I have learned that justice itself can be defined in many diverse ways, even among our Christian faith traditions. For example, liberation theology is about the realities of poverty and oppression and the commitment of Christians to struggle for liberation. Within this paradigm, God is a God of liberation, and his love is expressed in his justice and liberation of the oppressed. Justice is also part of the salvation paradigm of liberation theology, and injustice is something that has been structured and institutionalized by those in power.
In Catholic social teachings, there are underlying idealistic truths and foundations that any faith tradition that seeks to ameliorate injustice and champion justice issues can promote. For example, the Catholic tradition is rooted in three affirmations—the dignity of the human person, the social nature of human beings, and the belief that the abundance of nature and social living is given for all people. Subsequently, the dignity of each person created in God’s image and the transcendental worth of each person is foundational to Catholic social teaching. From this, Catholic tradition often links economic justice with issues of participation and political rights. Catholic teaching on justice also has a great concern for the poor and notes the treatment of the poor as a “litmus test” for the justice or injustice of a society.
Reinhold Neibuhr’s Protestant paradigm of justice begins with love. Yet Neibuhr follows this premise with the fact that human sin distorts the reality of the perfect harmony of love and stresses the fact that humans are fallen creatures. Within the realm of sin and fallen humanity, however, Neibuhr also raises the possibility of justice that is capable of improvement but which always reflects the partiality of human perspectives and is always within the conditions created by sin.
I believe that in considering what others are saying about justice, I can begin to consider how I define justice and how I want to practice it. Because if I do not do that—whether it be as a youth worker serving and leading others or as an individual—then the question of cross-cultural communion is moot. I want to have a profound definition of justice that will seek to nurture something so vital as cross-cultural communion.
During my last trip to Kenya—our second trip for our youth group—we were finishing building a school for children that we had begun the summer before. A picture of our youth group mission team hung on the front entrance of the church as some sort of memorial. I am really adverse to such hero worship of short-term mission teams. But I realized at that moment that unlike other trips, the school was more than just a one-summer fix for the Kenyan students we were meeting and ministering to. It would serve as a long-term solution to educate and equip a generation of students who would otherwise be subject to the injustice of not having such an education.
This reality and feelings about justice and injustice are something that Chap Clark and Kara Powell express in their book, Deep Justice in a Broken World. Moreover, it has shaped not only our understanding of justice but how we practice missions. I realized that embracing and fighting for justice means more than just temporary solutions. Practically speaking, it is more than just a summer mission trip or a trip to a soup kitchen. It is a change in my fundamental worldview and paradigm of justice, especially in the church. It means teaming up and supporting the efforts of missionaries who are on the front lines of need. It is asking the question of why things are the way they are in each context and then doing something about it. It means seeking out solutions that will combat injustice for a lifetime.
When it comes to this type of justice, Martin Luther King Jr. said it most appropriately when he stated that “true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars need restructuring.” Similarly, Professor James Lawson of Vanderbilt University stated that “if you do not deal with the socioeconomic and political forces that inhibit people and create torture and cruelty, you can’t make progress toward justice.”
Ultimately, it is this type of justice that has helped our youth ministry and church to begin to see that justice, by definition, is cross-cultural communion. In seeking to understand the injustice of others and not just what we may think, we are moving across culture to seek true communion to restore justice systemically and holistically.
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Thanks to Glenn Beck, the word justice and the idea of practicing justice have gotten a lot of press lately. Somehow we’ve given “liberty and justice for all” a bad name. The Bible is filled with references to living justly. And there are many references making sure that the widow and orphan and the alien are taken care of and not take advantage of while they are among the people of God.
So, how should we live? How does this change us? Or does it?
According to Bible Gateway (www.biblegateway.com), the word justice appears in the NASB more than 100 times.
Micah 6:7-9 (New American Standard Bible):
“Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams, in ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
I don’t believe that our churches have to be culturally diverse in order for us to practice justice. I do believe, though, that we must have an understanding of other cultures in order to live justly. We must have exposure, and we must take time to gain understanding of where other people come from in order to understand their needs and really learn to love them.
If I’d never been broke and had my electricity cut off, I wouldn’t have the ability to understand how scary and humiliating this can be—when you are working your hardest and it’s still not enough. If you’ve never been denied health insurance or unable to get it because of a lack of money or a preexisting condition, then you cannot understand why people want reform and justice in this area. I’m waiting to hear back from an insurance company right now to see if they will cover my family and me. We actually have the money to pay, but our preexisting conditions and medication needs may cause us to get declined anyway.
