 I've
always found the insights of the prophet Isaiah alarmingly
contemporary. One of the most striking is the outburst that we
read in Isaiah 58. People don't always see it that way, of
course. Frequently, the chapter is raided for reassurance.
Doesn't verse 11 promise us, for example, that the Lord will
guide us continually and satisfy our needs in parched places,
and make us strong? Doesn't it assure us that we shall be like
springs whose waters never fail? Well, yes, but only after some
very straight talk about utter neglect of responsibilities and
the dire need to mend our ways.
The context of
Isaiah 58 is clear enough. The people of God are very sure that
they are doing all the right things before God. They are caught
up in prayer and worship, they call on God to give judgments
(probably on the "unrighteous"), and they profess their delight
in knowing God's ways. They even go through rituals of
self-denial so that their religious zeal cannot be in any doubt.
But then it dawns on them with some surprise that God doesn't
seem to be giving the right response. They ask, "Why do we fast,
but you don't see? Why humble ourselves but you don't notice?"
(58:3). God's response through Isaiah must have come as a bit of
a shock, as it would to many of us Christians today: "Is that
what you call a fast—serving your own interests, quarrelling,
and oppressing all your workers?" (58:3-4, paraphrase).
The passage
points to two fundamentally different ways of seeing our calling
before God. One is that often reflected in our religious
subcultures: fights about purity of doctrine, nitpicking about
worship, internal disputes, and moral
crusades against
the ungodly. This is precisely the attitude of Isaiah's hearers,
who thought they were models of obedience. The other way is
reflected in God's response: that God's people need to be
fervent about justice, compassionate to the needy, and committed
to nonexploitative relationships. And real obedience is serving
those who are broken. For Isaiah, therefore, a key ingredient of
our calling is to "loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the
thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free" (58:6). This
is God's idea of a "fast."
It is the
juxtaposition of religious correctness and collusion with
exploitation that Isaiah rails against. The fact that the
believers are oblivious to the problem is no excuse. It simply
illustrates how easy it is to live with self-delusion, to
believe that we are custodians of God's truth—expositors of
God's revelation—even though we are missing the very heart of
it. Even worse, we can allow our ignorance to cloak the fact
that we are ourselves oppressors of the vulnerable and complicit
in acts of gross injustice.
In Isaiah's time
it was easy to identify those who were being oppressed. They
were the hungry, the ragged, and the homeless who existed in the
same communities where the people of God lived with abundance.
They were the workers that the pious worshippers treated badly
without even thinking about it. They were the same people that
James shouted about when he warns the rich oppressor that the
unpaid wages of the laborers who mowed their fields cry out, and
"the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord
of hosts!" (James 5:1-6).
Today, the
oppressed are not necessarily visible within our local affluent
communities. They are more likely to be hidden away, on the edge
of our cities, in slums or shanty towns, with many more living
in poor remote villages all over the global South. Yet we are as
much involved in their lives today as Isaiah's hearers were in
the lives of the poor in their communities. And we are as much
responsible for their oppression and exploitation. We may
disregard the poor today with the same indifference shown by
Isaiah's hearers, but our lives are still deeply interwoven with
their own. We eat their products, we buy their goods, we enjoy
their resources, we profit from their labor. We, in our wealthy
societies, reap the benefits of trading with the global poor.
The tragedy is that it often does not trouble us that we also
contribute to their poverty. For the trading patterns that
ensure that we can enjoy our goods cheap and live with luxury
are the same patterns that ensure that those who produce these
goods may be barely making a living.
Our world today.
We know the figures for global poverty well enough. Of the 6.2
billion people living on the planet today, 1.3 billion live on
less than $1 a day. And 2.3 billion live on less than $2 a day.
These stark facts alert us to the level of poverty that exists
in our world. But they don't reveal its complexity. For poverty
is not measurable purely in financial terms. It has multiple
features: hunger, malnutrition, high infant and maternal
mortality rates, and low access to fresh water, health,
education, information, transport, and financial services. It
also includes illiteracy, indebtedness, exposure to disease and
epidemics, vulnerability to climate change, and a whole range of
exclusions and experiences of powerlessness.
The paradox is
that since the 1990s, in the decade of the greatest increase of
wealth for the richest nations, the poorest nations have
received less and paid more. How did this come about? The Make
Poverty History campaign (a coalition of charities, development
organizations, religious groups, trade unions, and individuals
formed in the U.K. in 2005) highlighted three issues that
contributed to the deteriorating situation. It asked the G8 to
address the questions of more and better aid, the release of
debt, and trade justice. On the first two, considerable progress
has been made. On the issue of fair trading, we seem to be no
further forward.
Trade injustice
is the clearest parallel in our 21st century to the concerns
that Isaiah identified. For it is in our unfair trading
practices between rich and poor nations today that we exploit
and oppress others. So many factors built into the very process
of trade contribute to this situation.
Along with
unfair trade agreements, technology costs and wages play a
crucial part in maintaining the burden of poverty. Technological
dependence has often been built into exports, which has required
poor countries to pay high prices for components and (later)
purchases. Workers in poor countries can find their wages pushed
to a minimum by Western importers who make their profit in the
West and cut costs everywhere else. Western imports even can be
controlled through rules and quality requirements that are so
complicated that they can only be understood and operated by
those who impose them. In every instance, societies that are
already struggling to make a living find themselves on the wrong
end of a bargaining process.
Much of the
trading with the global South is done by multinationals, which
also contributes to the problem. For example, monopolies can be
established so that profits from manufacturing or harvesting raw
products in poor countries is maximized without competition.
Multinationals often bargain for exemption from taxes when they
manufacture in poor countries; they can also manipulate internal
transfer prices so their profits count at home rather than be
taxed in the countries that need that tax revenue most. If this
were not enough expression of power, they can also keep
countries poor by dominating the market and damping other
development or initiatives.
The biblical
call to justice. In Isaiah's prophecy God was holding the people
responsible for the consequence of their actions, even though
they seemed oblivious of its effects on the poor. Whether they
acknowledged it or not, they were guilty of injustice. In our
complex world, injustice to the poor has become structured into
the way we trade, consume, and live. And whether we acknowledge
it or not, whenever we buy something that has not been traded
fairly, we also are guilty of injustice. The call to us is no
less urgent than the call to the people in Isaiah's day.
What we need to
recover, as Christians, is a biblical concept of justice that
does not deteriorate into remote abstraction, and that is bigger
than mere impartiality. In his book Jesus and Politics,
Alan Storkey (my husband) suggests that we need "Jesus' emphasis
on 'loving justice,' marked by compassion, mercy, and powerful
commitment for others. This is not justice addressing wrongs
abstractly, blind to the people involved, but outgoing justice
for them." Loving justice is what Jesus teaches in his
parable of the vineyard workers in Matthew 20 and in the parable
of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. Loving justice is what
the prophet Zechariah calls for when he tells us "do not oppress
the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor" (Zechariah 7:10).
Loving justice is what reveals to us how deeply our own culture
is indicted by its complacency and self-interested indifference
toward the struggles of those whose work we use.
We don't know
whether Isaiah's words had sufficient impact on the people of
his day. But unless similar words have impact on the people of
our day, gross injustices will continue to dominate the trading
patterns of the world. We urgently need the loving justice of
Jesus to reveal to us our own responsibilities and give us the
commitment necessary to challenge and change the global
oppression and exploitation of the poor.
Elaine
Storkey is president of Tearfund, a U.K.-based Christian
international relief and development organization. She is also a
senior research fellow at Oxford University, broadcaster,
columnist for The Independent newspaper, and author of
several books.
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