Justice and Mercy

The scriptures referred to are Genesis 18:20-32 and Luke 11:1-13.

It's a good thing we don't live in a world of superpowered or magical humans. As Lord Acton wrote, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” If you can do anything, what keeps you from actually doing it? What keeps Superman from becoming a tyrant? In the comics Lex Luthor's opposition to Superman is that doesn't trust someone that powerful. Lex is a genius, though, and knows better than to, say, kill Lois Lane. The Joker does not and in an alternate reality, he kills Lois, her and Clark's unborn child and wipes out the city of Metropolis with a nuclear bomb. Then Superman does what Batman never could: he punches his fist clean through the Joker's torso. Gotta say it, though: the Joker totally deserved it.

A human being so powerful that he is essentially a living weapon would be a nightmare, as the recent “Superboy as monster” film Brightburn illustrates. And yet we love the idea of supermen protecting us, and, lacking real superheroes, we tend to give lots of power to people we perceive as strong. Italy and Germany were both in bad shape in the years after the first World War and the Great Depression so they chose "strong men" leaders like Mussolini and Hitler. Stalin ruled Russia with an iron fist and nationalist and military leaders pushed imperial Japan from democracy into totalitarianism. It doesn't take an historian to see how a world ruled by "strong men" who put national interests above everything else would result in war and genocide in the first half of the 20th century. Some see the rise of "strong men" leaders today as equally ominous. What nobody seems to realize is that real strength is seen in restraint. The person who cannot control himself is weak.

The usual take on God in the Old Testament is that he loves going all wrathful on sinners. And yet, in the story of Abraham, the father of our faith, there are some notable instances that go against that concept of God. One is the sacrifice of Isaac. In a world where people did not question sacrificing humans and even their own children to their gods, Yahweh illustrates his uniqueness with regards to this practice via an enacted parable. God stops Abraham from sacrificing Isaac. And then God provides the sacrifice himself, something he will do even more powerfully in his son Jesus.

Another instance where we see the supposedly wrath-happy God of the Old Testament differently is in today's lesson from Genesis. God appears to Abraham as 3 men, which is interesting in the light of the New Testament data that led to the doctrine of the Trinity. Two go to Sodom to check out its reputation for sin. God tells Abraham that he needs to see if they are as wicked as it has been reported. “If not, I want to know.” (Genesis 18:21, NET)

Notice that this suggests that God hopes the outcry about Sodom is untrue. That's what he wants to know. He has not yet judged the city. God wants to be merciful. And Abraham seems to pick up on that.

Not that God has said what he will actually do if he finds out that Sodom is very wicked. That too Abraham intuits. God is just. He will not turn a blind eye to sin when he finds it. But he wants to see the evidence. Now we don't know what Abraham has heard about Sodom, but his nephew Lot lives there and so he probably knows a lot. But he doesn't have a God's eye view of the extent of the city's wickedness. So, for the sake of this story at least, it appears that God and Abraham are working without the full facts.

And Abraham brings up a pertinent point. Even if God finds a great deal of wickedness in Sodom, there is no way that absolutely everyone is totally evil. So will God wipe out everyone, good and bad? There might be as many as 50 righteous folks living in that place. Should they perish as well?

“And the Lord said, 'If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.'” The Hebrew word the NRSV translates as “forgive” is an interesting one. It literally means “to lift, to carry, to take.” It is most often translated “to bear.” What God is saying is he will bear with or carry the burden of the many wicked people for the sake of the 50 righteous ones.

What follows is Abraham showing a lot of chutzpah haggling with God over the fate of Sodom. What if Sodom is 5 short of 50 righteous folks? “Will you destroy the whole city for lack of 5?” “I will not destroy it,” says God. But Abraham, knowing he is but dust before the creator of the universe, keeps asking about lower numbers of good people. What about 40? How about 30? What if it's only 20? Maybe we are only talking about 10. What then? “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it,” says God.

Abraham knows that God is just but also that he is merciful. He has bought Sodom a great deal of leeway. They only need to have 10 righteous people in the whole place. Well, we know how that turns out. Only 3 people make it out alive, and they aren't exactly saints.

By the way, Genesis doesn't tell us what the sins of Sodom are. A lot of people think it is homosexuality but that's based on just one incident. The visiting angels were going to sleep in the town square until Lot persistently urges them to stay with him. And that night the men of the city besiege the house, asking that the visitors be sent out to them. The key word in the interchange that follows is that the men of the city want to “know” the visitors. The implication is that they mean this in the same way a pick up artist does when he tells a woman he'd like to get to know her. So this story is usually seen as showing that the men of Sodom want to rape the angels. And Lot offers his virgin daughters in exchange!

There is an alternate interpretation, according to the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible. The men of the city might be suspicious of the visitors and want to know them in the sense of interrogate them and see if they are spies. Lot resists this idea because he knows that the interrogation will be rather unpleasant. (This is the Ancient Near East, after all.) And so he offers his daughters as hostages to be held as a guarantee that his visitors will not do anything bad. Still most commentators do not favor this interpretation.

Either way this is a gross violation of the Middle Eastern rules of hospitality on the part of the men of the city. So much so that Lot would rather surrender his daughters than betray his duty as host. By the way, Lot's gesture is one the original audience of this story would find equally repugnant, as seen in the similarly horrifying story found in Judges 19. Remember this is a culture where rape gets you stoned to death.

It's pretty obvious that Sodom is a very wicked place but it is not in Genesis that we are told precisely what their sins were. In Ezekiel it says, “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” (Ezekiel 16:49) Having an abundance of food but a contemptuous indifference to the plight of those in need is why God condemned them. And their well-known mistreatment of the poor is probably why Lot didn't want the visitors sleeping in the town square. They would be easy targets for men who had no regard for the rights of homeless strangers.