If you’ve never been poor, it’s hard to understand all the painful aspects of not having enough money. If you’ve never gone without food, you cannot know the shame it feels to have to ask for help just to pay for the basics. And it is very easy to criticize those seeking justice for the least of these when you have a great deal of money and have not had to suffer much yourself.
Living justly involves learning to walk in another person’s moccasins; to see life through someone else’s eyes and experiences; to understand how others think, how they live, and why they do what they do. There are always different sides and multiple opinions on what is just and how one should live justly in the world.
For me, it involves beginning to look at the world through the eyes of God. God sees us all equally. He doesn’t rate us on our clothing, our lack of clothing, the cars we drive or the lack of a car, the houses we live in or lack of a house. God looks at our hearts, not the color of our skin or our countries of origin.
Are we loving people? Are we serving people? Are we considering others before ourselves? Do we realize that how we live and how we choose to spend our money and our time really does have an impact on others and their lives? Do we choose action or inaction?
Does it matter if I buy a shirt or a soccer ball that may have been made by children? Does it matter if I choose to keep buying water in plastic bottles? Does it matter if I recycle? Does it matter that kids are sold into slavery because their parents cannot afford to feed or clothe them?
This can all feel overwhelming and impossible, but difficulty cannot be an excuse for inactivity.
I have learned that it does matter how I spend my money and my time. I can share more with those who have less than I do. I can make better choices. And can I can encourage my students and my own children to see how blessed they are and that our job as followers of Jesus is to live out Matthew 25:40. Then we really will be doing justice.
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Talk of justice has been popping up everywhere. It used to be a kind of code word for mainline liberals, but lately evangelicals have turned their attention toward justice as well. That said, I think it is important that we remember that justice (from a theological perspective) is not something we (as human agents) primarily do. It is God who brings God’s justice and often bringing God’s justice through God’s very judgment.
So while I think it has been important that we’ve taken this turn toward speaking of justice and encouraging young people to participate in justice-seeking action, it’s odd to me that when we talk about justice, we rarely talk about the judgment of God or God’s action at all. It is God who brings God’s judgment, and it isn’t necessarily a judgment of right and wrong but a judgment that seeks to bring the redemption of creation and the bursting forth of the new humanity.
God surely judges but not like a rigid teacher or a popular clique making comments on your new school wardrobe. When God judges, God seeks to bring forth justice, to bring forth within creation the new, to make things right, by God in God-self asserting that what is cannot be and then acting to bring forth the new creation and the new humanity.
Then can you practice justice without practicing cross-cultural communion? Maybe practicing justice is not about human effort or programs but participating in God’s action by coming under God’s judgment, knowing that when God judges (God kills), God always brings back to life. And this witnesses to the new creation that is on its way. So maybe you can practice justice without cross-cultural communion because justice is first and foremost about participating in God’s action, not in some kind human program.
However, it just may be that to participate in God’s action of justice is to be drawn into cross-cultural communion. A driving reality of the old, a driving reality of the broken world that God is acting to redeem through God’s justice, is that we are divided culturally and ethnically, and these divisions turn difference into the playing field of violence. Therefore, it just may be that to participate in God’s own action of justice, which is to bring forth the new creation and new humanity—where there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female—demands that we ourselves be swept up into actions and relationships across every boundary.
So my point is that cross-cultural communion may be necessary for justice, not because it will work or because it is right, but because it is where God is found actively bringing forth God’s new reality. Justice is to participate with God.
There’s one more point to add. If we follow this way of thinking—that God is the one who brings justice and we are called not to do our own justice but to participate in God’s action and if God’s action of justice comes through God’s action of judgment—then why doesn’t youth ministry ever talk about God’s judgment?
I’m not advocating some kind of spiritually abusive self-esteem drain, but we take kids all over the globe into contexts ravaged by corruption, poverty, and racism, and rarely are these trips constructed in a way to help kids be open to listening for the judgment of God, of actually being judged by God. We usually just stick to helping kids feel like they have made a difference (with a rhetoric of do-goodism), but maybe—and I know this takes a lot more thinking—mission trips and service projects are not just about what we do but about participating in the judgment of God as a blessing to others. Maybe kids should hear God’s “No.”
According to studies (like some in the excellent book Divided by Faith, by Michael Emerson), a major reason that cross-cultural communion doesn’t happen is that people in power tend not to want to face the past and its judgment, while people who have felt the sting of oppression wonder how they can move forward in communion without the past being judged.
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