Let’s Not Neglect Justice and Mercy and Faith

“HYPOCRITES! HYPOCRITES! YOU HYPOCRITES!” This past weekend, while watching the news about the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and the Republican response, these exclamations (and a few other choice words) kept screaming into my head — and occasionally out through my lips. Eventually, I realized I was responding, appropriately, in biblical terms. In the Gospel of Matthew (Ch. 23), Jesus responds in the same way to the politically powerful of his time, also calling them “blind guides” (v. 16) and  a “brood of vipers” (v. 33).

Hypocrites proclaim principles of behavior to which they will not conform themselves. They practice one of the worst forms of “situational ethics.” Hypocrites respond to a given situation in a way they declare to be the “right thing” to do in all such situations. When another essentially identical situation comes up, however, they do the opposite — because, this time, holding to the principle they proclaimed before might be inconvenient. It might deprive them of some highly desired outcome.

When officeholders are hypocrites, it’s an unmistakable sign that holding on to power is their highest value, whatever else they may say.

When Matthew’s Jesus uses the term, he calls out the “scribes and Pharisees” for misleading people, for pursuing self-interest, for neglecting “justice and mercy and faith” (vv. 16-24). The scribes were the Jewish legal experts of the time. The Pharisees were a faction of Jews demanding scrupulous observance of the Mosaic law. In all fairness, however, we should probably see the Pharisees in Matthew as anachronistic references that actually reflect internecine conflicts between members of the early Jesus movement and the Pharisaic leaders of the emerging rabbinic movement, following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E.

Even if naming the Pharisees is anachronistic, it is nonetheless clear that Matthew shows Jesus criticizing the behavior of the powerful elites of society. The essential charge he brings against them is neglecting justice and mercy and faith. When the powerful overlook justice and mercy, they mistreat their weak and vulnerable “neighbors.” When they neglect faith, they let self-interest guide their actions rather than justice and mercy.

You see, faith is not so much about “believing in” God or in Jesus, but simply about believing what God and Jesus tell us. Faith is more about trust than belief, per se. When Jesus says the greatest commandments are to love God and to love one’s neighbor (Mt. 22:36-40), we need to trust him. We should “believe him” and act accordingly. When Jesus tells us not to judge (Mt. 7:1), we should stop dividing society into dehumanizing “us-versus-them” groups and begin to accept diversity as the gift it is.

Consider this. When we hear Jesus saying “believe in me and you’ll be saved” (in the Gospel of John, for example), and we take it to mean “believe I’m God the Son and you’ll go to heaven when you die,” we may be missing the point. Perhaps Jesus is saying “believe me, trust my message to guide your actions, and we’ll live in God’s kingdom ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ (Mt. 6:10).” This would be to hear the word of Jesus as the expected messianic prophet like Moses.

Still, even when we see Jesus as the expected messianic king like David, aren’t we also being called toward social justice and mercy on earth, not toward greed and power and heavenly reward? In the time of Jesus, the messiah was expected to overthrow Roman oppression and establish an ideal kingdom in which justice and mercy would prevail. The ideal king in the ideal kingdom was to transform life in this world so that the prophetic ideal of justice and mercy, care for the widow and the orphan and the stranger, would become lived reality, here and now.

Could the good news, the gospel, be that Jesus is the “son of God” (not the “Son of God”)? Could we, in fact, be children of God, and thus siblings of Jesus? Surely, we are — especially when we end our hypocrisy, choose life (Dt. 30:19), and begin to act in faith with justice and mercy.