What is justice, really?

Amos 1:1-2, 5:14-15, 21-24
 

            Amos is a prophet who is well-known for talking about justice. “Let justice roll down like waters,” he says. I imagine in the pre-Jesus Jewish world this was something you would put on a bumper sticker—you know, stick it to the butt of your camel and show everybody what you stand for. But this, like so many words and phrases that means something to us—justice, righteousness, those kinds of things—are loaded words. Is our idea of justice anything like Amos’ justice? Like God’s justice?

            Everybody is “for” justice, right? Nobody is going to say, “I like injustice more than justice.” But once we get past the initial polling of whether we like justice or not there is the difficult question of defining what justice is. Is it retributive justice? An eye for an eye? Is it a fair sentence for a crime? Is it the bad guys getting karma? Is it restoring victims? What is it?

            See, I don’t really like preaching on justice because I think it’s too easy for all of us to hear what we want to hear. If you’re of a liberal persuasion you may hear justice and think “social justice”—equality, empowerment, all that—and if you’re of a conservative you might hear justice and think “just desserts”—you get back what you deserve, what you earn, what you worked for. God’s justice, according to the Bible, seems like both those views and neither at the same time. In order to understand God’s justice we need to understand the law and where better to look for the law than with Ten Commandments.

            Now, I’ve read the Ten Commandments once or twice in my life; I’m guessing you have, too. There are many laws in the Bible but the Ten Commandments are laws I think we can all agree are pretty universal. The Ten Commandments are taught in most churches; we even have a section of Luther’s Small Catechism devoted to them with explanations of each. And there’s a very good reason we teach the Ten Commandments: They condemn us.  The more I read them, and especially the more I read Luther’s explanations to them, the more I realize that you can’t read the Ten Commandments faithfully without seeing all the ways you are in violation. With that realization is the reality that I the one under the thumb of God’s judgment and I am not the judge.

Lest we find ourselves thinking that perhaps we do have it all figured out, Luther’s explanations to the Commandments should leave us with the cold reality that we break not just one of the commandments but every commandment and we break them with astonishing regularity. This is why many people through history have looked at the church and said, “Well, they’re just a bunch of hypocrites. They’re just as sinful as everyone else.” If the Christian faith is about living up to these standards and if justice is for the world out there but not including myself, then I think they have a point. The commandments are an ideal we cannot live up to. They only mark our failures.

            For example, commandment #1: “I am the Lord, your God. You shall have no other gods before me.” I can all but guarantee you’ve broken that one since I started talking. Maybe you’re thinking right now, “Man, I’d rather be doing something else.” Or “How long are you going to talk?” But this isn’t really about preaching, which can sometimes be about the preacher and, shockingly, not much about God; it’s more about the attitude you have in every moment of your life. Can you really always put God first—even before your own self?

            But it doesn’t end there. Commandment #2 is about taking the Lord’s name in vain. Don’t curse, ever. Don’t even think it. Essentially, this commandment is telling you to never be resentful or angry, or use the Lord’s name out of anger or to wish ill will on your neighbor. Good luck with that.

            Commandment #3 is about honoring the Sabbath, which is tough when many of us haven’t taken a full Sabbath day in years, if ever.

            Commandment #4 is honor your father and mother, which teenage-you failed on a minute-by-minute basis.

            Commandment #5 is where we start to really trick ourselves. “You shall not murder.” Well, I’ve never done that! Score one point for the good guys! I’m not like those murderers who deserve what they get! Then you read Luther’s explanation: “We are to fear and love God, so that we neither endanger nor harm the lives of our neighbors, but instead help and support them in all of life’s needs.” It’s not enough to not hack somebody to death; you have to help them in all their needs. ALL of them.

            So it continues with the latter commandments: You shall not commit adultery. Great, we might think, until we start talking about our thoughts, the things we wish—even the things we don’t want to think but occasionally do anyway. There’s this statement on the big test that psychologists use to profile people. The statement is “I sometimes think things too horrible to say.” You have to agree or disagree. The question is one of many designed to see whether you are ideologically distorting experiences, because occasionally thinking horrible things is universal—everybody does it. You can trick yourselves into thinking you don’t; you can pretend that you only ever have angelic thoughts, but you don’t always. And our thoughts condemn us, and it’s the same with coveting. Actually coveting might cover most of this stuff. It’s not enough not to act; it’s also required not to think it; and we all do it.

            At the end of the day, the commandments are impossible. So, about justice… by the demands of the law you are not the righteous judge but prisoner to your guilt. Jesus is incredibly consistent when a person comes to him asking about the demands of the law; every time he answers by giving them the law in all its fullness and glory, “Be perfect like your father in heaven is perfect,” he says, or “Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow,” or “You need to go give away everything.” Jesus shows us what it means to be just according to the law—you have to be perfect.

            Justice is for murderers and thieves, yes, but Jesus points out—on the back of Amos—that you are a murderer and a thief and you just don’t know it. So justice means you’re going to get yours—you’ll get exactly what you deserve/

            So, about justice…

            There are three ways to take this. One is to say that this is stupid and that it’s better to be your own god than follow a God who tells us we have to be perfect. The second option is to throw your hands up and say, “Well, since you’re saying I’m no better than a murderer, then I might as well go and do whatever the heck I want.” This is tempting—to treat grace as something cheap, something weighty enough to make me righteous but not weighty enough to drive me to love others. Or, we can fall on our knees like Peter and say, “Lord, to whom shall I go?” or like the disciples, after Jesus sends the rich man away, who cry out, “Who then can be saved?” to which Jesus responds in a way Amos could not, by saying, “For mortals it is impossible but for God all things are possible.”

            True justice is only a thing God can do.

            True justice requires the person judging you to also have died for you. So you can’t be judge. Not if you’re living. Your job is only to love on people. You aren’t the judge of who is righteous and who is not. You, like everybody else in the world, have been found guilty and sentenced to death. This is why we have to die, right? Because of sin.

            So, I wonder… does Amos matter anymore? There’s a part of me that wants to say, “No.” Let’s forget the prophets, forget the law altogether, throw out the Ten Commandments, instead live lives of love in response to grace, but then I wonder, “What do those lives look like without prophets like Amos as our guide?” How do we know how we should act in response to the gift of salvation we’ve been given if not for Amos?

            Just because we can’t reach justice is no excuse not to love; in fact it’s the reason we do it, even as we acknowledge we won’t do it well enough. Justice is an ideal that we cannot reach, but we need ideals. So, when you hear “justice was served” just know it’s a lie, because true justice condemns the perpetrator even as it restores the victim, and in this broken world that just can’t happen. We should know there is no true justice in the case of murder or rape, even in the case of theft, because you can never truly restore the security that is broken, let alone a life or innocence lost. We know there is no justice for adultery, no setting back the clock on abuse. We know this even we talk about “criminal justice.”

            The only justice is found in our death, which is universal, because that is the actual reward for sin. And that’s the end of the law. But through Jesus we have a promise that death’s judgment isn’t the final word. Justice is not temporal but eternal. Justice is radical, because Jesus is radical.

            So, I think we can probably stop talking about doing justice. We don’t do justice. But we can strive to live, as Amos calls us, to hate evil and love good; to acknowledge our imperfections and strive for something better; and to pray to God that there is something better than our justice in the universe because our justice is not justice at all. Our justice needs Jesus.