Friday 20 August 2010
Jesus and Lucifer on Social Justice ☀
The insidious message of the Lucifer Effect is that systemic poverty is not our problem, that we have enough to do taking care of ourselves, our families, and the individuals to whom we are charitable. This is a self-focused, narrow benevolence. It’s much easier to be merely charitable than to accept personal responsibility for social systems that perpetuate poverty. And when celebrities like Glenn Beck label social justice un-Christian, the Lucifer Effect encourages us to go along with the behavior and advice of an outspoken leader who offers us the easier path.
So take a look around. We’re all on the Jerusalem road, and in many ways it’s not a safe place to be. It may be OK for the well-to-do, who can hire private security guards, send their kids to the best schools, and pay for good medical care. But for the vast majority of working people—whose income simply isn’t enough to pay the bills and whose kids are trapped in dead-end schools—the Jerusalem road can be deadly.
WWJD and WWLD. Is the only difference between Jesus and Lucifer that Jesus would help the occasional victim while ignoring the unsafe conditions…and Lucifer would ignore both? Or should we read Jesus’s message of personal transformation in the larger context of social justice, the context Jesus himself established by choosing the words of Isaiah as his first public teaching?
