Loving Justice

The scriptures referred to are Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23, James 2:1-17 and Mark 7:24-37.

Babies don't like bullies. That's the finding of a study where babies watched a puppet show that consisted of 2 shapes with googly eyes. When one shape hit and squished another, babies preferred to play with the victim. But if the two did not fight then they had no preference. It looks like they have an inborn sense of justice.

We've seen that monkeys also have a sense of justice. Capuchin monkeys are fine being rewarded with a cucumber for doing a task...until they see another monkey given a grape for doing the same task. Then they throw the cucumber back and loudly protest. But it was the monkeys getting the raw end of the deal that were unhappy. I couldn't find anything saying the monkeys getting the grapes would strike in sympathy with their unequally paid friends.

We want justice for ourselves. Few of us will work for justice for others. And almost nobody will work for justice if that involves us getting penalized for breaking the rules or making a sacrifice so others have more. But justice is only worthy of the name if it applies equally to all. Anything less is injustice.

The people who get the short end of the stick tend to be those who are already disadvantaged: those who are born into poverty or who are mentally or physically disabled or who belong to a racial, ethnic, religious or other minority. It is not impossible for such people to find justice but it is highly improbable. Those who are not operating under such burdens are almost always in control of society and do not readily give up their advantages. They are getting the grapes; why on earth would they settle for cucumbers?

For most of history, that was the way things were. Those who were born with money, land, or hereditary positions did well and those who were not born with those things just had to do without. Justice was mostly about keeping the well off from cheating or stealing from or harming others of their own class. There were no police forces because the law was not very interested in giving justice to the general populace. If someone stole from an average person in the Roman Empire the victim or his relatives or friends would have to catch him and deal with it themselves. If, however, you ripped off someone in power, they would make sure you paid. A noble could have your hand cut off for stealing from him. If you were his slave, he could have you killed. The more powerful the person you offended the more severe the penalty. There was no equal justice for all.

It's not that different today. If you don't have a lot of money, and you get accused of breaking a law, staying out of jail is difficult, if not impossible. A lot of the inmates in our jails haven't been found guilty of anything. They simply cannot make bail and thus have to stay in jail until their trial, when they will actually be found guilty or not. And they can be in there, not only for murder or theft, but just for open container or some other misdemeanor. In the meantime, they can lose their job for not showing up at work, their apartment for not being able to get the rent to their landlord at the beginning of the new month, and their car for not being there to feed the meter or not moving it for street cleaning. The car is usually towed to Impound where it can be auctioned off after a month. If the contents of the car or their apartment include their ID, their computer and/or the tools of their trade, those can disappear as well. Why don't they call somebody to bail them out? Sometimes they don't have family or friends here, or those they have don't have the money to put up bail. And they may not be able to reach them because like most of us they don't have the numbers in their head but in their phone, which is locked up in Property. And you can't make calls unless you have money on your phone account or have a family member to put money in your account for you. By the time you get out, even after a minor offense, even if you are found not guilty or have the charges dropped, you may have lost everything and so must start over, with only the clothes you were wearing when arrested and whatever was in your pockets.

You do have a right to an attorney even if you are poor. But if you have no money, you get a public defender who can easily have a 100 clients besides you. You rarely see him or her, have trouble even getting them on the phone, and when you do, they will often urge you to take whatever plea deal the prosecutor is offering. Remember, if you go to trial, you will be in jail longer, months or a year, and the verdict can be all or nothing. You may get acquitted but you may get convicted and your sentence will usually be for a lot longer than the previously offered deal. On the other hand, if you take the deal, it will stay on your record to cause you problems getting work and loans the rest of your life.

Compare that to what happens if you have lots of money and a good lawyer. Like legendary record producer Phil Spector. Though actress Lana Clarkson was found dead in his home with a gunshot wound to the mouth and several teeth on the floor, and though he told his driver, “I think I killed someone,” he was allowed to stay out of jail on $1 million bail. After 2 trials, he was convicted of murder in the second degree.

In today's lectionary we have several examples of God's special care for the poor, the sick and the disabled. As I've said before, there are at least 800 verses in the Bible about our duty to the disadvantaged. Why does God focus on them? Think how you would act towards one of your children if she or he was sick or disabled. You would make special provisions for that child. Or what if you had adopted a child from a different country or culture or race. You would make sure they were treated fairly everywhere they went. God loves us all but he is especially concerned for those who do not have the advantages others do. And he expects us to take proper care of them.

Cain's infamous reply to God's question about his brother Able—“Am I my brother's keeper?”—should be answered in the affirmative. That's obvious when you realize a better translation of the Hebrew should be “Am I my brother's guardian or protector?” Yes, we are. And we are, as the Key West bumper sticker says, one human family. While scientists do not see the early chapters of Genesis as scientifically verifiable, they do tell us that, ironically, we are in fact all descended from one woman and from one man. DNA shows that we all come from the Mitochondrial Eve and the Y-Chromosomal Adam, both of whom lived, by current estimates, approximately 150,000 years ago. Anyone you meet is at least a cousin several times removed. And if we are all related, we should look out for those members of the family who are in danger of being left behind or bullied or taken advantage of.

Peter Parker's Uncle Ben said it best; “With great power comes great responsibility.” Our longing for heroes is based on the idea that if you have great power you also have a responsibility to help and protect those who don't have that power. The Flash wouldn't be a hero if he used his speed to run away from danger. Had Tony Stark continued as an alcoholic playboy rather than become Iron Man, he wouldn't be a hero. Had Sherlock Holmes simply deduced that Professor Moriarty was the “organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected” in London and did not think it worth risking his life, he would not be a hero. A hero is not just someone who has power or can do spectacular things. That's a showoff. A hero is someone who acts on behalf of those who need help. A hero acts unselfishly. A hero is willing to make sacrifices.

