Faithful and Just

"Faithful and Just"--November 20, 2017

"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.  If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us." [1 John 1:8-10]

These are words that I have known since before I even knew they were from the Bible. 

They will sound familiar to Lutherans especially--these words from 1 John were brought over intact into our Order for Confession and Forgiveness that begins worship for us most Sundays. They are words that have shaped the faith of many Christians, and for a lot of Lutherans, they roll of our tongues like our first words.  (In worship, after all, they are among the first words spoken on a Sunday morning, if you think about it.)

But there is something that surprises me hearing these words again today--maybe reading them on a Monday helps me hear them differently than speaking them aloud on a Sunday morning in a sanctuary.  I am caught today, not so much by John's description of us as "sinners" who need to be truthful about it [although, yes, that is true, too], but by his description of Jesus. 

John says "he who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us..." (We could argue about whether John specifically has Jesus in mind, or whether he is thinking more specifically about God the Father, but the context seems to me to lean in favor of Jesus here.)  In any case, notice the words that get paired here--the one who forgives is "faithful and just."  That is a surprising combination for our ears, given how we often think about "justice" and what it means to be "just."

In conversation with people, ask them what "justice" is about, and quite often the first responses have something to do with punishing people for what they did wrong, or at least some sense of getting even for abuses suffered from others. Our minds often go right to the criminal justice system when we hear the words "just" or "justice."  And forgiving someone for what he or she has done wrong doesn't seem to fit with that.  Justice, we think, should be like saying, "You can be put back in right relationship when you have paid your pound of flesh," or "You can be reinstated to society when you have suffered enough to satisfy that society's demands." Our usual picture of "justice" is usually punitive, and it is stark in its black-and-white, neat and tidy dividing up of the world into "innocent" and "guilty,"  "good guys" and "bad guys." No ambiguous gray areas.  No mess.  No second chances.

But forgiveness as an expression of justice?  That doesn't seem right.  And yet here is John saying that Jesus, who is described here first and foremost as "faithful and just," will forgive us at the first mention of our sins--no time served, no pound of flesh, no getting even.  Forgiveness is messy--it is an acceptance of the offender while they are messy, in the interests of making a new start possible.  But this is what we have to work with, if we are going to take Jesus' seriously: his kind of "justice" includes forgiveness and not merely punishment.

Well, when we are confronted with a situation when our words and logic don't fit with what Jesus does and says, either our words and logic are going to have to change to accommodate Jesus, or we'll have to remold Jesus to our liking.  So either we have to remake Jesus to be as vindictive as our understanding of justice is--or we will have to do the riskier thing of surrendering our understanding of justice to Jesus, and letting him re-teach us.  

So if we are going to believe John our writer here and admit that Jesus is supremely "faithful and just," then we are going to have to stretch our understanding of "justice" to include "mercy."  And all of a sudden we realize that justice is not about demanding a pound of flesh for the sake of abstract principle--which would never allow for the breathing room of forgiveness--but rather, justice is about how people get put back into right relationships when they have gotten things messed up. But notice--that is a decidedly messy way of seeing things.  In that case, forgiveness is not only "allowable" as part of whatever "justice" means--it might well be a primary way of "justifying" people who are out of right relationship.  Forgiveness, then, might have very much to do with justice--they are not opposites, competing for God's attention, but both part of God's ongoing desire and design to put us (the whole human family) back into right relationship with the divine.

Jesus, then, is "faithful and just," and he shows it--he practices justice faithfully--precisely by forgiving us.  In addition to giving us a much needed assurance when we are honest about how much we have to be forgiven for, that also widens our view of what it means to be concerned for "justice," too. 

We are not forced to make a false choice between being people of justice and being people who forgive.  To see it in the life of Jesus, forgiveness is part of what his kind of justice is all about. 

Good Lord, we ask you both to forgive us of our sins, and to open us up to your kind of justice.  Let us be captivated and compelled by your desire to put us back into right relationship with you, and let us be a part of that work as we tell others about Jesus and pattern our lives after his vision of Your Kingdom, whether we call such work "justice" or "mercy," or both.