Part of our series on abolitionist readings of texts from the Revised Common Lectionary frequently used in mainline churches.
Micah 6:8 is one of the most-commonly-quoted calls to justice in the Bible: “What does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
While the doing of justice is essential to the abolitionist project, the earlier verses in this passage make it even clearer the liberatory shape of the justice God proposes.
First, God rises up to “contend with Israel” (6:2): “O my people, what I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me!” The root of his contention is Israel’s forgetfulness of their history: “For I brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery” (6:3).
As James H. Cone, among others, has written, the call to justice, and particularly to freedom, in Israel is a direct response to God’s act of liberation in the Exodus. The foundational act of freeing captives in the Exodus is determinative of what justice means now, for Israel.
This is the context of Micah’s call to us in 6:8, to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly: doing justice means continuing God’s work of Exodus, of setting captives free. By remembering God’s work and God’s story in Israel, we see the pattern of our own justice turned toward abolition.