It's Not Them: It's Us (Micah 2:3-5)

It is always easier to see evil and bad behavior in others.  It's a kind of distraction away from looking at ourselves too closely. Jesus made this clear in one of His more memorable metaphors: 

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, "Let me take the speck out of your eye," when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matt. 7:3-5)

If your gaze is always outward, seeing the what others should be doing or not doing, then you are not seeing your own shortcomings and not trying to remedy them. In fact your own failures will give you a kind of blindness, for you'll measure the person by your own standards, and not see how deficient your standards really are.  "I am not as bad as you!" is not a fair and just way to assess the behavior of others. 

That very blindness will cause you to do more harm than good. You think you are helping the person when in fact you are injuring or alienating them with your insensitivity. 

It is so easy for the Israelites to look upon their pagan neighbors and say, "Hey, we are not like those people!"  The more honest among them may have said, "Yeah, we are like those people, but we don't let things get out of hand."  

Either way, a plank of hypocrisy is making it hard for the Israelites to see the sin in their dealings with each other.  The injustice is coming not from pagans, but from the wealthy among them:

Woe to those who plan iniquity,
to those who plot evil on their beds!
At morning’s light they carry it out
because it is in their power to do it.
They covet fields and seize them,
and houses, and take them.
They defraud people of their homes,
they rob them of their inheritance. (Micah 2:1-2)

Instead of railing about the evil pagan practices the Israelites engage in (that will come later), Micah is pointing out in no uncertain terms how the wealthy are defrauding the poor, after much planning and plotting. This is utterly reprehensible. The wealthy landowners have power and use it to hurt their fellow Israelites--the ones who have very little and now with such evil people dealing with them, have even less or nothing at all.

You'd think Micah would then go on and talk about the pagan practices that stir God's anger.

No.

This kind of injustice stirs God's anger:

I am planning disaster against this people,
from which you cannot save yourselves.
You will no longer walk proudly,
for it will be a time of calamity.
In that day people will ridicule you;
they will taunt you with this mournful song:
"We are utterly ruined;
my people’s possession is divided up.
He takes it from me!
He assigns our fields to traitors."
Therefore you will have no one in the assembly of the Lord
To divide the land by lot." (2:3-5)

What goes around comes around: You defraud your fellow Israelites out of land with no remorse. "Your" (you took it from the poor) land will now be taken from you. Who will do this? The Assyrians. You will be as to them what the poor has been to you.

God is warning His people that their callous injustice has blinded them to the storm clouds that are gathering around them. They are so busy scheming that they do not see nor care that there are other people who are scheming against them.

I am thinking of this important quote from Pastor Niemoller. He was "a prominent Lutheran pastor in Germany. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he sympathized with many Nazi ideas and supported radically right-wing political movements. But after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Niemöller became an outspoken critic of Hitler’s interference in the Protestant Church. He spent the last eight years of Nazi rule, from 1937 to 1945, in Nazi prisons and concentration camps." [1]

Here is the quote:

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

The wealthy landowners in Samaria did not care about what they were doing, for they benefitted from the system they help to sustain. They never thought that what they did to others would one day be visited on them. They thought they'd always be in control and have resources to survive any challenges that came along.

Niemoller is making the very uncomfortable point that if we do not speak out about injustice being done to others, or worse, perpetrate injustice ourselves, the day may come when no one will care about what is being done to us. We alienated our neighbor with our callousness, and now our neighbor is either unwilling or unable to help us.

I am not talking about running out into the streets and screaming about injustice. (Is that the most productive way of solving a problem?) I think the people of God better serve injustice by providing resources and places where people can go to receive help, healing and compassion. Changed hearts change society. 

We need to cultivate relationships based on kindness and compassion. We love our neighbor as ourselves, because that very love is an extension of the love we have for God. We love Him with all of our heart, soul, mind and spirit and our neighbor gets that overflow.

Remember how Jesus answered Peter's question about, "Who is my neighbor?" with the parable of the good Samaritan? Sometimes those who have felt the brunt of scorn and alienation can be the most sensitive to when it is happening around them. The Samaritan could relate to the man in the ditch, because he had been in society's ditch for a long time.

Maybe Pastor Niemoller's blindness came from the fact that he didn't rub elbows with any of the groups he mentioned; they were just people, not neighbors.

We must remove those planks from our eyes, if we are trying to help others and act justly. Our blindness may cause more harm than good, or perhaps inadvertently foment more injustice.

God wanted His people to have utter clarity about what being His people meant as they followed Him, and how that was best demonstrated by how they treated one another:

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)

 

[1] "Martin Niemoller: First They Came For..."

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists