Love Kindness

To act justly is critical to finding the right way. To neglect justice is to choose to go in the wrong direction; it is to lose our way entirely. But Micah’s message doesn’t stop at commanding right actions. God, he says, doesn’t just want right actions; he also requires that we ‘love kindness’.

To ‘love kindness’ is primarily to do with our attitudes, rather than our actions. In other words, the challenge of walking the right way is now going deeper than just deeds and words. If actions are to do with what we might call the exterior of our lives, to love kindness is to do with the interior. It focuses on what we are deep down inside.

Here, though, we may want to pause. Someone might say, ‘If my actions are okay then does it really matter what my attitude is like? Isn’t it enough for me just to do the right thing, even if my attitude is a million miles from desiring it?’ After all, no law court anywhere can prosecute you for wrong thoughts so why bother with attitudes?

The first thing here is that quite simply we cannot – and should not – separate attitudes from actions. What we are as human beings includes our emotions and desires. To concentrate solely on our actions as a measure of what we are is to have a distorted view of things. In fact the Bible teaches the rather disturbing truth that God sees our heart and judges our thoughts. He is interested in who we are as a whole, not simply the sort of appearance we present.

The second thing is that what we think determines what we become. Over time attitudes can become actions. If you repeatedly think angry thoughts then, sooner or later, you will explode in angry words or deeds. Positively, if you work at thinking kind thoughts, then kind actions are more likely to follow.

Why is there so much wrong with the human race? The answer is that our attitudes are wrong. In condemning the desire for what is not ours to have, the tenth commandment attacks the wrong desires that are the very root of all wrongdoing (Exodus 20:17). Building on this, Jesus made it clear that attitudes and actions cannot be separated. He taught that hatred was as bad as murder and lust as bad as adultery (Matthew 5).

What sort of attitude are we to have? The answer that Micah gives is that we must ‘love kindness’. Underlying the word translated here as ‘kindness’ is a Hebrew word with a rich and deep meaning. In fact its very richness gives problems to translators, so that in different Bible versions you will have it given as mercy, loving-kindness, unfailing love, constant love or steadfast love. Which one is right? The answer is all of them. The kindness we are told to love here has at least three dimensions: it involves love, mercy and faithfulness.