Speaker: Caleb Schrock-Hurst
Bible Passages: Isaiah 61:1-11; Luke 4:16-21
Summary: When we divide the concepts of justice and righteousness from one another, we miss how God desires wholeness for all people, working to correct our sins so that we can flourish as God desires. Forgiveness — of ourselves and others — is key to the way of Jesus and the biblical concept of righteousness.
Good morning everyone! What a pleasure to go caroling together last evening, and to be together two Sundays in a row.
Last week, we focused on grace being a core characteristic of God; today, we’re focusing on another characteristic of God that can sometimes seem to be in tension with the idea of grace — justice. To start, I want to share a story about my siblings — my brother Lucas, who has a very keen sense of justice, and my sister, conveniently named for this story, Grace, a concept she embodies well.
Anyhow — My family loves playing board games, and growing up, the classic game Settlers of Catan led to many conflicts between Grace and Lucas. Grace owned the set of the game, and when we lived in the Philippines, special things from home were at a premium; it was one of her most prized possessions. Once, while we were in the Philippines, Lucas had raced out to a commanding lead in the game, so much so that everyone else, very unjustly — at least in his eyes — decided not to trade resources, no matter the circumstances, with him for the rest of the game, guaranteeing he would lose. Being an adolescent boy, at some point his frustration at the injustice boiled over to the point he knocked over the card table and stamped off in a huff. This was bad enough, but the worst part was that one of the irreplaceable pieces of the game somehow disappeared for good. Now, my sister had every right to be vindictive to Lucas — it would have been “just” to prevent him from playing Settlers again — instead, we still play it together when we get the chance. It’s because of my sister’s grace towards Lucas that we can still play games together as a family.
But we can ask — should she have chosen a path of grace, or of justice, after that argument? Which path does God hold to more closely? Is God just because he’s merciful, or merciful because he’s just?
If we accept that these two things really can’t be held together, then I have to side on the side of grace — while we value the tradition of law and justice of the Old Testament, our faith as Christians is not built on equal retribution, but on self-sacrificial love and forgiveness; Grace, not judgement, is God’s most important characteristic.
But — we miss a lot of God’s nature if we forget that justice is also central to God’s nature. Justice is highlighted three times in our passage from Isaiah this morning: at least in some translations God says — “For I, the Lord, love justice;” Isaiah says — “I love God for he has…arrayed me in a robe of his justice; and “For as the soil makes the sprout come up…so the Sovereign Lord will make justice and praise spring up before all nations.”
It is comforting that God is just, to know that God reigns sovereign over the universe, to know that God sits in judgement over the evildoers; to know that in the end, all wrongs will be made right. This is what enables us to cry out to God now, asking why that judgement against those who choose war over peace, who choose hatred over love, who choose greed over mutual flourishing, who choose exclusion over mutual learning, do not receive their judgement now.
So — If grace and justice are in disagreement, we side with grace: but I actually don’t believe they are in as much disagreement as we sometimes think, for three reasons.
First, so many things hold together with God that don’t hold together for us: we can remember and celebrate the mysteries of God, and trust that within the divine mystery, grace and justice hold together. Second, if we examine the linguistics of the word ‘justice’ in the bible, we find that our modern English understanding of the concept is extremely different from what Biblical writers were discussing. And third, God’s justice tends to be restorative justice — God’s justice, and even judgement, against us, and against others, is meant to correct, guide, and restore, not punish.
But before we dive too deep into justice, let’s think a little more about mystery.
We live in a society that is opposed to mystery — anything we do not understand, we fear. Imagine you saw something you didn’t understand — say, something, in the grand scheme of things, that is extremely small — like, for example, your family all went out for dinner, and when you came home, all your shoes were inexplicably moved to a different spot in the entryway of your house. Would you be comfortable with that mystery? Or would you assume someone had broken into your house? Would you sleep well that night, or would the shoes that had mysterious moved around the house keep you lying awake all night? This is the smallest of mysteries, and yet it causes me, at least, deep, deep discomfort too imagine — I know I wouldn’t rest well until I had gotten to the bottom of what happened.
