it's all about maintaining the status quo so that the people of privilege can keep their privilege

CONTINUING with Justice From Below by Walter Brueggemann.

This is the king's mishpat.  Justice read from above tends to be predatory.

That strand of Biblical justice, it seems to me, calls for a hermeneutic of suspicion because it is a confiscatory regime that transfers wealth, does this sound familiar?, from common people to the urban elites who preside over the military economy.

This will be the king's mishpat.

So you can read a strand of the Bible as justice from above and it is always about the maintenance of order and in order to meet, to maintain order you may need more police or you may need more armaments or you may need a bigger defense budget. But it's all about maintaining the status quo so that the people of privilege can keep their privilege.  Do you think I'm too hard on God's holy Word?

But there is in Psalm 99,* one of these five [Enthronement] Psalms, a segue to another kind of justice.   In 99:6-7, this is a little linkage text that's important to my argument - verse 5 says "Worship the Lord and his footstool," which means his Temple  But then the next verse says Moses and Aaron, amazing, were among his priests, Samuel was among them, they cried to the Lord and He answered, He spoke to them in a pillar of cloud, they kept his decrees and the statutes that he gave them.

And so these two verses are a little bit odd in the cosmic liturgy of Jerusalem.  They identify the great pre-monarchal leaders. Moses and Aaron and Samuel, they talk about the memory of how we groaned and cried out in slavery and they affirm that God answered. And then there's a one-liner in there, he led us by the pillar of cloud.  We can remember that we were in the wilderness.  And then it ruminates about Mount Sinai, of statutes and ordinances, now, therefore, Exodus 19, If you will obey my voice and keep my covenant you shall be my treasured possession out of all the People.  

So this justice that just gets a trace in Jerusalem, this justice is not order from above, but it is transformation from below. And what I want to suggest to you is that the Bible is essentially a contestation between these two notions of justice. And my experience of the practice of the Church is that the Church is an arena for contestation between these two practices of justice. You know, there is a joke in the Episcopal Church about where is the dividing line in the church between Republicans and Democrats and the answer is the communion rail. Some of us are on one side the the People on the other side.

I don't know. 

"It is always about the maintenance of order," reminds me of something that always comes back to me when I'm thinking about courts, especially Supreme Courts,  I think of how the Supreme Court allowed an execution to go through on the basis that the paperwork for the appeal wasn't filed on the schedule of a lower court.  As I recall that embodiment of the banality of evil,  Sandra Day O'Connor in a revolting tone of scrupulosity had something to say about "order" in that case.  

But it's hardly only the US Supreme Court, other courts can provide callous injustice on the same basis.  The atrocious Fells Acre case in which the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts, the governor, Jane Swift, certainly the prosecutor, Martha Coakley and others kept a clearly wrongly convicted family in prison, especially in the case of the son Gerald Amirault in the ritual child abuse hysteria of the 1980s and 90s.  As I recall the Supreme Judicial Court, the Massachusetts Supreme Court cited the desirability of having tidy procedure for the courts in their part in keeping clearly wrongly prosecuted and convicted people in prison with a guilty verdict on their record.  And that "finality" was more important, too.   It's a case that is such an example of judicial and prosecutorial, not to mention psychological-psychiatric shattering of justice that it had me in the odd position of being on the same side as Dorothy Rabinowitz who did much of the work of exposing the appalling injustice.   Or, rather that she was on the same side I'd been on from the start of that judicial-prosecutorial-pseudoscientific injustice.

Such is the case with the kind of justice that Walter Brueggemann brilliantly notes is present in the Bible but which is always in contestation with a quite different understanding of justice which is more likely to produce justice.   It was not until I started reading and listening to Walter Brueggemann that I'd been exposed to that key to understanding that reason that there is such serious, dangerous contradiction in the Scriptures, that it represents two entirely different strains of tradition among the Children of Israel, in the headwaters of the source of modern egalitarian democracy.  One is what the Kings and Temple priestly establishment deem it to be which, it should be no surprise, favors the rich, the powerful, the respectable and the well established, the other - and I hold true or at least truer side - favors the least among us most and the struggling and insecure as well.   

It's possible to go throughout history to see the same dynamic at work over and over again, in the Louis Boudin text it is seen in such pillars of the establishment as James Wilson fretting about the Congress, especially the House which is closest to having its power depend on the assent of the governed, acting "extravagantly" an interesting choice of words considering that extravagance is far more likely to be an attribute of the James Wilson, John Marshall class of people, a land speculator who made bad bets that literally landed a Supreme Court "justice" in debtors prisons and a fabulously wealthy Chief Justice whose wealth rested on hundreds of enslaved people against who he regularly handed down "justice" from that high bench. 

The Supreme Court of the United States is the high temple priesthood in our version of that contestation, the parts of the government that are closest to losing their jobs if The People vote them out are sort of in the middle, The People are the other side whether they realize that or not.  And there are lots of them who are suckered into looking up to the ones who are not going to provide them with the side of the justice duplex they need. 

The lawyers are functionaries of the court, I doubt many of them have the guts that Louis Boudin had in pointing out that the thing is not only a sham but it is the foremost engine of injustice and a danger to egalitarian democracy as long as it is allowed to retain its self-given power to thwart and, under the Rehnquist and, especially Roberts Courts, to attack equality and even The Vote.   

It is the key to understanding the entire collection of The Bible, that these two sources of content in it are two very different, yield entirely different results and can be seen all over the history of Christianity, Dorothy Day on one side, the putrid Francis Cardinal Spelman on the other side.  Archbishop Romero and the martyrs of Central America, the JPII papacy and the Reagan administration, with the American imperial christianity, on the other side.  

I think if Christianity as the following of Jesus is going to survive into the future it will have to finally choose the side of Jesus instead of the sticklers for legalism.   Most everything that is discrediting in the long history of Christianity is the side which chose worldly power, the side of Solomon who started out by killing off his rivals and ended up, as Brueggemann said earlier in the lecture, driving his kingdom into ruin. 

* Psalm 99

Praise to God for His Holiness

¹ The Lord is king; let the peoples tremble!
    He sits enthroned upon the cherubim; let the earth quake!
² The Lord is great in Zion;
    he is exalted over all the peoples.
³ Let them praise your great and awesome name.
    Holy is he!
⁴ Mighty King,^[a] lover of justice,
    you have established equity;
you have executed justice
    and righteousness in Jacob.
⁵ Extol the Lord our God;
    worship at his footstool.
    Holy is he!

⁶ Moses and Aaron were among his priests,
    Samuel also was among those who called on his name.
    They cried to the Lord, and he answered them.
⁷ He spoke to them in the pillar of cloud;
    they kept his decrees,
    and the statutes that he gave them.

⁸ O Lord our God, you answered them;
    you were a forgiving God to them,
    but an avenger of their wrongdoings.
⁹ Extol the Lord our God,
    and worship at his holy mountain;
    for the Lord our God is holy.

NRSV