Easter and Justice

Easter and Justice—May 26, 2017

 [Paul said to the Athenians:] “Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stones, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” [Acts 17:29-31]

You don’t repair what you are about to throw away. 

You don’t fix what you are going to pitch immediately.

You don’t take the time and energy and sweat and effort to mend something that you don’t care about.

And you don’t take the time to straighten out, or reinforce, or set right, something that you are just abandoning.

We had neighbors across the street a while back, maybe a year or two ago, who had to leave the house they were renting.  And because it wasn’t theirs (they were just renting), and the terms were not ending on a particularly happy note (eviction is never a happy circumstance), they just left the place a gigantic mess.  Weeks later, after they had grabbed their stuff and gone, someone from the bank or landlord came and investigated the condition they had left the house, and it was just awful—messes from the animals, walls banged up and dirty, and things just left in a bad state.

Now, was it irresponsible of the former tenants to leave things that way?  Sure.  But in a sense, that is exactly the mindset you might expect from any of us when we are feeling “just done” with something.   If you are throwing away the old broken cheap venetian blinds from your window to install new ones, you usually don’t take the extra time to dust and wash the ones you are pitching.  If you are using disposal plates at your family picnic, you don’t wash or even scrape off the plates that you are just going to throw away anyhow.

On the other hand, the things you are invested in are the things you take the time to mend when they are broken, reorganize when they are strewn around in a mess, and put right when they are out of sorts.

If we are clear on that much, then we are in the right frame of mind to talk about the New Testament’s claim that God has raised Jesus from the dead in order that one day he will “judge the world in righteousness.”  We often assume the phrase “judge the world in righteousness” means destroying the world.  But again, I think that misses the point of why judgment happens in the universe... ever.  Judgment is--or at least it is meant to be--about justice, which is to say, it is about setting things right. The word translated "righteousness" here in the Greek is the same word for "justice;" these were not separate ideas in the minds of the biblical writers.  That means when Paul, or Peter, or James, or any of the other writers of the New Testament talk about God's future "judgment" over all things in Christ, it is about "establishing justice." It is about setting things right that are currently out of sorts and out of whack.  It is about mending and restoring.  After all, you don't bother to check if a wall is plumb if you are already determined to knock it down.  You only measure--that is, to judge--the squareness or plumbness of a building if you intend to continue to inhabit it, not if it is already slated for the wrecking ball tomorrow.

And that means, too, then, that the resurrection is not meant to be heard as a threat--as in, "Look out, because the divinely appointed hit man is back from the dead and looking for revenge!"  but as a promise, as in, "Here's how we know God is committed to setting things right in this broken, crooked world--God has even raised Jesus from the dead for the expressed purpose of taking a level and a plumb line to the universe and restoring it where it is out of true.

And it is in light of that promised future--a future of justice, in which people are no longer stepped on or elbowed out of the way by those who imagine themselves more important, in which nobody gets bullied or silenced, in which no one has to live in fear--that we are called to turn our hearts over to the plumb line now, too, and to let Jesus go to work making us true again, too.  Even the call for "all people everywhere to repent" is part of that restoring work, letting the risen Jesus reset the warped beams in our hearts that have allowed us to become selfishly crooked and indifferent to the needs of those around us.  To "repent," after all, is to let Jesus effect a change in our thinking and willing, our hearts and our minds, where they have gotten bent in the wrong direction.  But of course, a carpenter doesn't bother to bend and re-direct the nails that have started to go in crooked if he is going to throw away the project straight away anyhow.  The hammering back into the right shape is a sign that the carpenter is still committed to setting the boards right and getting the nails in correctly.

And so, dear friends, today take the Easter news that Jesus is alive again and risen from the dead as the New Testament voices like Paul and Luke intended us to hear it.  The news "Christ is risen" is the opening sentence in a declaration that this crooked universe will be put right.  Resurrection means that God is not throwing away creation, but putting it right where we have all bent it out of true.  And being Easter people now means that we strive even now to let God's justice bend us back to our right shape where we have let ourselves become curved in on ourselves.

And when we feel that hammering, shaping, bending presence working on us, we will have confidence: God is still working on us.  And you don't keep working on something you are just going to pitch.

Lord God, let your justice shape us and reshape us, more and more fully now, as you are remaking and restoring all this crooked world and putting us right.