For the last five hundred years Western Christianity has been on a quest to purge anything mystery from our understanding of nature, through science, and our understanding of God, through systematic and academic theology; but this is not a uniform Christian approach — Orthodox Christianity, among other Christian traditions, continues to center the mysteries of God in worship and theology.
Mystery, of course, is also a central part of Advent — there is no version of the Christmas story that doesn’t contain mystery, surprise, and perhaps even a little concern: it should be mysterious and shocking that the creator of the universe was born to a poor, young, unmarried, woman from a conquered people who couldn’t afford a room without barn animals in it to give birth in, let alone a midwife — we should remember this mystery, and never forget that God’s ways are beyond, and better, than ours.
For the past few Advents I’ve enjoyed this devotional book during advent — God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas, which is a selection of writings by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian and pastor who resisted and was eventually killed by the Nazi regime. Bonhoeffer says this about mystery and advent:
“The lack of mystery in our modern life is our downfall and our poverty….We destroy [the] mystery because we sense that here we reach the boundary of our being, because we want to be Lord over everything and have it at our disposal, and that’s just what we cannot do with [the] mystery. Living without mystery means…remaining on the surface, taking the world seriously only to the extent that it can be calculated and exploited…Living without mystery means not seeing the crucial processes of life at all and even denying them.”
Embracing the mystery is part of what we’re after as Christians. We should, as Bonhoeffer suggests, come to live with mystery and go beyond the world of calculation and exploitation, to the world of love, mutuality, trusting of one another, embracing the wonder and beautiful mystery of life.
Embracing the mystery, let’s turn to more carefully examine the question at hand: God’s justice, as spelled out in Isaiah and Luke.
As we turn to the text, I want to start by looking at the Hebrew word we’re talking about: tsedek. Say it with me: tsedek. You may feel like you’ve never heard this word before, but if you remember the kind of strange story in Genesis of Abraham running into a priest named Melchizedek, that’s the same word — his name is actually ‘Melki,’ King, and ‘tsedek,’ of righteousness. No wonder the book of Hebrews spends like three chapters comparing Jesus, our king of righteousness, to the Melchizedek of the Old Testament!
Anyways, back to tsedek. Like a lot of concepts in the Old Testament, depending on context this word can be translated a lot of ways — Justice, Judgement, and Righteousness are the most common, and are frequently interchanged in different translations — we can learn a lot by swapping these words amongst each other in a given verse.
Because justice and righteousness come from same biblical word, we make a serious error when we separate the idea of justice from the idea of righteousness. Where justice is often seen as punitive and overbearing — I think of how much injustices is done by the US justice system — we intuitively know that righteousness includes forgiveness, and grace, for people of all circumstances.
This isn’t the only way the concepts of righteousness and justice are pitted against one another in our world. I have friends who are all about justice, who would happily call themselves social justice warriors, but who wouldn’t touch the concept of righteousness with a ten foot pole; similarly, I have friends who structure their whole lives around living righteously before God, but who also believe that action for ‘political’ justice somehow makes them less righteous in the eyes of God.
One of the things I love most about our Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition is that we try — though we often fail — to hold these two concepts together, in the more accurate biblical understanding, that justice and righteousness need one another; there is not justice without righteousness, and there is not righteousness without justice.
With that in mind, let’s turn back to our passage from Isaiah — one that Jesus clearly loved. Our story today is of Jesus’s first sermon in the book of Luke; though we’re in chapter four, Luke has so far told the Christmas story, shared Jesus’s baptism and temptation in the wilderness, and then has Jesus head back to his hometown of Nazareth — and what passage does he choose to preach from, in his first public sermon? Isaiah 61.
I say Isaiah 61, but In Jesus day, the chapters and verses we know hadn’t been added — those were added by Christian scholars in the middle ages. At the time of Jesus, then, if you wanted to indicate a passage of scripture, you couldn’t just say “Isaiah 61” — you had to include actual verses from that section. But, to save space, they wouldn’t copy the whole passage — just the first few verses.
