God’s Social Justice

YHWH enters into judgment with the elders and princes of His people’ “It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the plunder of the poor is in your houses.  What do you mean by crushing My people and grinding the face of the poor?” Isaiah 3:14-15

Grinding – “So the common man has been humbled and the man of importance has been abased, but do not forgive them” (Isaiah 2:9). What?  Isaiah prays that God not forgive.  What insensitive, irreligious attitude is this?  Can you imagine any preacher rising in the pulpit and beseeching God not to forgive those who listen from the pews?  No wonder the people murdered the prophets.  No one wants to hear a man of God proclaim that his sins will go unremitted.  But Isaiah had good reason for such a shocking prayer.  Both the common man and powerful leader were abusing the poor.  They were grinding the face of God’s most precious ones in order to fill their houses with luxury.

The Hebrew verb, tacan, means “to crush, to grind into small pieces (as in a mill).”  The idiomatic expression, “to grind the face of the poor,” means to oppress the poor, to use them for one’s own advantage.  If there were ever a word that describes the economic disparity in this world, this is that word.  Remember it.  Tacan (tä·khan’).  When you pay $5.00 for your next cup of Starbuck’s, think of tacan, and the $2 a day that the harvester gets paid to gather those beans.  When you try on those khakis at the Gap store, think of tacan and the 15 cents that the single mother was paid to sew them at the factory in Honduras.  Spend $30 on a Maidenform bra.  She was paid 18 cents to make it.  Enjoy the “Kelly Reed” dresses at major discount stores.  Someone breathing polluted air and living in squalor outside Port-au-Prince worked for $0.12 per hour to make them.  How about that pair of Nike shoes?  The company contributed $2 a day to the worker who produced 12 pairs.  Tacan.  Isaiah applies the word to the common man as well as the community leadership.  How will we survive his declaration, “Do not forgive them!”?

I have a dream.  My dream is not as powerful or as noble or as far-reaching as the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King.  It is a simple dream.  It is a dream about a village in Honduras.  The village doesn’t need a name.  There are dozens of them.  Any one will do.  It is home to fifty people, mostly women and children.  The men are gone to look for work or simply escape.  The children eat when they can, once a day if they are lucky.  There are no sewers, no clean water, no electricity, no medical clinics, no schools.  In twenty-five years, most of these people will be dead.  My dream is not for them.  My dream is for those who will be born between now and the time this village falls into ruin.  My dream is to turn this village into a community, a group of people who are productive, who care about each other because they aren’t desperate about living, who have discovered there is someone from the bubble-world of Nike shoes and Starbuck’s and Maidenform who will sacrifice for them, not to give them relief but to give them dignity.  As I said, it is a simple dream.  But my feet seem to take me there whenever they can.

Topical Index:  tacan, oppress, grind, Isaiah 3:15, Isaiah 2:9