Canter Bridge

Power turns the heart of those we would never expect capable of using it wrongly. Power moves hands that had previously been clean in darting, surreptitious ways. Power corrupts good men and good women.

When Jehoshaphat was reforming the kingdom of Judah, he set the bar high for those who would wield power in the context of local disputes. He seemed to anticipate both the blessing and the bane that come with distributing power among men who are but flesh and therefore susceptible to its distorting force.

Yet he also intuited that YHWH would be present in the very human, quite mundane business of making hard decisions about justice and equity.

(Jehoshaphat) appointed judges in the land in all the fortified cities of Judah, city by city, and said to the judges, ‘Consider what you do, for you judge not for man but for the Lord. He is with you in giving judgment. Now then, let the fear of the Lord be upon you. Be careful what you do, for there is no injustice with the Lord our God, or partiality or taking bribes.’ (2 Chronicles 19:5–7 ESV)

One wonders how the men and women of Judah discovered YHWH’s presence in the ordinary process of the judges’ work. Perhaps this knowledge came in retrospect, as they looked back over the gradual reshaping of their shared life. Maybe YHWH’s fingerprints could be traced in the slow accumulation of fairness, in the gradual diminution of fear, the decision-upon-decision building up of the security that comes to a well-governed people who are freed to do what they do rather than to worry about who will strip this property or that liberty from them.

The note of urgency in Jehoshaphat’s instructions to his judges seems to come in his declaration that ‘there is no injustice with the Lord our God’.

YHWH is different. YHWH will not be purchased by money passed under the table.

The people that realizes this finds YHWH’s blessing, intuits his presence in the quotidian passage of little moments. Not quickly, seldom spectacularly, but rather in the well-considered judgement, the attention to fairness, the freedom that comes when the right thing becomes the ordinary thing.

YHWH haunts ten thousand small moments.