This points to the fact that Jesus likely read on past the one point five verses of Isaiah that Luke gives us — how far, we don’t know, but certainly up till what we heard today: Jesus chooses this beautiful picture of the people of God being restored in justice and righteousness, being trees of beauty and grace and strength for the world, to launch his ministry.
Isaiah, and thus Jesus, are making reference to the year of jubilee — the year of jubilee was this idea laid out in the biblical law that every seven years, and then much more so every 7 times 7, or 49 years, that all property would be given back to its original owner; every household that had been separated, for any economic or political reasons, would be re-united; all the overworked land and people would be given rest; all the property and boundary lines that had changed would be reset. The people, and the world, would be given the ultimate sabbath, where everything would be at rest and at peace with one another.
This is the justice and righteousness that Jesus promises us — a restoration to the intended glory God created us and the world for: right relationship with God, with ourselves, with nature, and with one another.
Jesus takes these promises — and he says that today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing; stating that he, the word who became flesh and dwelt among us, is the one in whom these promises of joy, wholeness, justice, and righteousness, will be fulfilled. A beautiful, but also bold claim — so bold a claim, in fact, that his friends and neighbors then tried to throw him off a cliff! But that’s a different story.
Anyhow — let’s remind ourselves where we are so far: first, we should seek to embrace mystery, particularly in Advent; second, that justice and righteousness are one concept in the biblical understanding, not opposed to each other as they often are in our modern world, and that Jesus built his public life on this ministry of reconciliation.
But this leaves us with a final question: how do we try to live into this synthesis of justice and righteousness?
The key, I believe, is to live, whenever wrongdoing occurs, seeking restorative justice — righteous justice, tsedek justice, that forgives and restores rather than seeks retribution. We all know — we live in a broken world, and from the most intimate relationship to the global stage there are no shortage of slights, sins, mistakes, and tragedies that we can either forgive, or try to retaliate against. We can seek retributive justice — an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, which will leave the whole world blind — or we can seek restorative justice, addressing wrong doing so that it doesn’t happen again, but seeking forgiveness, learning, and flourishing, not endless punishment.
Restorative justice is a pretty key concept in Mennonite academic circles, and we should be glad of the real inroads Mennonite scholars and practitioners have made in founding and running restorative justice programs in prisons and communities around the world, from post-war truth and reconciliation programs to structures that seek to upend the adversarial nature of the courtroom so that restoration, rather than punishment, occurs.
But the idea of restorative justice isn’t just some academic concept — it is a concept that is frequently lived out by people all around the world, even in horrific circumstances, who choose reconciliation and righteousness over punitive justice.
I’m sure many of you, like me, have been following the collapse of the brutal Assad dictatorship in Syria over the last few weeks; after two generations of dictatorship and thirteen years of Civil War, as of this week there is hope for a united and peaceful Syria for the first time since 2011, though the path forward remains long and unclear.
Anyhow — one of the most meaningful videos from Syria I saw this week — including of prison doors literally being thrown open, and of families that had been separated for years reuniting — is of a man calling out, speaking to others in the foyer of a prison where he had been held. He said — ‘I forgive my tormentors; I forgive the killers of my brother and my nephew. I was arrested by Assad’s men seven times, and my body bears the scars of their torture — but I’ve let it all go. No revenge, let’s build a new country together.’
This is the heart of God’s righteous justice: that we cannot undo the wrongs of the past, but we can work to restore what has been lost, not seeking revenge, but a just and righteous future, where hope, thriving, and the restoration is embraced.
As we move towards the frenetic days of Christmas, may we not forget what advent is about: the divine mystery of God coming to be with us and restore the world; the promise that despite the brokenness of the world, God is righteous, God is just, and God is near. As God guides us on life’s surprising and sometimes difficult journeys, may we continue to say — maranatha, come; come quickly Lord Jesus. Amen.
