God, Our Justice
Twenty-Ninth Sunday Scripture Readings
This morning, I have to confess that I find it challenging to reconcile Jesus’s words as reported by Luke with the injustices that we see reported daily all around us. Luke writes, “I tell you, [God] will see to it that justice is done for [his chosen ones] speedily.” Is that just some gloss on the text of the gospel Luke added for reassurance? Or could it be that Jesus’s use of the term “speedily” refers to God’s taking his own good time to respond? Frankly, I don’t like either of these options.
The only way I can imagine reconciling in my mind the blatant and pervasive injustice that permeates our world, not only in our own time, but throughout history, is to accept the inevitable conclusion that God’s justice is somehow different from our understanding of the term. It was, after all, the Prophet Isaiah [55:8] who said, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.”
What is our understanding of justice, and how do we deal with it? For most of us, as well as for the Torah, the Jewish Law, justice implies equality: social equality as well as equality before the law, where people enjoy inalienable rights that both government and all members of society must respect. The biblical concept of “righteousness” embodies the fairness expected of both parties to the covenant: God’s fairness to his people, and our response by conforming with both the laws of God and nature, and our duties and responsibilities to one another. To do evil, then, is to act outside of the bounds of righteousness. It’s treating our obligations to God and to others with contempt or indifference. This is what we’re seeing all around us these days.
In this understanding of justice, injustice creates a legal, social, moral, and spiritual imbalance that calls out for correction. We imagine a tally sheet of offenses, wrongs, and crimes, each of which represents an outstanding debt that must be repaid. These debts must be settled up one way or another: if not willingly, then by force. For every crime, every unpaid debt, there must be an equal and opposite punishment, so that the legal, social, moral, and spiritual universe may be restored to equilibrium. Until that happens, we’re restless, anxious, and discontent. With the psalmist [Psalm 13:1-2], we want to cry out, as it were, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget [us] forever? How long will you hide your face from [us]? … How long will [our] enemies exalt over [us]?”
We look around us and see the violent injustice, the ongoing affront to people’s legal, social, moral, and spiritual rights and values, and we’re not just disgusted, we’re outraged. Is there no justice? Like the widow in today’s gospel, we turn to the powers that be for redress, looking for a response, but getting none. Yet, I have to ask, what response are we actually looking for? Yes, we just want it all to stop, but how can that happen when facts don’t matter, truth is irrelevant, decency is ridiculed, and our protestations only seem to make things worse? Mahatma Gandhi, reacting to the injustice perpetrated on his people by the British authorities, saw this conundrum clearly. Whether it’s Jesus, or Gandhi, or you and I, we come to the inescapable conclusion that our definition of justice must be faulty because it just doesn’t work in practice in the real world.
There must, indeed, be another kind of justice, another kind of righteousness. Gandhi saw it, and, if you saw the movie, Gandhi, you saw it too: the portrayal of the peaceful protest of the British monopoly on salt that took place at the Dharasana Salt Works. Thousands of protesters approached the salt works in rows and were beaten by British-led Indian police. Row after row approached, and row after row were beaten bloody with clubs, while American journalist Webb Miller reported it live to the US by telephone. The protest itself doesn’t represent this alternate form of justice; it’s the fearless perseverance of those people despite the cruel and overwhelming odds that demonstrates it. It’s the same perseverance we saw in the widow this morning. We watch it dancing in costumes in Portland, crowding the streets of Chicago, and in gatherings all across our country. Unlike the way we’ve understood it before, this kind of justice demands that we disregard the question of who’s right and who’s wrong, or which side will prevail, and which side will succumb. Justice can’t be a question of winners versus losers; otherwise, there’d be no winners, only losers.
If we want the archetype for this kind of justice, which is, in truth, God’s justice, we need look no farther than to Jesus himself. For Jesus, the image of the Father, justice is achieved through loving God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength and our neighbor as ourselves. It means abandoning the idolatrous worship of wealth, power, and prestige, and freeing others from slavery to these idols. Its foundations are reconciliation, mercy, and transformative righteousness—that is, doing the right thing not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because that’s who we are. In that is metanoia, that change of mind and heart that Jesus taught. God’s justice is manifest in Christ’s perseverance through all obstacles and setbacks, even in the face of certain defeat and ruin, as represented by the cross. It was Christ’s perseverance, his pressing forward despite everything and with absolute trust in the Father, that revealed the resurrection.
If that’s God’s justice, should we not then work for respect and fairness, human rights and dignity? Of course we should. We must. We have an obligation. But, as we do so, we need to recall that it’s God’s justice, God’s righteousness, that we work for, not the world’s. Our expectations need to be about the quality of our own righteousness rather than about any results that may or may not come about from our work. We ought to expect that we will carry the truth with us in our love and mercy, our healing and forgiveness. That’s the work we do, while we leave the outcomes to God. If we can do that, we’ll find that, indeed, God’s justice will be done speedily for his people, because it’ll be done in us and we’ll carry it with us in every place and in every time and in every circumstance. It’s then that the closing words of today’s gospel will finally be proved true in our world.
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