Isaiah 43:16–21
Every year, the state and local governments in the United States pour more and more money into a criminal justice system that is fundamentally broken. Despite the fact that police fail to resolve the vast majority of significant crimes and that prisons fail miserably at preventing crime, the bipartisan American political establishment is unwaveringly committed to throwing more and more money at these failed institutions. The budget plan that President Joe Biden released this week goes out of its way to emphasize that it funds the police with “$1.97 billion in discretionary funding to support state and local law enforcement.”
“Budgets are statements of values,” President Biden rightly said and the values his budget espouses represent the American commitment to violence. The American imagination is obsessed with violence as the solution to the economic scarcity induced by capitalism, the criminality created by our legal codes, and the estrangement we feel from one another nurtured by decades of harmful systems and policies. The American consciousness accepts largely without public critique the idea that doing violence to each other will somehow stop violence in our midst, even though this idea has been roundly criticized for millenia.
Isaiah’s imagination is different. In the passage from Isaiah this week, the prophet depicts God as one who “makes a way” (v. 16) in the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of a churning sea. God neutralizes the weapons of war and instruments of violence — “they are extinguished, quenched like a wick” (v. 17). This God declares: “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (vv. 18-19).
Invoking the Exodus, Isaiah provokes us to imagine a new thing, to forget the way we’ve always done things. Yet the American response to its social ills is not to embrace whatever new thing God may want to do among us. The American response is to hold on to the former things and the things of old as if they are the only thing standing between us and death.
The criminal justice system in the United States all too often does not stand between us and death. It is itself an instrument of death. Consider the ludicrous example of Arslan Guney, a 71-year-old man who faces the prospect of a felony for drawing with a sharpie on a gym floor in Colorado. Far from making rivers in the desert, our criminal justice system could send this man to prison creating death where there was life. Consider the role of prisons during the pandemic. Public health experts warned that our prison system would become an “epidemic engine,” destroying the lives of prisoners and people outside their walls. Instead of pursuing decarceration, pandemic relief money often went to funding bloated police departments and investment in even more prisons. American jails hold over 450,000 people not because they have even been convicted by the criminal justice system but because they cannot pay bail or they are being held preventatively without a trial, a system ripe for abuse. Untried incarcerated people experience damage to their families, careers, and communities as the system brings about even more death in our midst.
What does Isaiah propose as the solution, then? Immediately before the lectionary passage, God commits to “break down all the bars” (v 14) in Babylon, a reference to the systems of incarceration and slavery in the ancient empire. It turns out God is quite the abolitionist! God promises to turn the tables on those dedicated to the Jewish people’s imprisonment and bondage. But according to Isaiah, while God promises all of these things, God’s people do not call for God to live up to those promises. In the United States, Christians do the same. We worship a God who in the first sermon of Jesus proclaims (again, in the voice of Isaiah!) a commitment to setting prisoners free, but so many of us do not pray for that God to come. Instead, we fund police and prisons with our prayers and tax dollars, convinced that $1.97 billion dollars in the hands of inherently violent institutions will keep us safe.
Every year, we make the same mistake, but what if we didn’t?
Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his) is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina.