Beyond Justice

The scriptures referred to are Genesis 18:20-32, Psalm 138, and Colossians 2:6-19.

Recently I listened to a podcast from the Templeton Foundation in which the hosts interviewed anthropology professor Robin Dunbar on the origins of religion. Defining religion as a belief in a transcendental world inhabited by spiritual beings, he says we can trace religion back at least 20-30,000 years. If we include the Neanderthals, religion might go back 500,000 years, 200,000 years before evidence of our species, homo sapiens. Science says religion has been around longer than modern humans.

What I found relevant to today's message is that he agrees with many other researchers that religion is what makes large civilizations possible. Dunbar is famous for working out that humans have the capacity for managing relationships with only about 150 people, which is now called the Dunbar Number. As it turns out the average number of friends people have on Facebook is 149. So, using the estimate for the original population of Jericho, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, “how do you get 10,000 people living together in very, very cramped conditions, without falling out with each other constantly, and indeed, presumably, also without robbing each other all the time. And the answer is, religion provided the one mechanism which is extremely powerful as a tool for managing large social groups like that.” In other words, religion is the glue of civilization.

The word “religion” comes from an obscure Latin word which some think meant “to bind.” Religion binds people together. Dunbar notes that religion binds us through things like singing, dancing, eating together, and telling emotional stories. Religions also give us moral codes. And usually the founder of a religion is a very charismatic person who comes from a poor family background during a time of turmoil. And so these leaders teach us to behave fairly towards one another and to take care of the less fortunate. This bottom-up personal commitment works better at getting people to behave than the alternative which is to have order imposed from above through force.

The commitment to fairness or justice is the subject of today's Old Testament reading. In our passage from Genesis Abraham acts as a mediator with God regarding his judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah. God tells Abraham that the outcry about the sins of these cities has come to him. And while Abraham does not dispute the fact that these two cities are very sinful, he is worried about what will happen to the few righteous people who live there. And you should know that the Hebrew word for “righteous” also means “just.” So his concern is for people who do live according to the moral code and act justly. Abraham says, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”

And God listens to Abraham and agrees to spare Sodom if only 50, and then 45, and then 40, and 30 and 20 and finally just 10 righteous people live there. Since Abraham knows that his nephew Lot and his family live there, he is really counting on there being just 5 more righteous folk in the city. However we know how the story turns out.

But I want to point out a couple of things. First, God is reasonable. He does not tell Abraham that he is out of line to question God's justice. Instead he listens and agrees to lower the bar on how many righteous people it will take to save the city from punishment.

Second, because God is willing to show mercy on the unjust for the sake of the just, this shows that he values mercy more than he does absolutely strict justice. Let's face it: even the righteous there, which seems to consist entirely of Lot and his family, must be complicit in such overwhelming injustice, if not corrupt. (Genesis 19:6-8, 26, 30-36) And by the way, we are not merely talking about the rape that the men of the city intend to perpetrate upon the angels God sends. In Ezekiel we are told, “See here—this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters had majesty, abundance of food and enjoyed carefree ease, but they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and practiced abominable deeds before me. Therefore when I saw it I removed them.” (Ezekiel 16:49-50) So whatever those abominable deeds were, God nevertheless puts special emphasis on how they did not help the poor and needy.

Nor is this a rare instance of God's concern for social justice. Altogether the Bible mentions the poor, the needy, the widow, the fatherless child, the resident foreigner, the blind, the deaf, the lame and the sick 834 times, an average of 1 mention for every 37 verses in scripture. That's more than the Bible talks about worshipping other gods (which is more than 200 times). Just as Jesus pointed out that the two great commandments are to love God and love our neighbor, so too the prophets come down fiercely against both not worshipping God properly and not treating the powerless justly.

Isaiah says that God will not listen to his people's prayers because of the blood on their hands. He tells them to “Wash! Cleanse yourselves! Remove your sinful deeds from my sight. Stop sinning! Learn to do what is right! Promote justice! Give the oppressed reason to celebrate! Take up the cause of the orphan! Defend the rights of the widow!” (Isaiah 1:16-17) Worshipping God is not a substitute for taking care of the needy.

