We often mistake the pursuit of justice as a problem. Then punish the justice seeker rather than extrajudicial violence.
Prudence Crandall and the prophetic witness
Luke 9:62–10:2
There’s a phrase that gets tossed around today: being on the right side of history. It evokes certainty of conviction as the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. We say that future generations will look back and recognize who was right and who was wrong.
As ideas go, this one sounds better than it actually feels.
Despite the popularity today of Martin Luther King, it was quite the opposite in 1966. And his commitment to pushing, not only civil rights but through the Poor People’s Campaign to move the country toward economic equality continues to be scrubbed from popular memory.
Accepting the conviction of unpopular, but good and moral justice is heroic work, not because it is hard, but because it often comes at extreme costs.
Losing …
employment and means of maintaining a living,
friendships,
freedom
even life itself.
There’s something about this that many of us feel averse to delve into. Either, perhaps, because it doesn’t align with our politics or worldview or else because it does and it frightens us.
Prudence Crandall
To consider what Prudence Crandall did, which is to treat humans like they are human, people as if they are worthy of dignity, demands that we face how unpopular an idea this was in civil society. Educating certain children was literally against the law. Which means people wrote laws to make it so.
One of the ongoing traits of our perpetual whitewashing of history so that none may feel the shame and indignity of our ancestors is what we actually do to the circumstances of the present.
People of Crandall’s day, before the Civil War, wrote laws to reduce the dignity of black people. All non-European people, really. As did people in the midst of Reconstruction to destroy equality. As they did during Jim Crow. And with the rise of the KKK. Civil Rights era. The rise of mass incarceration. As they do now. And at every stop along that way, they pretended that this is how it has always been. They would pass a new law and pretend it was always there.
Hindsight, mixed with present politics has a way of making the destructive acts of some into the permanent indignities of all.
All Crandall did was try to teach one girl and the town flipped out. She opened a separate school. Of course, we know why separate but equal was never the point. Nor is a simple act of bravery for the pursuit of human dignity treated as righteous. Extrajudicial violence is not only the tool, but the excused, justified method of white supremacists.
Injustice is tolerated to protect us from disruption. We fear reprisal more than we desire freedom.
Our whitewashed history
Again, it is easy, in our whitewashed history to see these things as past and yet the present is somehow permanent. Look no further than how quickly some have rushed to turn a 17 year-old murderer into some kind of hero. The attempts to vindicate extrajudicial violence of any kind as somehow just while the attempts of many to peacefully call for equal rights are treated as too disruptive.
It reminds me of the human impulse within dysfunctional family systems to actively avoid making a parent mad out of fear of the consequences. How we blame the victims of abuse or punish the spouse more because she should have protected the children.
Rather than replacing injustice with justice, our true moral conviction is to justify injustice and punish its disruption.
Of course, knowing this, with those present eyes of permanence we might see the injustice of the time, the injustice put upon Crandall, and the injustice put upon her students by the venomous white supremacists of her day. We might recognize it for what it is and feel far freer in condemning it than anything in our own day.
Pushing the Plough
But as Jesus names in our gospel, if you are taking the work of pushing this plough, you don’t get to turn back and go “what about…” You don’t get to defend a slaver when the slave gets “uppity”; you don’t defend the abuser for their abuse back here when the mission is taking us there.
Putting our hands to the plough means we have work ahead of us in this field. Work that involves harvesting and sharing in the kin-dom work God is growing. And in the next season, beginning again.
This ploughing work requires plowshares. Which, we know from Isaiah, must come with change. Changing our minds and hearts from violence and oppression; victory and supremacy; and taking our weapons of war and changing them into tools which will actually make peace. Our blood and sweat and tears going into the work of making peace, not the preservation of power.
The work ahead of us is this kind of kin-dom work. Teaching. Feeding. Transforming lives. Transforming unjust systems. Sharing in the dignity. Ploughing these fields. Full and abundant. With confidence that this, above everything else, is good work.