The Answer Is Justice

Rev. Dr. DeWayne L. Davis

This Week at Plymouth, August 23, 2024

“My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”

—Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

One of the most influential pieces of wisdom that has stood with me came from Bryan Stevenson, the attorney who started the Equal Justice Initiative to help death row inmates get their death sentences overturned. In his national bestselling book about his efforts, Just Mercy, he said, “The opposite of poverty isn’t wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.” That assertion inspires me, especially when I read the sacred texts. And it occurred to me that God’s answer to just about everything that goes wrong is justice. Even when humans seek to usurp God’s prerogative in response to one thing or another, when the human imagination fails, and people resort to the narrowest, most unfair, most violent responses, God always responds by doing justice and commanding justice. When the human imagination fails, the Divine imagination always calls for forgiveness, remission, and liberation.

Whether one reads the Bible literally or metaphorically, many readers widely acknowledge that it is a source of imagination. The biblical witness challenges us to envision and anticipate the movement and intentions of the Divine, even in the face of failure, scarcity, and barrenness. The Divine imagination continually shapes and reshapes us, defying the notion of hopelessness and loss. This Divine imagination comes into play when God acknowledges, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings” (Exodus 3:7). This closeness of God to human suffering provides comfort and assurance—God sees, hears, and understands. God is present and affected by pain and suffering. In response, God envisions how to bring justice to those in need.

The world is crying out for people of faith to recognize and address the suffering of others and to inspire a vision for a more just world. If we want to reclaim justice in our own time, if we’re going to inspire a new generation of disciples to embody the radicality of God, if we’re going to enlist a new vanguard to practice community and neighborliness, we begin by exercising our imaginations. We try to see, hear, and know and then act to ensure no need exists. In every prayer we utter, every hymn we sing, every social justice campaign we support, every contribution we make, every person we feed, every prisoner we visit, every LGBTQ person we embrace, every religious minority we respect, every homeless person we shelter, every person in recovery we tend, every immigrant we welcome, we demonstrate that we are proximate and present to the most pressing need for justice. We commit to using our imaginations to break business as usual by daring the world to respond and remove the need. That is justice.