Fairness, accountability and restoration

The demand for fairness (impartiality, equity, justice) wells up in us from an early age. I was surprised to find this in the book of Amos.

I can't say that I can quote any passage from the prophet Amos off the top of my head, but from the little I have recently read about him, I knew that his message to the northern kingdom of Israel some hundreds of years before Jesus' emergence on the human scene, would still be important today.

So, what a lovely surprise to find the prophet-shepherd quoted in today’s edition of The Christian Science Monitor!  Here is the piece, titled “Yusef Salaam and the ‘ultimate justice’” from contributor Ken Makin:

If Yusef Salaam had lost faith in the justice system, let alone electoral politics, it would have been understandable. As a teenager in 1990, he was convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and spent nearly seven years in jail. 

And yet, Mr. Salaam, one of the five men exonerated of raping and savagely beating a Central Park jogger in 1989, grew more determined. Last week, he won a seat on the New York City Council representing Harlem. A few months before he announced his candidacy, Mr. Salaam stood at a ceremonial gate that was unveiled to honor the Exonerated Five’s resilience and independence.

“We are here because we persevere,” Mr. Salaam said at the time.

There are times when a gate works as a dam – a prison. Gatekeeping is the activity of limiting access and controlling resources. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke allegorically many years ago about how we might break open the floodgates: “Now is the time for justice to roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Dr. King’s reference to the book of Amos wasn’t just aspirational. It was a call to accountability. Even as Mr. Salaam walks in the way of Harlem activists such as Malcolm X and iconic politicians such as Adam Clayton Powell, there are still injustices that profoundly affect Black people. As we highlight the individual stories of the exonerated, we should be mindful that there is a collective of people who seek independence from poverty and homelessness.

The potential that comes from that social uplift is limitless, as Mr. Salaam said when asked about the arc of his life on PBS. “It strikes me as the ultimate justice,” he said. “In faith and in faith communities, they always talk about when God restores, you get back 100 times what was taken.”

Reading this has spurred me to begin the work of actually reading the book of Amos, instead of reading about the book! (Someone has said that the best text we need to understand the Bible is the Bible itself! Haha.) By the time I got to chapter five, I was getting the gist of the prophet’s message. Under the rule of the misguided Jeroboam, things were much too comfortable in the newly separate kingdom of Israel. The wealth and ease of many had created a malaise of complacency, pretention and indolence. Further, they completely ignored God.

Amos’ poetic imagery (5:24) rings out in its call for justice and fairness:

…let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.

The Message (by Eugene Peterson) phrases God’s message via Amos thus:

               I want justice—oceans of it. I want fairness—rivers of it.

Mary Baker Eddy speaks of justice as “the eternal attribute of Truth”.  

The signs of these times portend a long and strong determination of mankind to cleave to the world, the flesh, and evil, causing great obscuration of Spirit. When we remember that God is just, and admit the total depravity of mortals, alias mortal mind, — and that this Adam legacy must first be seen, and then must be subdued and recompensed by justice, the eternal attribute of Truth, — the outlook demands labor, and the laborers seem few. To-day we behold but the first faint view of a more spiritual Christianity, that embraces a deeper and broader philosophy and a more rational and divine healing. The time approaches when divine Life, Truth, and Love will be found alone the remedy for sin, sickness, and death; when God, man's saving Principle, and Christ, the spiritual idea of God, will be revealed.
(Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 2:6)

And  so, today it is to Truth, God, that we turn as our “remedy for sin, sickness, and death”.

    For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the Lord... (Jeremiah 30: 17)

Julie Swannell