Justice Is Learned--January 10, 2023

Justice Is Learned--January 10, 2023

"[God's Servant] will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching." [Isaiah 42:4]

Whatever justice means in the end, apparently it comes from the instruction of a teacher rather than the point of a sword or the barrel of a gun.

I've got to confess, I'm sure I've heard this verse dozens of times in my life in church services, and then read it before on my own plenty of times beyond that--but I don't think it has ever dawned on me how Isaiah connects the gentleness, the kindness, of God's Servant with bringing justice.  But here it is--the thing that this justice-hungry world really is waiting for is instruction, not invasion.  We are in need of compassion, not a conqueror.

Today's verse [which again might be familiar to folks who were in worship this past Sunday] doubles down on the vision the prophet gave us yesterday in Isaiah 42:1-3, where God's Servant brings justice with gentleness.  The same One who doesn't need to shout in the streets to get attention, and who won't break off a bruised reed or snuff out a struggling candle's flame, is the one who will "bring forth justice" for "all nations."  And here again today, the prophet says that God's Servant, the One we confess we have met in Jesus, will keep going strong in his work "until he has established justice in the earth."  But the conclusion of that thought is simply dumbfounding: the world in need of justice is apparently longing for teaching, rather than coercion, for that justice to arise.

This is going to make us stop and think more carefully about what we think the word "justice" really means, because to a lot of ears, the word "justice" is just a synonym for "punishing lawbreakers for committing crimes" or "getting revenge for past wrongs."  For the multiple generations who grew up with the opening monologue of TV's Law and Order playing in the background, "justice" is about catching bad guys and convicting them.  And for those who remember the beginning of the two decades of war in Afghanistan, we cannot help but recall that the invasion of that country, meant to respond to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, was originally designated as "Operation Infinite Justice."  In other words, in our culture, we are often told that justice is something you achieve with weapons in hand.

And without denying the very real need in our world for stopping bank robbers, murderers, or terrorists from being able to harm people or steal from them, I find it striking that when Isaiah imagines justice for all the earth, he describes it coming at the hands of a teacher who is so gentle he wouldn't even break a bent reed along his path.  There is no vision here of a commanding general ordering troops in to kill their enemies or "make them pay."  There is no description of "getting even" or "getting back" at some villainous "them" waiting in the shadows around every corner.  There is not even a sense of needing to punish people for bad actions--there is, rather, a longing for instruction in a good way of life.

And this, of course, runs counter to what we have accepted as "conventional wisdom" for just about all of human history.  Over the centuries, empire after empire and superpower after superpower has insisted that it was tasked [by history? By fate? By the gods, or a particular god?] with enforcing "justice" on all the unruly places that had not yet submitted to the powers of the day.  The Romans insisted they had come to save the world and bring it justice... by conquering it.  The Third Reich was certain it was fated to bring order and peace by its rule.  The militarism of the Soviet Union was all for the sake of economic "justice," according to its propaganda, no matter how many people died under its tank treads or in gulags along the way.  And certainly we have done our share of convincing ourselves we are always and only the guarantors of justice, and that therefore, we are permitted to overthrow governments, drop atomic bombs, or invade other countries. It is always easy and tempting to tell yourself that you are permitted to do terrible things because you and Your Side are on the side of "justice," while "They" are on the side of evil.

Isaiah envisions something different.  And he is convinced that God does, too.  Isaiah imagines that God's Chosen One--God's "Servant"--brings justice through kindness, and that gentleness and teaching are what we are most in need of.  Echoing the images from the opening chapters of Isaiah's book where the nations come to the mountain of God to learn the ways of peace, so that they can beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, here the prophet pictures the whole world being taught a new way of living, until justice comes forth.  That means rethinking what justice really means--because as Isaiah describes it, it looks less like a fixed balance sheet that must be paid back in terms of retribution, but more like something you grow and nurture like a seed.  It is an active reality we keep practicing, keep getting better at, and keep growing into--not a matter of "getting even" to restore some unchanging ledger line.  To the prophets, "justice" is not something you threaten or shoot your way into achieiving, but something you learn by doing, a way of life that ensures everybody gets to eat and nobody gets taken advantage of.  That might include restoring things that have been taken, damaged, or lost, but not the need to get some "pound of flesh" to satisfy debts.  If that is our picture of justice, then we are the ones who have caricatured it into a crude matter of settling scores--the Hebrew prophets keep calling us to see justice as a way of life for everyone in a whole community, not just a matter of catching robbers or putting crooks in jail.

All right, then, so what?  What difference does it make to shift our thinking of justice from "invading armies" to "instruction in a way of life"? Well, for one, it helps us make sense of Jesus and his mission.  We Christians are people convinced that the Servant of God turns out to have been not a king, a general, or a Caesar, but a homeless itinerant rabbi who gets executed by the Empire--and in the name of the Empire's kind of "law and order," mind you.  But Jesus never calls for invading the people who don't accept him, killing his enemies to get even with them, or riling up his disciples to storm the praetorium if they don't get their way. Whatever "justice" looks like to Jesus, it looks more like everyone being fed bread and fish, the jubilee year of debt cancellation, and a blessing pronounced on the last, the least, and the left behind.  It looks a lot like learning how to love with kindness.  Without a voice like Isaiah's showing us that this has been God's way all along, we might take one look at Jesus and dismiss him with a shrug, saying, "But when does he get revenge and make his enemies pay--you know... justice?"  We might miss that Jesus' way of life IS what justice looks like, and that Jesus' way of living is the means by which justice grows up out of the ground.

That also means each of us has great power in our hands in small acts of teaching and learning from one another how to treat one another decently and equitably--before someone steals, hurts, or kills.  Every time I teach my kids to speak kindly to other classmates who get picked on rather than joining in the bullying to save their own skin, it is a matter of teaching justice through kindness.  Every time my kids remind me about sharing good things with others who do not have what they need, they are teaching me about the way compassion breathes life into justice, too.  Every time we dare to listen to someone else tell us how our actions have affected them, even if we didn't realize those effects, we come to see how being good to one another feeds the growth of justice, too. 

Perhaps, too, we'll come to see like Cornel West says, that "justice is what love looks like in public, just like tenderness is what love feels like in private." Instead of seeing "justice" and "kindness" as opposites--where justice is about cold, calculating punishments and kindness is warm, squishy feelings--we can see that justice and kindness are two sides of the same coin, and that they are both part of a way of life we learn together, rather than something we have to be scared into doing for fear of punishment.

I don't know about you, but I could see myself spending a whole lifetime learning from Jesus about how to love others rightly, and I don't think it would ever get old.

May we be such faithful learners of justice from God's Servant, Jesus, today.

O God our Instructor, your ways are good, and you lay a good path before us.  Guide us into your justice and mercy, and keep us along your way in this day.