ADVENT AWARENESS: Justice
Jeremiah 33:14-16
November 29, 2009: The First Sunday of Advent
Rev. Janet Robertson Duggins
When we hear the word “justice” we almost automatically think also of injustice. And we don’t have to think hard to come up with examples of injustice in our world. We don’t have to look very far to find images that remind us of the painful, widespread, and diverse ways women, men, and children – our sisters and brothers – experience injustice.
We don’t like to think about the extent and the depth of the injustice in our world, but we know it’s real.
Everyone has experienced the teacher who doesn’t grade fairly, the boss who blames others for his or her own mistakes, the companies that take advantage of vulnerable consumers, the people who judge us by how we look and not by what we can do.
Some people don’t get fair trials because they are poor or because of their race. Other people manage to buy their way out of responsibility for crimes.
Some people work hard, and are able to provide a nice home and security and opportunities for their families; some people work hard and have to choose between rent and food.
Some children get a good education; others don’t.
20 per cent of the world’s people use 80 per cent of the world’s resources.
Millions of people live – and some die – in danger and fear because of armed conflict they did not choose and cannot escape.
We know that disasters of all kinds – natural disasters, war, economic hard times – fall hardest upon those with fewest resources.
These realities make us uncomfortable, especially when we realize that in so many ways we are among the privileged. Or they make us despair, because the little we can do seems to be, well, SO little.
We can, and do, try to shut it out, not see it. We can tell ourselves that maybe it isn’t really unfair, that people everywhere can get to a better life if they are determined and work hard and make the right choices… but that too means not seeing things we don’t want to see.
Advent awareness … urges us not to turn away from these unhappy truths. In this season when we think about God coming into our world in Jesus - not turning away from human suffering but embracing and sharing it… how can we turn away?
While the world around us is decking the halls and preparing to have a Merry Christmas – and we are doing those same things, too, at church and at home – we are also pausing in worship to hear words from the prophets, traditional readings for the Advent season. The prophets might not fit in very well at the mall or the office Christmas party, but they do fit right into Advent, because Advent is a time intended to sharpen our awareness… and that’s exactly what the prophets like Jeremiah do.
The particular focus of the awareness the prophets bring us is JUSTICE.
Sometimes, in an effort to shut out awareness, people try to ignore the parts of the Bible that talk about justice; it seems like a too-subversive idea, perhaps. But as the theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff observes, “to delete justice from the Bible is to have very little left.” It’s a major theme, especially for the prophets.
You will remember the words made famous by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (but originally penned by Amos the prophet several hundred years before the birth of Christ): “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (5:24)
The prophet Micah asks: “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?” (6:8)
From Jeremiah and the other prophets, we know that God’s desire is for justice.
To understand what that meant to Jeremiah, we have to know
something about Jeremiah’s situation: he
lived in a time of national crisis and disaster. A foreign enemy had invaded and occupied
But there is also an expectation of the kind of “life together” God’s people will live… they will be a community in which righteousness and justice rule. And that will be a change! Earlier in the book of Jeremiah you can read about God’s anger and disappointment because the people have NOT been faithful to God’s idea of justice.
It’s really difficult to read the prophets and then go around pointing fingers at enemies, calling them “evil.” Jeremiah and the other prophets do that, but they keep coming back to the hard truth that God’s people, who ought to have known better, have behaved just as unfaithfully as the enemy who knows and cares nothing about God’s way.
The message of Jeremiah looks forward to God’s time, that “day of the Lord” in a distant future when God’s rule is complete – but those promises about what God will bring about for God’s people are also clues about what God cares about. They suggest the kind of life God wants God’s people to begin living now.
The Hebrew words jpvm (mishpat) and hqdc (tsedaqah) – “justice” and “righteousness” - have their origins in legal terminology. “Mishpat” originally referred to a fair judgment, or to someone – a judge, usually – who rendered a fair judgment in a dispute. “Tzedaqah” meant “rightness” and described, among other things, the use of fair weights and measures in the marketplace, so that no one was cheated or at a disadvantage. They eventually came to have broader meaning, but in the same vein; they are about how the people in a community or society related to one another. We may sometimes hear the words “justice” and “righteousness” as abstract concepts; they aren’t supposed to be abstract, though. It’s perfectly plain in the prophets that God did indeed expect that mishpat and tzedaqah could and would in fact be practiced by God’s people.
Sometimes you will hear people say, in response to injustice in the world or to an unjust situation, “Life’s not fair – get over it.”
But the prophets, including Jeremiah, would absolutely not agree. Their message is, “Life is not fair, and we should NEVER get over that.” Not until the justice God desires for humankind is fully realized. Not until everyone experiences mishpat and tsedaqah as realities and not as mere words.