Jeremiah tells God's people that among them are those whose “'houses are filled with the gains of their fraud and deceit. That is how they have gotten so rich and powerful. That is how they have grown fat and sleek. There is no limit to the evil things they do. They do not plead the cause of the fatherless in such a way to win it. They do not defend the rights of the poor. I will certainly punish them for doing such things!' says the Lord. 'I will certainly bring retribution on such a nation as this!'” (Jeremiah 5:27-29)

Later in Jeremiah, God dresses down the current king, Jehoiakim. “Sure to be judged is the king who builds his palace using injustice and treats people unfairly while adding to its upper rooms. He makes his countrymen work for him for nothing. He does not pay them for their labor.” (Jeremiah 22:13-14) He contrasts this king obsessed with buildings who cheats his laborers with his father, Josiah. “'He did what was just and right, so all went well with him. He upheld the cause of the poor and needy, so all went well with Judah. Is that not what it means to know me?' declares the Lord.” (Jeremiah 22:15-16)

Things go well for God's people when they take care of the less fortunate and they do not go well when they are mistreating the poor, the sick, the disabled, the widow, the fatherless, and the resident alien. God is concerned about justice for all, not just for some. Remember how in Ezekiel he condemns the haughty. That word in Hebrew is related to the word in our psalm where it says, “The Lord is high, yet cares for the lowly, perceiving the haughty from afar.” In both cases “haughty” means “ high, powerful and arrogant.” Why does God see them “from afar?” It isn't that God has moved away from them; they have moved away from him. They feel that they have no real need for God. They certainly don't feel they need to humble themselves before him. That is why Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a sewing needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. (Matthew 19:24) As Jesus concludes in his parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.” (Luke 18:14) As the Bible says, “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)

Too often the powerful see themselves as blessed by God because of what they have. And even today some churches teach that if you don't have money and power it is your own fault for not having enough faith. But Jesus taught that in his kingdom “many who are first will be last and the last first.” (Matthew 19:30; cf. Mark 10:31; Luke 13:30) God's kingdom turns the values of this world upside down. There is no preferential treatment of the rich, the powerful, the pretty and the popular. Indeed there is no preferential treatment for anyone.

If justice is getting what you deserve and mercy is not getting all that you deserve, then grace is getting what you could never deserve. God is gracious. Sodom did not deserve for God to even entertain the notion of saving them from their much deserved judgment. We do not deserve to be saved from the hell on earth that we have turned this planet he gave us into. We do not deserve to be saved from the evil we have done to ourselves by misusing his gifts to make things better for ourselves and those we care about while making things worse for those we don't like or don't care about. We don't deserve to have God come down to live among us as someone from a poor family in a world under the thumb of a powerful and ruthless government. We don't deserve to hear any good news about God's love and forgiveness. We don't deserve to have Jesus die for our sins. We don't deserve to receive the hope of a resurrection like his and the gift of eternal life with him.

But as Paul said, “For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9) We cannot earn God's favor. We would have to be perfect, completely in harmony with his goodness. (Matthew 7:1) Instead God gives his grace freely to those who trust and love him.

And if we trust him, he gives us his Spirit who in turn gives us the power to be reborn and to grow into God's image, that is, to become more like Jesus. Paul wrote, “...practicing the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into Christ, who is the head. From him the whole body grows, fitted and held together through every supporting ligament. As each one does its part, the body grows in love.” (Ephesians 4:15-16) This echoes our passage in Colossians which says, “As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.”

As you can see, becoming like Jesus is not instantaneous. It is a process, just as we see in so many of Jesus' parables about seeds growing into wheat and vines and trees producing good fruit. (Matthew 13:3-8, 18-23, 31-33, Mark 4:26-29; Luke 13:6-9; John 15:1-8) And what is the fruit we are to bear? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23) As Dunbar noted, you need such things to have a good and stable civilization. As we're seeing, the absence of these qualities are leading to instability in our world and in our country.

People like to say that we live in a Christian nation. But we do not see a bumper crop of the fruit of the Spirit. And we do not see a lot of justice. We do not see mercy. We do not see grace. Instead we see a lot of injustice, especially to those who are disadvantaged, disabled, diseased, destitute and despised. We see a lot of people who have gotten rich and powerful, sleek and fat, through deceit and fraud, who build monuments to their name while neglecting to uphold the cause of the poor and needy, the widow, the fatherless and the foreigner in our land. And we have seen what God let happen to his own people when they did such things. We must be like Abraham, pleading with God for mercy. We must be like the prophets, warning people that God expects us to help those who are not doing well in this life. Because only if we do, will things go well for us.

Right after Paul says that we are saved by grace through faith and that we are not saved by our works, he goes on to say, “For we are his workmanship, having been created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has prepared beforehand so we may do them.” (Ephesians 2:10) We are not saved by good works; we are saved for them.

What should we do? Look around you. You see people in need? You see injustice? You see hopelessness? You see people suffering? There is a lot to be put right. Join up with others who love Jesus, pray and get to work.