Pulling at the Threads--October 20, 2025

Pulling at the Threads--October 20, 2025

Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my accuser.’ For a while he refused, but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:1-8)

Jesus takes it as a given that God cares about justice in the world--this world, the one in which we live, here and now.  And Jesus seems intent on convincing us to believe that God cares about justice, too.

I suppose you could say that "God is always on the side of justice," except that so often in our time everyone assumes that their own side is always the "just" and "righteous" one, and therefore that the matter of justice is reducible to an US-versus-THEM conflict.  And even more dangerously, we tend to assume that since we have told ourselves we are on the "side of justice," therefore any means are permissible to accomplish that justice--and history shows us a terrible list of people who committed atrocities because they were convinced in the righteousness of their cause and the justice of their goals.  So maybe it's not so helpful to think about justice as a matter of pitting one "side" against another, or putting the interests of "Me and My Group First" because we have convinced ourselves that God and justice are with "us," rather than with "them."

Maybe we would do better if we thought of God's commitment to "granting justice" in terms of making all things whole in the world.  We are so quick to define "justice" in terms of who gets zapped for stepping out of line, or how big of a punishment is meted out for the breaking of the rules, but really, the Scriptures offer a much bigger picture of what justice really is.  It's more about putting thing right, restoring what is lost, mending what is broken, and healing what is wounded.  Justice is more about repairing what has been harmed, lifting up those who have been stepped on, and seeking the good of all rather than just a select few--and that will never quite fit rightly within a framework that can only see life as a zero-sum game, where good for you is a threat to me and my group, and where my victory can only come by means of your loss. Jesus isn't suggesting that God is anybody's mascot when he says that God is committed to granting justice; rather, God's kind of justice is about making all people whole and putting all things right.

That means when we are looking to recognize God's presence or work in the world today (because, again, Jesus doesn't rope off God's concern about justice to being just for the afterlife or up in heaven, but seems very much about this world as well), we can't just oversimplify God's work to taking sides.  It's not that God is on the "side" of the Russians against the Ukrainians in that war (much to the chagrin of the clerics and patriarchs of the Russian state church that have publicly declared God on their "side"), or the other way around, but rather that God doesn't want anybody killing anybody over who owns pieces of land, and God doesn't want anybody to be afraid of incoming bombs or drones in the night.  It's not that God is on the "side" of the nation-state of Israel or that God is only on the "side" of the Palestinian people who live in Gaza and the West Bank, but rather that God doesn't want to see anyone taken hostage, or anyone's home to be bulldozed or blown up.  God's kind of justice isn't about making one side win and another side lose, so much as it is about remaking our whole way of relating to one another, so that I can see you as a neighbor, even across the lines we have drawn between us, and I can seek your well-being just as you are called to seek mine.  God's kind of justice isn't about getting my party in office at the next election so that we can just hold onto power, but rather about how we lay down our need for power and status so that instead we can serve one another.  God's kind of justice is much less interested in damning people for being rule-breakers, and much more invested in restoring people who are suffering in some way.  And it is for everyone, because God's intention is to make the world itself whole. That just doesn't work with the us-against-them kind of vitriol that labels anybody you don't agree with as terrorists or criminals.  God's kind of justice is committed to restoring all of us, and making all of us whole.

That's what Jesus says we can count on God to grant.  We can't put a leash on God to serve only on "my side" or work for "my agenda," but we can depend on God always to be committed to putting things right in the world, wherever things have gone wrong.  Sometimes that work is slow, tedious, and difficult to see, rather like watching someone untangle a messy knot might look for a good long while like nothing is being done, because the progress is small and often messy.  But if you've ever untangled a knot before, you know that the slow and steady work of pulling at the threads and loosening the tangles is worth it.  And if you want to save the whole piece of string rather than just cut your losses and settle for giving up on some of the tangled cord, then you have to take the time to get the whole thing unraveled rightly.  That's what God's kind of justice is like--the deliberate, dedicated work of undoing all the ugly knots we have gotten ourselves tied up into, because God knows that we are all bound up together in the same skein of yarn.  Your well-being is connected to mine, just as mine is tethered to everyone else's.  God isn't willing to give up on some part of the ball of string by just cutting a segment out--God is intent on setting the whole thing free again. That's our hope.

Today, the question to ask is this: how can I be a part of God's work to untie the knots around me, and how can we see the work of "justice" as something bigger than sides trying to defeat each other? How might we let ourselves be a part of God's work to mend the whole creation?

Lord God, bring your kind of justice to us, and allow us to be a part of your work in this tangled world.