Sometimes we don’t want to hear about justice because we think that faith is to be about what’s in our own hearts and how we live our personal lives, and not about the issues and problems of the world. But it’s a false and unbiblical dichotomy: faith is about the world, too; justice is about what’s in our hearts and in our close-at-hand relationships, also.
The biblical concept of justice is essentially “right relationship.” It applies as much to how we relate on a personal level as it does to the larger society or world in which the relations between whole groups of people are out of whack. All our relationships, on every level, matter to God.
This idea of right relationship is key to understanding what justice really means. It’s bigger than whether the things we do, say, think are good or bad, well-intentioned or unkind, caring or selfish. It has to with the nature of our connections.
When we think about injustices and inequities in our community and world – especially at this time of year – one of our most natural responses is to give: to Loaves and Fishes, to Ministry with Community, to the Angel Tree or another project to provide gifts for kids, to the Red Cross or to the free clinic or to a famine-relief agency. This is a good impulse, and our gifts are needed, and we should give them. But we should not make the mistake of thinking that we are necessarily doing justice with them. We may well be relieving a significant amount of suffering, but that’s not the same as changing the relationship between a homeless person and all the non-homeless of his community. It’s not the same as changing the relationship between an unemployed person and an economic system that considers maximizing profits to be the goal. It’s not the same as caring about whether everyone whose work we encounter earns a living wage. It’s not the same as recognizing that there might be a relationship between the low, low prices we want to pay for the goods we buy and the poverty of others. It’s not the same as trying to get to know and understand and respect those who are different from us. It’s not the same as learning to want and use less because we use more than our fair share.
The theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff tells about the first time he really experienced the power of God’s call to justice. He was in South Africa, at the time just before the end of apartheid, participating in a conference at a Dutch Reformed university, with others who were mostly from the Netherlands and from the white and black and mixed race (or colored) communities of South Africa. The subject of apartheid was brought up by the Dutch scholars, who denounced it, which of course made the white South Africans angry. Then the people of color present began to speak about their experiences of injustice and the ways in which the apartheid system demeaned their people.
Wolterstorff says that the response of the Afrikaners – the white South Africans – took him “completely aback. They did not contest the claim of the blacks and coloreds that they were being treated unjustly. Instead they insisted that justice was not a relevant category. The relevant category was love, charity, benevolence.” They claimed that the system of apartheid was motivated by benevolence. They told about all the things they did to help the black people in their communities, such as giving Christmas gifts and passing on used clothing. They said they were hurt to hear so little gratitude for the charity they extended, and asked, “why can’t we just be brothers in Christ and love each other?”
It was at that moment, Wolterstorff says, that he understood what justice meant. It was from that moment that he felt a call from God to speak up for justice for the South African people suffering under apartheid. In fact, justice in general became a central theme in his theology and writing from that day on.
He remained troubled by that seeming tension between justice and love, and discovered that the more he talked about justice, the more people seemed to react out of this tension.
You’re probably familiar with this view that justice is
often contrasted with love. I’ve
certainly heard it many times: “God of
Old Testament is about justice (meaning judgement or wrath) but the God of the
New Testament is about love.”
This is not in fact a good understanding of the biblical concepts. For one thing, it ignores that when the Bible describes God as being angry and pronouncing judgment – and it does, numerous times – God’s anger isn’t arbitrary. In fact, it’s usually about the same kind of things that makes us angry: betrayal, infidelity, cruelty to the vulnerable, greed, dishonesty… things that hurt people. God’s anger is in fact a sign of loving concern for the vulnerable.
What’s more, claiming that “love” is the ethical principle by
which we should live – and making this distinction between love and justice, opens the door to this problematic notion that
we can just “love” each other - and show
love to those in need - in whatever way suits us – words, gifts, feelings, help, compassion – and leave justice
out of the equation. It’s not hard to
see how easily this can lead to a patronizing inequality … or worse. That happened in
Love needs justice in order to be whole and godly and fully realized. “Right relationship” matters as much as right actions, feelings, words, thoughts or intentions.
Martin Luther King, Jr said it in
a different way: “Injustice anywhere is
a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of
mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly,
affects all indirectly.”
It sometimes feels to me as if we’ve heard the prophets’
words about justice so often that it’s hard to hear them anew. But maybe this Advent, we can hear God’s word
of JUSTICE in a different way. What if,
when we hear the word “justice” instead of thinking about the prophets’
scolding and God’s anger and “causes” that overwhelm or annoy us… what if we
thought instead about connectedness?
We are connected to each other, to our families, friends, neighbors, fellow believers, fellow citizens, everyone else on this planet. The nature of those relationships is what the prophets’ cries for justice are about. It’s a daily challenge; it’s a spiritual issue; and in Advent, it is a truth we are invited to know more deeply.
Resources:
“The Way to Justice” by
Nicholas Wolterstorff, in The Christian
Century, December 1, 2009