Besides telling us how God feels about arrogant people who abuse and exploit the poor, what else do we learn about him, especially from the passage in Genesis?

For one thing, if a disaster comes from God, he will disclose it beforehand. Just prior to where our passage begins, we are told, “Then the Lord said, 'Should I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? After all, Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all the nations on the earth will pronounce blessings on one another using his name. I have chosen him so that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just. Then the Lord will give to Abraham what he promised him.'” (Genesis 18:17-19) God decides to tell Abraham in order to illustrate his ways to him and that it is vital that we follow his commands.

Why is this important? There are a lot of preachers who assign divine reasons to disasters, saying that this state or this city was hit by some natural phenomenon due to some action they took, which the preacher deemed sinful. But this story and the record of how prophets work in the Bible show that God would announce it beforehand, not after the fact. Preachers who only afterwards say a calamity was God's wrath are just declaring their own personal opinions. And both the book of Job and Jesus say that tragedies do not indicate that the victims were sinful, nor that they were more sinful than the average person. (Luke 13:4-5, John 9:1-3)

Secondly, God does not act on impulse. Again I think what we have here is an enacted parable. Does God really need to send angels to find out things for him? No. He is giving Abraham a glimpse into how he thinks. He is illustrating that he doesn't act in a knee-jerk fashion but with deliberation. He looks at the evidence. Which we should do as well, especially when we are judging the actions of others. Jesus said we should not pass judgment on people themselves. (Matthew 7:1-2) Only God is qualified for that. But we obviously can judge whether actions are moral or immoral, wise or foolish. And we should only do so based on evidence. Furthermore, we should do it with an eye to helping the person change his mind. (Matthew 18:15-17) That is literally the whole point of the book of Jonah. As it says in Ezekiel, “For I take no delight in the death of anyone, declares the sovereign Lord. Repent and live!” (Ezekiel 18:32, NET) God wants to forgive, not condemn. And he weighs the evidence before he acts, so that his judgment is true.

Thirdly, it is OK to question God. He will listen. He is reasonable. He will not change his mind about sin but may change his response, the way a parent will take into account whether a child understands and is sorry about hitting her brother or not. Returning to the book of Jonah, that is the prophet's problem with God: “O Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you were a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.” (Jonah 4:2) Far from thinking God cannot wait to roast sinners, Jonah's beef is that God is too forgiving.

And finally from our passage in Genesis we see that we can intercede for others with God. We can advocate for them. We can pray that he shows them mercy. Indeed in our gospel passage, notice that in Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer it says, “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” It is an acknowledgment that if we expect God to act in a forgiving way towards us we need to act in a forgiving way towards others. Jesus reinforced this in his parable of the merciless servant, who is forgiven a ridiculously large debt by his master but doesn't do the same to a fellow servant. In the end, the master treats the servant as he treated his coworker. (Matthew 18:23-35) Again the goal of Christianity is to become like Jesus, who forgave even those who arrested and crucified him. (Luke 22:49-51; 23:34)

Nobody wants a world where there are no rules for how to treat other people but no sensible person wants a world where there is no mercy for anyone who breaks the rules. We all fall short of what God expects us to be. We can be grateful that we have a God who is both just and forgiving. We also should emulate him. We need to pray for wisdom so we will know how and when to balance justice with mercy.

Sodom is a cautionary tale. It shows that God is not on the side of the bullies, the arrogant, the abusers, nor those who are complacent, who ignore the needs of the poor, the safety of the stranger, or the victims of injustice. They will pay, if not in this life. If you wonder why God doesn't rain down wrath on modern communities that reflect the callousness and indifference to suffering we see in Sodom, consider Jesus' parable of the wheat and the weeds. When a farmer awakens one day to find weeds growing up among his wheat, he is urged to pull out the weeds. “But he said, 'No, since in gathering the weeds you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At harvest time I will tell the reapers, “First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned, but then gather the wheat into my barn.”” (Matthew 13:24-30) Our lives are so intertwined that extricating relatively bad people (fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, etc) could cause or exacerbate trauma in the lives of those who love them but are relatively good. It seems that Abraham realized this and Jesus articulated it by saying, “love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be like your Father in heaven...” (Matthew 5:44-45)

And if Sodom gives us an example of what to avoid, this story of Abraham gives us an example we should imitate. Abraham is more concerned with the welfare of the innocent than in ruthlessly punishing the guilty. He is persistent in his prayerful conversation with God, as the man at midnight is with the friend who is in bed. We cannot be afraid to ask God for what we or others lack, to search for what is necessary to make things better, to knock on doors and seek help. God will give us, not necessarily all we desire, but what we need. And what we principally need is the Holy Spirit of the God who is love, the Spirit of truth, the Comforter, the Encourager, the Advocate. It seems we have a dearth of those qualities in this world.

Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth.” (Matthew 5:13) Salt at that time was the only preservative, the only thing that kept food from going bad. Jesus is saying we are like the 10 righteous who, had they existed, would have saved Sodom. Jesus said, “You are the light of the world.” (Matthew 5:14) Light reveals hidden hazards and leads people out of darkness. Our roles in this world are to preserve what is good and enlighten the spiritually and morally blind. Nowhere in scripture, not even in the book of Revelation, are Christians to be instruments of judgment and punishment. Only one wiser and more holy than we is qualified for that. And he is inclined to be merciful if at all possible.

God gave us a world of good gifts: water, food, life, and all our various qualities that enable us to affect the world. We can use them as God intended and help one another or we can choose to pervert their purposes and use them to harm others. We can use our intelligence, our communication skills, our sense of community and our collective strengths to make the world a better place or a worse one. We can cheer on its destruction or work for its redemption. We know which side Abraham and Jesus are on. Which side are you on?