The Church's Role in Justice

A big change for me

For about the first 50 years of my life, I had a very different view from the one presented by the book I recently read. My family and most of the families who were our friends and fellow churchgoers were part of companies’ management. They saw labor unions and government regulations as unjust and unreasonable hindrances.

As a result, I heard mainly the views of business owners and other executives, not their employees, and never the views of those who did manual labor and depended on hourly wages rather than salaries. I found the college course that I took in economics deadly dull, so I never wanted to pursue that topic any further. I’ve always managed my own bank account and have been moderately well informed about the stock market because of my father’s and my husband’s interest in it, but that’s been the extent of my awareness of economics and finance.

In recent years, however, I’ve realized that there are other valid viewpoints besides those I heard from my family and friends. I’ve therefore taken a new look at some economic and financial matters that I’d never previously thought much about. Some of what I read about them is still mostly like Greek to me, but the book I write about here is a welcome exception. It gives clearer explanations than those I’ve usually found elsewhere, and it present views and facts that I now know deserve attention. Many even relate to actions that following Jesus requires, like feeding the hungry and healing the sick.

What about health care?

It stays in the news, and opinions about plans for providing it keep bombarding us.  Caring for the poor and the sick seems to have been a huge part of what Jesus talked about, and the Hebrew prophets had a lot to say about it, too. Shouldn’t that make it an important subject to be talking openly about in the church? Yet dealing with health care is a political issue, and many churchgoers insist that politics doesn’t belong in church. Supporting a particular political candidate or party may well be out of place in church, but discussing the principles involved—who needs our help and why, and the pros and cons of various ways of giving the needed help—seems not only appropriate but actually necessary if we want to follow Jesus today.

Many Christians say the government shouldn’t provide health care for the needy. But until we fix the system, who else will provide it? I don’t see many churches or individual Christians doing it. I fantasize about contacting my local clinic and asking it to send me from now on the medical bills of at least one person who, unlike me, is unable to pay. If that person had no health insurance, I would pay for her to belong to the health plan I belong to. If she had a heart attack, I would pay for her treatment. I don’t have the nerve to do that, but wouldn’t it be today’s equivalent of being the Good Samaritan that Jesus told about? I suspect it would. What if all affluent churchgoers did it? What if sermons in our churches urged us to consider it? That’s really a fantasy, isn’t it! But why?