Micah 6:6-8 & Matthew 23:23

Brothers and sisters in Christ,

This evening’s Bible passages are Micah 6:6-8:

⁶ “With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
⁷ Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
⁸ He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

and Matthew 23:23: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.”

These two passages remind us that scrupulous, or even extravagant, obedience to the minor points of God’s law does not by itself please God. Claiming his authority to add to his law truly displeases God. In the first passage, Micah mocks the human eagerness to placate God with sacrifice. The speaker begins with a legitimate bid of “burnt offerings” of “calves a year old,” but then exaggerates what may be required (“thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil”) and ends with a sinful willingness to sacrifice his children to a false god. In the second passage, Jesus condemns the Pharisees’ obsession with parsing God’s law down to the smallest possible detail: “You tithe mint and dill and cumin.”

In both cases, we read of what God really requires of humanity. In Micah’s words, we are to “do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [our] God.” The justice in view is not a rigid, blindly enforced, punitive justice, but one characterized by a love of kindness and a humble walk with God. The word “humble” is important. The true nature of justice is not a matter of arrogant human assertion. It’s something best learned from a lifetime (or, on a communal scale, from centuries) of walking humbly with God or, to put it another way, of walking in step with the Spirit (Gal. 5:25). In Jesus’s words, “the weightier matters of the law” begin with justice. But the justice he has in mind is one tempered by mercy and faithfulness. Mercy perhaps corresponds to Micah’s love of kindness, while faithfulness (some versions prefer “good faith” or “honesty”) may be another way of saying that justice is not a matter of self-interest but of a humble commitment to the well-being of all who are made in God’s image.

How, though, do we set about making laws for a more just society? Or choosing who to vote for in pursuit of a more just society? The Bible gives us some general principles, but it’s not always easy to see how they apply to our particular context. Perhaps you’ll be helped to think about this—as I have been—by the fairly simple suggestion of the moral philosopher John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971). Rawls proposes a “hypothetical scenario” in which a group of persons is set the task of reaching an agreement about the kind of political, economic, and legal structure they want for a society, which they will then occupy. Each individual, however, deliberates behind a “veil of ignorance”: each lacks knowledge of his or her hypothetical gender, ethnicity, skin color, age, intelligence, wealth, skills, education, religion, language, and other key factors. In short, no one knows who she or he will be in this society. What laws would you propose under these circumstances? What kind of agreement would best promote a more just society? You may want to spend some time pondering possible answers to these questions, alone or with others.

Your brother in Christ,

Max