Belonging Together: Justice like an ever-flowing stream
- smegburke
- Jun 9, 2020
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 8
Words don't come readily to the things we are seeing these days. Images from the news of death, destruction and anguished protest only deepen the uncertainty. These past months of being apart have been an acute reminder to me that we belong together. But this turns into an ache, when I see how we fall so short of standing together in just society.
Martin Luther King, in his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ looks to the prophet Amos, and the apostle Paul for a creative way forward: “Was not Amos an extremist for justice: ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.’ [Amos 5.24] Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: ‘I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.’ [Galatians 6:17] … Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”
In Amos 5 there are some pretty sharp indictments, not just of attitudes, but of how we live together. King echoes these. Those who turn away from the cause of those in need do not get off easily with God, and it seems we can’t have justice without some form of judgement. This text imaginatively culminates with the the rolling waters, the flowing stream of yearned-for justice. This brings to mind another image, from the Visual Commentary on Scripture, which Jennifer Allen Craft describes:
In this painting, African American artist Jack Whitten responds to King’s ['I Have a Dream'] speech with a brilliant and bold illumination of that dream. Each face that emerges from the abstract colourful surface of his canvas powerfully asserts itself in the context of the whole, its identity pronounced not by virtue of race alone, but in relationship to the whole composition and to one another.[…] Amos speaks of justice in the mess of society, while the wild brushstrokes of Whitten suggest that in the mess of it all, there is still hope to be found. His image evokes a garden of colour, an Edenic space of promise that embodies the dream of justice.
I confess I don’t know how to stand together in such times, when I falter to understand very deep, real, and raw fractures in our society. I hope and pray it will be a time of listening, healing, and action towards peace. I am thankful to those artists, like Whitten, who provide imaginative and hopeful visions of what this can look like. For the prophetic voice of Amos, for the healing marks of Christ. Lord, show us how to bear these marks together.
Sources:
Image: King’s Wish (Martin Luther’s Dream), 1968 © The Jack Whitten Estate and Hauser & Wirth; Photo: John Berens
Martin Luther King Jr, Letter from Birmingham Jail, https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
'I Have a Dream', Commentary by Jennifer Allen Craft
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