The “Greatest Commandment” that Jesus identifies in Matthew 22 and its parallels originates in the Torah (even the precise combination Jesus makes is found in earlier Jewish sources*), and its presence in the reading from Leviticus for this week sits the command to love your neighbor as yourself next to a series of other social-oriented instructions. Here’s a simplified list:
- Do not base your judicial outcomes on defendant’s income (19:15)
- Do not slander each other (v. 16)
- Do not profit based off other’s pain (v. 16)
- Do not hate each other (v. 17)
- Do not let injustice slide (v. 17)
- Do not center retribution in your relationships with one another (v. 18)
All of these are surmised in vv. 2 and 18 with general commands: “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” and “love your neighbor as yourself” (NRSV). I’ve adjusted the wording for the others from direct translation in hopes that we see how obviously our society fails to live up to even the spirit of these commands, particularly in the criminal justice system.
Our judicial outcomes are absolutely driven by defendants’ income. Innumerable people take plea deals for crimes they didn’t commit because they can’t afford a lawyer with enough bandwidth to defend them and they don’t want to risk even more punishment and prison time. The public defense system is woefully inadequate (Maine doesn’t even have one, other states are governed by state and county funding, which is far from equitable across geographies) and the plea deal is often the least worst way out. At the same time, the rich have no trouble avoiding lawsuits, punishment, and other consequences for regular wrongdoing. When they fail to avoid it, in fact, it makes news.
The accused and convicted (guilty or not) face immense slander, including barriers to employment, the ballot box, and other critical re-entry needs. The American system very much uses them as scapegoats and heap upon them social ills that many conveniently ignore in light of presumed guilt.
In 2017, the Prison Policy Initiative estimated that the cost to state and federal governments (and impacted families!) for our incarceration system is upwards of $182 billion. Billions of those dollars go to private prisons, as well. Whatever way you cut it, extraordinary amounts of people are making extraordinary amounts of money off the pain of those who suffer in our prison system (guilty or innocent). This structure certainly falls woefully short of Leviticus 19:16’s injunction against “profit by the blood of your neighbor.”
The remaining commands are also easily seen as violated. The prison industrial complex only multiplies hate. Our collective (often willful) ignorance of its evil points to our own guilt. The entire system also centers on retribution rather than love for neighbors. Preaching on Leviticus usually isn’t popular, but the Torah is radical in its reproach of our society and preachers should feel empowered to use it as a matrix for judgment. No genuine conscience can look at the prison industrial complex, read these words from Leviticus, and walk away comfortable or at ease. Sometimes, that’s how we need to leave church on Sunday morning—at a fundamental dis-ease with the world around us.
Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his) is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina.
* – See notes on Matthew 22 in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, ed. Levine.