Justice…Unbribed!
Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash
You have heard it said of old,
Do unto others as you would have them do to you.
Taken at its most generous, The Golden Rule approximates “the second great commandment,” “You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18; Mark 12:31). It is an approximation except that the Golden Rule continues to regard the “other” as “other,” whereas the great commandment transforms the “other” into “neighbor” (Luke 10:25-37). The “neighbor” is preoccupied with mercy, a step well beyond the quid pro quo of the Golden Rule.
You have heard it said more recently:
The Golden Rule: The ones with the gold make the rules.
It was Karl Marx who saw most clearly that our greatest “values” devolve into material practices:
“The criticism of heaven is thus transformed into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.”
Thus the more recent version of the Golden Rule moves beyond the initial quid pro quo to see economic reality as it actually operates. When the operative economic reality is made overt and considered with regard to racial matters, the “Golden Rule” is transposed into a social reality that has been constant in the United States through slavery, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Me Too Movement:
White people are above the law; Black people are outside the law.
The force of this Golden Rule is everywhere evident among us until the present day. While there are important gains that have been made in racial matters among us, the great weight of conventional racist policy and practice continues to matter enormously. As a result, when a Black person receives justice through our social system, it is no ordinary event, but a matter of great moment.
All of the foregoing was before me as I read The Piano Lesson by August Wilson. Wilson, in this play as consistently elsewhere, allows his Black characters to speak without restraint in their own idiom. The characters who come and go in Wilson’s play, including Whining Boy and Boy Willie, scheme and plan and talk endlessly as they try to gain small advantage in their world of imposed exclusion and deprivation. In one scene Boy Willie boldly asserts that he would claim for himself, as rightfully his, the property also claimed by a White man.
“Boy Willie: I’d come back at night and haul off his whole patch [of berries] while he sleep.” (August Wilson, The Piano Lesson, 1990, 38)
Whining Boy makes a cynical knowing response to Boy Willie’s boldness:
“Alright. Now Mr. So and So, he sell the land to you. And he come to you and say, “John, you own the land. It’s all yours. But them is my berries. And come time to pick them I’m gonna send my boys over. You got the land…but them berries, I’m gonna keep them. They mine.” And he go and fix it with the law that them is his berries. Now that’s the difference between the colored man and the white man. The colored man can’t fix nothing with the law.”
His analysis and conclusion smack of weary realism. Black people have no chance of fixing anything with the law, because the law is an artifact and tool of the white man. Whining Boy—and after him Wilson—intends to deliver our thinking from any innocence about equity, fairness, or the reliability of the law. He knows that the law is, in substance, a tool of power that functions to leverage the interests of white people against Black people who are helpless before the law. Boy Willie can respond to the skilled analogy of Whining Boy with this sure moral insistence:
“I don’t go by what the law say. The law’s liable to say anything. I go by if it’s right or not.”
He makes a knowing distinction between what the law says and what is right, and knows that the two cannot be reliably equated.
This sequence of thoughts flooded in on me as I read and considered the recent Supreme Court ruling in its further dismantling of the force of the Voting Rights Act. The Court ruled, concerning Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, that only the Justice Department can bring suit against faulty voting arrangements. The ruling denied the right of individuals and other parties (including the ACLU and the NAACP) to bring suit against distorted voting, thereby gutting Section 2 of its force, because the Justice Department cannot possibly attend to all such cases. The outcome of the ruling is that irregular voting procedures and practices will be even further unregulated, thereby making it possible, yet again (a longstanding practice), to deny the vote to Black people and others who remain “outside” the law of the ruling white class. The Court’s ruling is a brazen effort, in my opinion, to sabotage democratic rights and democratic procedures, thus giving aid and protection to established preferences and interests against the interests of those who live at the edge of political power and at the edge of legal protection. The recent ruling is formulated to function according to the more recent version of the Golden Rule; those with the gold make the rules. The outcome is that white interests are protected by the tilted court that denies legal redress to disenfranchised Black voters who remain outside legal reckoning.
This recurring legal maneuvering is beyond ready or easy challenge, and the church community has no particular access to the matter. But what the church can do is to teach. It can teach, as Boy Willie sees so clearly, that there is an important distinction to be made between justice (“if it’s right”) and the law (the rule of those with the gold). In our long-running white privileged perspective, we have easily equated justice and law, but the matter is clearly otherwise. The church may readily bear witness to its commitment to radical restorative justice that contradicts much of the complacency of the law. The Old Testament, in all of its parts, can regularly see that the law is easily distorted by “gold.” At the outset in the Torah, Moses saw that the great threat to social-covenantal-neighborly justice is exactly a bribe. Thus in the earliest Torah formulation:
You shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the officials, and subverts the cause of those who are in the right (Exodus 23:8).
In the great theme of the Book of Deuteronomy the matter is articulated in this uncompromising way:
You must not distort justice; you must not show partiality; and you must not accept bribes, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of those who are in the right. Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue, so that you may live and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you (Deuteronomy 16:19-20).
Moses can extrapolate from this teaching a characterization of the God of the covenant:
For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing (Deuteronomy 10:17-18).
It is most amazing that this “God of gods and Lord of lords” is distinguished for taking on bribes and is available for the wellbeing of the most vulnerable in society.
The prophetic tradition of Israel readily saw that the law is easily distorted by “gold.” Thus Micah can declare:
Its [Jerusalem’s] rulers give judgment for a bribe,
its priests teach for a price,
its prophets give oracles for money (Micah 3:11).
Nice triad: bribe, price, money!
They all lie in wait for blood,
and they hunt each other with nets.
Their hands are skilled to do evil,
the official and the judge ask for a bribe,
and the powerful dictate what they desire;
thus they pervert justice (Micah 7:2-3).
The prophets were familiar with the reality that the “powerful dictate.” They do so through judges who are available for bribery.
The narrative of Israel reiterates the theme. In his farewell speech, Samuel denies that he has taken any bribe (I Samuel 12:3). Yet his privileged, well-connected, dishonest sons did otherwise.
Yet his sons did not follow in his ways, but turned aside after gain; they took bribes and perverted justice (I Samuel 8:3).
The royal narrative twice reports on how “gifts of gold” tilt policy:
King Pul [Tiglath-Pilezer III] of Assyria came against the land; Menahem gave Pul a thousand talents of silver, so that he might help him confirm his hold on the royal power. Menahem exacted the money from Israel, that is, from all the wealthy, fifty shekels of silver from each one, to give to the king of Assyria. So the king of Assyria turned back, and did not stay there in the land (II Kings 15:19-20).
Ahaz also took the silver and gold found in the house of the Lord and in the treasures of the king’s house, and sent a present to the king of Assyria. The king of Assyria listened to him; the king of Assyria marched up against Damascus, and took it, carrying its people captive to Kir; then he killed Rezin (II Kings 16:8-9).
The wisdom teachers see how bribes evoke social prosperity:
A bribe is like a magic stone in the eyes of those who give it;
wherever they turn they prosper (Proverbs 17:8).
A gift in secret averts anger;
and a concealed bribe in the bosom, strong wrath (Proverbs 21:14).
The “entrance liturgy” in Psalm 15 shares this aversion to bribery:
Who may dwell on your holy hill?
Those…who do not lend money at interest,
and do not take a bribe against the innocent (Psalm 15:1-2, 5).
In the ancient world, as in our contemporary world, money as bribe does indeed alter social equations.
Given the force of money among us, it is curious indeed that the Revised Common Lectionary never, to my knowledge, gets to such texts. The teaching church must, nevertheless, get to such texts, and must alert the congregation (and so the body politic) to the reality that both faith and healthy social possibility depend upon justice not leveraged by wealth.
I can readily enough conclude that the Supreme Court ruling that tilts voting power away from the vulnerable is not a direct outcome of bribery. (Though this conclusion is open to question as we are aware of lavish gifts to certain Supreme Court Justices) The matter however is more subtle and long-term when “dark money” operates systematically and in secret in order to shape the constitution of the court so that it may favor the wealthy privileged to the detriment of the body politic.
By its very character the church cannot remain uninterested in the matter of law and justice. It is possible (and in my view urgent) that the church must mobilize the force of its scripture concerning this systemic disregard in which the vulnerable in the ancient world (widow, orphan, sojourner) and now in our society (Black and brown people, and people in poverty); they are characteristically denied their voice and role in the public process. Everything in the gospel is at stake in this matter. The news of the Messiah was first announced to the lowly shepherds in the fields of Bethlehem (Luke 2:8-14). These shepherds were the lowest rank in society, without right or leverage, and so without justice. It is wondrous that the report of the shepherds evoked amazement (Luke 2:17). It is always a time for amazement when the purpose of God overrides the killing force of nefarious wealth in the world.
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles.
