“The Just Man Justices”

Do you like poetry? I do (to some extent), but I find it hard to read. That is, poetry needs to be read slowly, and I don’t often take the time necessary to do so. And much poetry demands imagination and deep thought, often more than I have or am willing to exert. But I like the poem that sparked this post. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins was an Oxford University student when he came under the influence of John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement, which sought to reconnect the Anglican Church with its Catholic roots.​ At age 22, Hopkins was received into the Roman Catholic Church by Newman himself.*

Hopkins (b. 1844) took the Jesuit vows in 1870, four years after converting to Catholicism, embracing the Jesuit ideals of poverty, chastity, and obedience. For the next seven years, he wrote no poetry, thinking it was contrary to his vows.

In the two years following the 1875 shipwreck of the SS Deutschland, though, Hopkins wrote a long, innovative ode titled "The Wreck of the Deutschland." A 2008 novel by Ron Hansen blends historical elements of that disaster with biographical elements of Hopkins’s life and a detailed narrative of his ode.**

Hopkins died of typhoid fever at the age of 44 in 1889.

“As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” one of Hopkins’s most celebrated poems, was written around 1877, but it was first published posthumously, in 1918. Here are the last six lines of that noteworthy sonnet:

I say more: the just man justices;

         Keeps grace: that keeps all his going graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –

Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Eugene Peterson, the esteemed author of The Message (the popular paraphrase of the Bible), has also written Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, a weighty book whose title comes from Hopkins’s sonnet.

Peterson claims that Hopkins’s poem presents the perceptive reader with a helpful view of the “end” of life: “The vigor and spontaneity, the God-revealing Christian getting us and everything around us in on it, the playful freedom and exuberance, the total rendering of our lives as play, as worship before God.”

But this essay is primarily about the words in the first line cited above: “the just man justices.” What does that mean?

Hopkins creatively uses “justice” as a verb. That word is generally a noun, of course, although the phrase “doing justice” has a similar meaning. And the latter harks back to Micah in the Old Testament. Verse eight of the sixth chapter of the book that bears the prophet’s name says,

What does the Lord require of you but to do justice?

It is quite certain that the kind of justice Micah (and Hopkins) is talking about is not what is usually called retributive justice. Rather, it is social justice, seeking shalom for all people. As such, doing justice is something that cannot be done alone or by just us. We must work with other people.

This past Sunday, the worship leader at Rainbow Mennonite Church began by talking briefly about the Justice Together meeting she and her husband had recently attended in Wichita. That organization is “a multi-faith, grassroots coalition of faith communities in Sedgwick County, Kansas.”

Citing Micah 6:8, on their website (here), Justice Together states, “Doing justice … addresses systems rather than individuals. No single congregation has enough power to effectively do justice. Thus, we act together as justice in action.”

Further, if it is true that “Christ plays in ten thousand places,” as I think it is, doing justice is often done also by multitudes of people who do not claim to embrace any religious faith, such as many among the millions of people who joined the No Kings protest on October 18.

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  * Here is a link to the blog article I posted about Newman in March 2020, which was a few months after he was canonized as a Roman Catholic saint.

** Hansen’s novel is titled Exiles, which I enjoyed reading many months ago, and it also includes imagined backstories of the five drowned Franciscan nuns. It culminates in exploring themes of faith, exile, and divine mystery in the storm. Hansen (b. 1947) is an American novelist, essayist, and interestingly (especially for those of us who live in west central Missouri), he is also the author of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (1983).

The Tyranny of Greed

Tyranny is a word that has, unfortunately, been heard often in recent years. The term usually refers to “the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit.”*¹ But it can also describe any power, such as greed, that dominates and dehumanizes. 

Greed is the inordinate desire to possess wealth, goods, or objects of abstract value with the intention of keeping it for oneself, far beyond the dictates of basic survival and comfort. It is not merely a personal flaw; it is also a power that enslaves both individuals and societies.

The biblical phrase “the love of money” is clearly a reference to greed (“the inordinate desire to possess wealth”)—and also a clear reference to its tyrannical nature, as it is “the root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10, CEB).

According to my AI “buddy” Claude, “greed was absolutely central to Jamestown's founding in 1607.” The Virginia Company was a corporation “created explicitly to generate profits for its investors.” It became profitable after 1614, when it began shipping tobacco to Great Britain.

The greed of the Virginia Company led to enslaved Africans being brought to Virginia in 1619 to work in the tobacco fields. Human beings were reduced to property so that plantation owners could increase their wealth.

A century later, cotton became king, and greed increasingly drove the engines of slavery. So, citing Claude again, “the desire for wealth [=greed] from cotton drove the expansion and entrenchment of one of history's most brutal systems of human exploitation.”

“The more profitable cotton became, the more deeply the South invested in slavery, making it nearly impossible to imagine their economy without it—which ultimately helped precipitate the Civil War.”

But as far back as 1607, greed also wreaked havoc on Native Americans. The founding of Jamestown inadvertently initiated the genocide of the Native nations. Much later, the desire for more land to grow cotton was a major factor behind the Indian Removal Act of 1830. 

For much of the nineteenth century, greed fueled the seizure of Native American lands under the banner of progress, or “Manifest Destiny,” as settlers and governments justified the displacement/removal of the Indian nations for the sake of acquiring land to use for their own economic gain.

Whenever and wherever greed is rampant, people are exploited, lands are stolen, and justice is distorted. Sadly, though, even today, tyrannical greed continues to shape economies, politics, and daily habits of consumption—and that greed is epitomized in the current POTUS. His “business” activity is just one indication of his greed.

