It has been a few days since I had time to post a TiE, and I had decided that it was going to be one more day because I’m exhausted. But this morning’s Scripture from The Upper Room really struck me, because you might not know that they prepare these things for publication six months to a year in advance, and yet this morning’s reading seemed to have been chosen just for the current situation facing the United States today. (I have a devotional they accepted that should be published in the January/February 2021 issue, and they accepted it in February 2020.)
So it seemed like a good indication to pay particular attention today. Hence, even though it’s “late” (I usually post at 8:30 a.m.), here’s a thought for today.
The whole passage is Hebrews 13:1-3, but I’m focusing on verse 3.
Remember prisoners as if you were in prison with them, and people who are mistreated as if you were in their place. (Heb. 13:3, CEB)
It doesn’t say “unless they are guilty.” In fact, Scripture is pretty clear that judging isn’t our job.
“As if you were in their place.”
I’ve become aware of a historical fact that bears on this. Prior to the Civil War, 70% of those in prison were White. When the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery was added to the Constitution, some people noticed a key phrase.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. [Emphasis mine, DK]
Ah, loophole! Therefore, not only did the Amendment not end slavery, it allowed it to spread back to the North. Laws that previously only carried fines for minor violations such as vagrancy or failure to pay a particular fee suddenly were “updated” to allow jail time, and since recently freed slaves could seldom afford to pay fines, jail became the most common punishment. Within a few year, the statistics shifted so that 70% of those incarcerated were Black. Prison labor built much of the infrastructure of the United States in the early part of the 20th Century, such as railroad and roads, and prison labor worked many of the mines.
As an article in Esquire magazine points out, the disparity of incarceration rates as a percentage of population “was used in statistician Frederick Hoffman’s influential 1896 article ‘Race, Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro’ as evidence of inherent black criminality, rather than, as W.E.B DuBois put it in his review of Hoffman’s work, evidence that blacks and whites were ‘subjected to different standards of justice.’”
Whenever we have the tendency to look down on someone on the receiving end of harsh justice, we would do well to remember that we all deserve judgment.
As if you were one of them. Because without the grace brought about by Jesus, you are one of them. Me too. That’s why I think the Hebrew writer is dead serious when he tells us this.
Peace.