Reflections of Faith and Justice - a Devotional by Benjamin MaysНамуна

The Christian faith as stated in the New Testament affirms that the love of God and the love of man is one love. Few people recognize the fact that Jesus got into trouble not so much because he believed in God but because he believed in the sacred worth of the individual soul. If Jesus had gone throughout the Palestinian or Greco-Roman world merely talking about God and doing nothing to help man, he would hardly have run into trouble because almost everyone in the world of his day believed in God or in gods. Jesus got into trouble because he believed in man, a belief interlaced and interwoven with his concept of God. Jesus Combined the Two.

When Jesus combined, in deeds as well as in words, the two great commandments of the Old Testament—the love of man for God and the love of man for his brother— he was not simply adding one commandment to another commandment and getting two. He was merging into one Great Commandments the love of God and the love of man so that these two commandments became inseparable.

Jesus made a profound remark when he said to the young lawyer: “ ‘On these two commandments depend on all the law and the prophets.’ ” He was simply saying that when you interpret and summarize all the law and everything the prophets have said, it adds up to one thing: love God and love your fellow man. . . There can hardly be any doubting the fact that man is ultra selfish and that selfishness is the cardinal sin of mankind whether it finds expression in the nation that wants to be God, in the race that wants special privileges, or in the individual who sees and judges everything according to his own likes or dislikes

The conduct that is sinful when observed in others becomes virtuous or forgivable when observed in ourselves. Because we belong to a particular race, we want privileges for ourselves that we stubbornly refuse to grant to members of other races. The Afrikaners are wicked, we say, because of the way they treat the Indians, the colored or mixed people, and the Negroes in South Africa. But “we don’t talk about that” when it is pointed out that we are just as wicked because of the way some Americans behave toward certain national, racial, and religious groups—Mexicans, Japanese, Indian Americans, Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and Jews, for example. Some of us deny them jobs, pay them less for the work they do, refuse to give them equal educational and recreational opportunities, deny them respect and friendship, and refuse to admit them to hotels and restaurants. We are all prone to look at life and the world from our own selfish point of view, conditioned by our prejudices and our fears.

When Jesus summed up the law and the prophets by urging man to love God first and his neighbor as himself, he was trying to get man to dethrone himself and put God and his neighbor at the center of his life. . . .

Man loves God with all his heart, soul, and mind when he recognizes and acts upon the fact that man is limited and that he is dependent upon God who is not limited. Man must depend upon God for the origin of the phyical universe, for human life, for what it takes to sustain life—sunshine and rain, air to breathe, and food to eat. Man must depend upon God for the physical laws by which the universe is governed, for the ethical laws that make social relations happy, for the kind of future that he can work for, for the length of time he can live on the earth, and for what happens to him when he is dead. Whether we like it or not, these are the limitations under which we must all live. If we work within the area of our limitations, love God, and never try to act as God, we shall be happy. If we attempt to be gods, we shall be miserable, and disaster will result.

- Excerpt from “Seeking to be Christian in Race Relations” by Benjamin E. Mays, Chapter 3