Compassion: Charity + Justice (brilliant!)

Compassion takes two forms in life: charity and justice. The word charity is derived from caritas, Latin for love. It is the personal form of compassion. Its objective is to alleviate the effects of suffering. Justice on the other hand seeks to eliminate the root causes of suffering. It is about transforming the social structures and systems that produce poverty and suffering. Justice is the social form of compassion. It is the social and political form of caring for the least of these.

The story is often told about townspeople along a river who began to see people floating downstream in distress, drowning, near death. With great compassion, they would throw out lifelines, row out in boats, and swim out to rescue the victims from drowning. The incidences, at first isolated, began to increase. Always, the townspeople would respond. Over time, they began to improve and expand their lifesaving abilities. Finally, one day, someone from the town suggested that they would better utilize their resources by going upstream to find out why people were falling in, or who was throwing them in, and try to prevent it.

This is the difference between charity and justice. Charity seeks to heal the wounds, while justice seeks to end the social structures that create wounded people in the first place.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said:

“We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through life. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it understands that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring.”

William Sloane Coffin has said: “The bible is less concerned with alleviating the effects of injustice, than in eliminating the causes of it.”

Both charity and justice are needed in our world. Jesus called for both. He embodied both. The question is do we favor charity over justice? In an unjust world, only the first response—charity—is acceptable to those in power. The work of faith-based charities is often lauded by government until they try to influence government policies to change the status quo.

Dom Helder Camara, a Roman Catholic bishop from the poor Brazilian region of Recife said in the 1960s, “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a Communist.”

John Dominic Crossan once said, “Charity gets you canonized; justice gets you crucified.”

That is exactly where the religion of Jesus led him.