We worship the greatest hero ever. God created us in his image, with powers of great intelligence and an unbelievable imagination and an astounding capacity to develop a dizzying variety of skills and the capacity to work with others across the boundaries of kinship. As the psalmist said, “You have made us little less than the gods.” And how have we used those godlike powers? To make things both better and worse. We have made amazing advances in medicine. The mortality rate today is a third of what it was in the Victorian era. We have also created weapons that could end all life on earth. We have improved the quality of life for many human beings and we are also making the world too hot for all creatures. We are the only animals who understand the balance of nature and the possibility of extinction and yet we are consciously throwing that balance out of whack and driving the extinction rate from 1 to 5 species every year up to literally dozens every day. We have used the godlike powers given us in diabolical ways and turned a potential paradise planet into hell on earth.

God could be forgiven for writing us off, for letting us wipe ourselves out. But he came to us in the person of his son Jesus Christ, to show us what he is like, loving and forgiving, and what we therefore can be, and then heroically to give his life for and to us. Jesus shows us the right way to use power: to heal and to teach and to feed and to build up others. It is the power of all encompassing love.

And it is love for all from which we get justice. If I only love myself and mine, I can still be unjust to those outside the sphere of my love. Only if I love all people, those like me and those unlike me, those who help me and those who can't help me, can I be truly just. It's like having more than one kid. If you have an only child, you can spoil him or her. But if you have more than one, and you don't treat them all fairly, then you will fueling ever bigger conflicts. If they realize you will not let any one of your children get away with things the others can't and that you will hold each and every one to the same rules and the same consequences for breaking those rules, then you will have peace.

Peace comes from justice. Once a society becomes rife with injustice then strife arises and ultimately revolutions erupt. People only turn to change when the status quo becomes too painful to maintain. If, however, they feel that their society is just, that people are treated fairly, that those who break the rules do not get away with it and that those who follow the rules get just outcomes, then there is peace, which in the Bible means well-being.

Mind you, absolute justice can make absolute peace impossible. And absolute peace can veto absolute justice. Because people are imperfect. If every sin or infraction is punished ruthlessly, then everyone is in trouble. As Proverbs 21:15 says, “When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers.” Yet as Paul pointed out, “There is no one who is righteous, not even one.” (Romans 3:10) So if we seek the well-being of all then some injustices cannot be dealt with exactly as we think they should. Justice must be balanced with forgiveness. As it says in Zechariah 7:9, “This is what the Lord Almighty said, 'Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another.'” Mercy and justice should go hand in hand, as our passage in James points out. As Hosea 12:6 says, we must “maintain love and justice.” [Emphasis mine] Again justice comes from love. God doesn't love abstract rules but us. As Ezekiel 33:11 says, “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.” God's purpose is not to punish bad people, which is all of us, but make bad people good again. He wishes to restore in us that image of the God who is love.

The harsher life is for people the harsher the justice they prefer. Perhaps because the consequences of wrongdoing is harsher for everyone. When your group is barely surviving, and someone is shirking their duty or cheating or stealing or disrupting the community so that the crops aren't harvested in time or the gates to the city aren't guarded or the unity of the people is broken, it could mean invasion or starvation for all. The more precarious the existence of the community the more military its organization and more rigid its rules. We see this in the Old Testament. Whether Israel was a confederation of tribes, or a tiny kingdom between bigger and better resourced empires, it didn't have the luxury to be lenient. Its rules were many and they would be stringently enforced.

Things have changed. We live in a wealthier, more secure society and so we have reduced some rules and loosened others. But if by doing that we make it easier for those who have power or wealth to get away with injustices, if we have tightened the rules only on those who historically haven't done well so that we create a bottleneck to their enjoying the same rights and benefits as those well off, then we are not acting out of love for all people and we are disobeying God.

The peaceable kingdom of God envisioned by Isaiah is not one where the wolf eats the lamb or the leopard chows down on the goat or the lion makes short work of the calf and the yearling but one where they live together in peace. (Isaiah 11:6) And I don't think that the message was aimed at animals, to get them to stop acting as natural predators. It was focused on us. We should not prey on our fellow human beings, yet some of us do. We don't put leopards on trial for killing a goat but we do when a person harms another. Because we are one species, one family, created in the image of our heavenly Father.

Even as infants we yearn for justice as we do for love. For Christians, talk about justice is not political but biblical. Our heavenly Father wants us to stop picking on one another, to stop taking all the good toys, to stop letting our friends get away with stuff we won't let others do. It's time we grew up. It's time we took the wisdom God gave us thousands of years ago and put it into practice. Are we not smart enough to figure out how to give everyone enough to eat and drink and a safe and comfortable place to live? I look at all the clever things we continually imagine and then create and I can't see that these problems are more complicated than gene splicing or splitting atoms or moving people through the sky thousands of feet in the air in planes or going to the moon. It's not that the laws of physics or biology make well-being and justice for all impossible. It is that we do not will it. It's not that we can't house the homeless; it's that we don't want to use our resources to do it nor have them live in our neighborhood. 

Stephen Colbert, who teaches Sunday School, said, “If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.” Jesus' response to that is found in Matthew 25:41-46. But if we do help the disadvantaged, God says, “Is this not the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to bring the poor and homeless into your house—when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to hide from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here I am.” (Isaiah 58:6-9)