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Monday 27 August 2012
“Band-Aids Aren’t Enough!”

It reminds me of a parable I know. A man from a village was standing by a river and he saw a baby floating in the water. He let out a yell, dove into the water, swam out, grabbed the child, and swam back to shore. The next day another villager also retrieved a baby from the river. By the end of the week, the villagers had pulled dozens of babies from out of the water. It was hard work. It was exhausting work. And it never seemed to end. One day, the man who found that first baby started to run up a path — not to the river. The people yelled, “Where are you going? We need everyone available to help out!” He said, “I’m going upstream to see who keeps throwing these babies into the river and try to stop him!”

Powerful story. It’s about the difference between charity and justice. Charity is like committing those “random acts of kindness.” It’s those isolated acts of mercy that respond to certain specific needs, things like giving a warm blanket to a homeless person on the street or serving a meal to a person whose hungry. Justice is more of a systemic thing. It’s about reforming the societal context and conditions in order to more fairly correct things when the decks are stacked against certain kinds of people.

Metaphorically, charity is like giving Band-aids to people after they’ve had a trauma.

Justice is seeking to prevent those traumas from happening in the first place. And over the years, faithful Jews and Christians have leaned toward each of those two things. People like Florence Nightingale and Mother Theresa excelled in personal acts of charity and mercy, and people like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Micah, and Martin Luther King, Jr. focused on prophetic calls for social justice and transformation.

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