According to an Oct. 9 post (here), Trump has launched ads “to sell his new collection of watches.” This will add to the wealth he has greedily accumulated as President. He reportedly made $10 million in the last year selling watches, sneakers, Bibles, and guitars.

His most profitable business, though, is cryptocurrency. Last year, he made over $57 million from his stake in World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency platform. His $TRUMP meme coin launched in January 2025 is estimated to have earned $320 million in fees.

Since the tyranny of greed is so prevalent, attention needs to be given to Malcolm Foley’s book, The Anti-Greed Gospel (2025).*² (Here is a picture of author Foley and his “million dollar smile” along with the subtitle of his book.)

In his book, Foley cites John Chrysostom (d. 407), who asserted that “great is the tyranny of Mammon.” That tyranny exacerbated the idolatrous worship of Mammon rather than the true God. It also led to the construction of racism.

Plantation owners needed a moral and legal justification for treating human beings as property, so they constructed an ideology of racial inferiority. This allowed them to justify the brutal exploitation and to prevent solidarity between poor White and enslaved Black people.

While he does not cite them, Foley’s basic explanation of racism is similar to that of contemporary scholars Inram X. Kendi and Starlette Thomas.*³ They all argue that racist ideas were created to justify slavery. The latter was based on greed, which led to exploitation and then used racist ideology to justify it.

In the last part of his book, Foley challenges churches to confront greed as both a personal and systemic sin, and to replace it with practices of justice, solidarity, and truth.

Since greed is personal as well as societal, all of us need to remember the oft-quoted admonition of Thomas Merton: 

*¹ These words are from Timothy Snyder’s instructive book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017).

*² Foley (Ph.D., Baylor University) is a pastor, historian, and speaker who serves as special adviser to the president for equity and campus engagement at Baylor. Foley also co-pastors Mosaic Waco, a multicultural church in Waco, Texas

*³ Kendi is an author, professor, and anti-racist activist. He is the author of three books, the most influential being How to Be an Antiracist (2019). Thomas is an author, preacher, activist, and race abolitionist who serves as the director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative at Good Faith Media. She is the author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church (2023).

What Does It Mean to Love One’s Enemies?

It is hard enough to love one’s friends and even harder to love others as we love ourselves. But how can we love our enemies? In both the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:43) and the Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:27), Jesus plainly says, “love your enemies.” 

Why do we have enemies? Are enemies people we harbor enmity against? Probably not in most cases. Why would Jesus’ first followers have had an “enemies list” so that he would have felt the need to urge them to love those on that list?

The answer is clear: our “enemies” are not primarily those we have enmity toward; rather, they are those who have enmity toward us for whatever reason. Note Jesus’ full statement: “pray for those who persecute you.” Those early followers of Jesus were persecuted, but they certainly were not persecutors.

Consider some notable examples of people who loved their enemies. First, of course, is Jesus himself. As he was being executed by the extremely painful means of crucifixion, Jesus uttered this prayer: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

Anabaptists (with whom I have long identified) have great respect for Dirk Willems, the Dutch Anabaptist martyr in 1569. He escaped from prison and was chased by a guard who fell through thin ice during the chase. But Willems turned back and rescued his pursuer—and then was recaptured, tortured, and killed.

Four hundred years later, Martin Luther King, Jr., steadfastly called upon Black people to show love for their enemies, the White people who had often lynched their ancestors for centuries and were still mistreating them in the present. His most well-known book is titled Strength to Love (1963).

I was certainly not a supporter of Charlie Kirk, although I grieved that he was killed. But I remain impressed by what Erika Kirk, Charlie’s wife, said at his memorial service. She forgave the shooter. Unlike the President, she expressed love and forgiveness toward him rather than hatred.

These are widely known examples of people who showed love for their enemies. Most of us, though, will likely never be in such dramatic situations. What does it mean for us to love our enemies?

“Love is more an attitude and action than a feeling.” That is the title of #25 in my book Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (2018). In that chapter, I cite John Hick’s explanation regarding the type of love Jesus meant when he commanded us to love our enemies.

The British philosopher writes that love is “to value a person in such ways as actively to seek his or her deepest welfare and fulfillment” (Philosophy of Religion, 1963). Or, as we might say today, love actively seeks the flourishing of all people, including our enemies.

In my above-mentioned book, I also cite how MLK importantly distinguished between liking and loving. King noted in Strength to Love that Jesus did not say, “Like your enemies,” admitting that it is “almost impossible to like some people.” But Jesus’ command was for us to love people whom we don’t like.

So, love of enemies is not sentimental affection, but deliberate goodwill and moral commitment. That is the attitude Jesus calls us to have for those who say hurtful things to/about us or do harmful things to us.

Loving in that way certainly doesn’t mean condoning injurious things that are said or done, to us or to others. We can’t be neutral concerning right and wrong, good and evil. Often, we must “hate” what people do, but love them for who they are, persons created in the image of God.

We could make a long list of people who do things we strongly disapprove of. Many of us have deep dislike for the things the POTUS and his henchmen such as Steven Miller and Russell Vought say and do, and we have the right (and responsibility?) to speak out against them.

But if we are serious about following Jesus’ command that we love our “enemies,” whether they are government officials we dislike, cantankerous neighbors, or whoever, we still must seek their “deepest welfare” and their flourishing. That is both for the well-being of others as well as for ourselves.

Remember, "hate is more harmful to the vessel in which it is stored than to the people on whom it is poured."