heirs of the radical Reformation, not to fall into this cultural trap and forget who may be Jesus Christ for us today, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned the German Christians 80 years ago.
There are so many biblically-unrecognizable Jesuses on offer today. But when you get to know the heart of the Jesus who cared, like every other prophet before Him, for the most vulnerable, the marginalized, the underdogs (yes, the widow, and orphan, and refuge-alien, and all those who are poor), you will not see the total eclipse of Christianity on offer today through the prosperity gospel and other utterly alien types of tamed and enculturated Christianity that side with corrupt practices, bigotry, and hate. Instead, what needs to happen is for Christians to take seriously again the call to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk closely to the biblical God who in humility laid down His own life for the sinner, for the fallen, for the bad, and for the lost.
So we are going (walking) somewhere rather than aimlessly and passively standing still. This companionship and developing friendship will inform us about our attitude to “our” God, the God we are in a relationship with, the God that we journey with. The view we have of God, and whether God is indeed our journey’s companion, will determine our humility and inform our perspective so that in the humility of that walk, we do what He requires of us and what He actually does in relationship with the world—that is doing justice and loving and affirming kindness and embracing, even more so loving, mercy. After all, Jesus in His famous first sermon on the Mount of Blessings, reiterates Micah’s message in Matt. 5:6-8: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
Consider a story told by Lowell Cooper, a former General Conference vice-president. In an article titled “Doing Justice, Loving Mercy” he tells of a woman in her mid-30s who arrived early at the departure gate for her flight and had time to relax and to read her book. Moments passed and she suddenly leapt to her feet, turned to the person sitting near her, and exclaimed: “I left my phone in the car!” She looked at her watch, threw her book and jacket on the chair, cried “I’ll be back,” and headed down the corridor. Cooper writes, “The determination of an Olympic athlete was on her face though her body lacked Olympic- athlete fitness. Through the corridor, past security and check-in counters, out the door, across the road and down the walk to the parking lot, she reached her car, grabbed the phone, slammed the door and began the return journey. Out of breath, she arrived at the security line—the place where one experiences eternity in the present. After what seemed like a century, she made it through security and raced (slowly now) for the departure gate. Other passengers had already boarded. Without breaking stride, she grabbed her coat, presented her boarding pass and headed on to the plane. Clutching her phone, she made it just in time—but she had forgotten her book on the chair,
Under the stress of thinking about one important thing (say, for example, worshipping on the right day or waiting for the soon coming of Christ) and concentrating our attention on the right doctrines, is there the danger of overlook- ing the other important aspects of what God might want from us? Is it possible that our single-minded thinking about the Advent might lead to an overriding attention to one aspect and the unintentional neglect of another issue, of “occupying while Jesus returns”? I hope we can get the phone and not forget the book at the departure gate.
Mic. 6:8: “Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly” into the world of so many invisible injustices, the merciless and graceless world, and the world that is proud and trotting and lacking even a modest amount of humility.
–Zdravko Plantak, PhD, is chair of ethics and director of the Ethics Graduate Program and professor of religion and ethics at the School of Religion at Loma Linda University. Email him at: [email protected]