justice – Relationalrealities

The 8^th chapter of the book of Nehemiah throws a historical spotlight on post-exilic life among the returning Jews in Jerusalem. Remember that in 586, Nebuchadnezzar had sacked Jerusalem taking into captivity the upper echelons of Judahite society. In 538 following the edict of Cyrus the Great, the first wave of returnees led by Zerubbabel arrived among the ruins of Jerusalem to begin the restoration process. A second wave followed in 458 led by the priest Ezra escorting the return of the sacred vessels for the new Temple construction. A third wave led by Nehemiah arrived in 445. Nehemiah had been a cupbearer to King Artaxerxes I, who is now entrusted with the civil administration of the restoration project.

The returning exilic community faced serious opposition. A group described as the people of the land represented the original Judahite indigenous peasantry who had been left behind after the Babylonian deportation of the upper echelons of Judahite society in 587. They clearly resented the returning exiles. Together with Judah’s Canaanite neighbors – the old traditional adversaries – they fiercely resisted the restoration project – frequently sending messages and envoys to lobby the Persian court against the exiles and further returns.

Therefore, the restoration project proceeded in fits and starts, as much hampered by the internal struggles within the returnee community between rich and poor, powerful and powerless – just to add into the mix with the constant guerilla attacks mounted by both indigenous and surrounding peoples.

In Nehemiah 6, we read of the completion of the wall around Jerusalem—an exhausting but significant achievement. With a modicum of physical security achieved, in chapter 8, attention now turns to the spiritual renewal of the people who gather before the Watergate to hear the Torah—the book of the law—proclaimed before them.

We read that all the people, both men and women gathered in the open square before the Watergate outside the newly constructed wall to hear the priest and scribe Ezra read from the law of Moses. Imagine the scene – from dawn until midday, standing on a raised platform before the Watergate, surrounded by the Levites and Scribes, Ezra read from the book of the law. We don’t know quite what this included but it is likely portions from the Deuteronomic corpus of Genesis, Leviticus, and Numbers.

With the completion of the physical city walls, it was time to build a different kind of wall – a spiritual wall within which the community reaffirmed its distinctive identity shaped by their covenant obligations not only to God but to one another. We read that the gathering included men, women, and all who could understand – reflecting a collective commitment to heal communal divisions under the guidance of God’s word.

We note that for many gathered to listen to Ezra, much of what he read was unfamiliar for it seems that among the assembly knowledge of the covenant heritage had been largely, lost. Added to this was a language problem – for Aramaic had replaced Hebrew as the lingua franca of the people. Hence the importance of the Levites flanking Ezra who acted as interpreters so that the people could understand the message being proclaimed. Like good preachers the Levites and Scribes rendered the message accessible and its application practical.

Standing under the judgment of God is for any community a bittersweet experience and we are told that hearing the words of the law evoked both weeping and rejoicing – repentance paving the way to reencountering the generosity of God’s promises.

In our St Martin’s community, the last Sunday in January is by divine decree designated Annual Meeting Sunday. And so, on this Annual Meeting Sunday when we move from celebrating the achievements of the past year we also are looking ahead to the challenges and opportunities of the coming one. 2025 from its outset promises to be the first year in a political cycle reflective of a nation deeply at odds with itself and with the wider world beyond. A political cycle that will have to grapple with the irreconcilable tension between the further privileging of the rich and powerful and the demands of a restless and angry electorate hungry for an improvement in their lives. Ahead lies a period in which many events will test our Christian allegiance to Kingdom values.

The span of centuries marking the passage through linear time separating us from the event recorded in Nehemiah’s 8^th chapter evaporates like mist before the lens of Kairos time – where there’s no separation between past, present, and future. Therefore, we too stand -imaginatively speaking- alongside the exiles before Ezra’s reading from the law. Like the men and women gathered before the Watergate – the question remains – how do we understand the message of the law? How will we interpret and apply our understanding?

In the importance of hearing and receiving God’s Word, we acknowledge the centrality of Scripture in shaping the life of our community faithful to the vision of a just society – a deeply rooted vision of covenantal community guided by God’s desire for a society built on justice as the communal expression of love – upon compassion as the outward working of mercy – a community faithful to the good news of Jesus Christ that the Kingdom of God is already among us.

Justice and righteousness are fundamental to social order. Justice ensures fairness and accountability, while righteousness emphasizes compassionate mercy and ethical behavior in recognition that everyone is entitled to be treated with dignity as children of God. Justice is blind to the artificial distinctions maintaining unequal systems favoring discrimination against and neglect of those whose difference renders them among the most vulnerable in society.

Justice has an economic face. The effective exercise of justice is a bulwark against monopolistic practices leading to the economic exploitation of the poor by the rich and the steady impoverishment of everyone in between. Today we most clearly experience this as institutions privilege shareholder returns over the duty to benefit those they were created to serve. We are living in a world where further tax cuts for the wealthiest are presented as a benefit for all and where the powerful take all the profits while demanding that we – the rest -shoulder the risks – compensating their losses from the public purse.

Justice has an environmental face. The primary command in creation is to exercise responsibility for the care of creation and to confront environmental depredation by the powerful and profits hungry from whom we hear that the environmental crisis is too costly to address. Yet, creation’s message could not be plainer – the reality is upon us – that it is infinitely more costly not to.

Standing alongside the crowds gathered before the Watergate we also hear the commandment to treat the stranger with dignity and with mercy for we were all once strangers in a new land. The tragic paradox was that while Ezra was proclaiming the care for the stranger as a divine decree – he was already working on measures to reinforce the ethnocentricity of Jewish society- prohibiting intermarriage and forcing Jewish men to expel their non-Jewish wives and biracial children. We are no strangers in our own time to the construction of physical walls as the first step in the completion of ethnic cleansings.

The just society envisioned in the Torah and central to Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom is a community where divine expectations shape individual and communal relationships – where individual rights are balanced with communal responsibilities.

This vision is not merely theoretical – it’s practical, designed to ensure a harmonious and flourishing society. Many today feel the demands of justice are impractical, too costly to implement and give away too much power to those less deserving than we are. It’s sobering to realize that every ill we experience in the operation of our society today, every corruption we lament, is an expression of our rebellion and rejection of the template of God’s vision of a just society. The question we should ask is not whether we can afford the demands of a just society – but whether can we afford to ignore them!

We have long prattled on about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. If we didn’t realize it before – we now must confront the seeming unpalatable truth – the moral universe bends only through our commitment to realizing justice, practicing mercy, and our courageous walking in step with our God.

As we celebrate the past year and prepare for the new one ahead, we will do well to remember that the Spirit of the Lord is upon us, because the Lord has anointed us to bring good news to the poor. The Lord sends us to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to fight oppression, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Welcome to the coming year in which God’s invitation is to let the scriptures be fulfilled in our hearing.

The Thomas Avenue Home Depot car park in Phoenix AZ around 5am. Men squat in ones or twos or small groups seeking whatever shade the sparse Acacia trees of Phoenix’s ubiquitous car park desert plantings can provide against the merciless sun – which even at this hour of the day grows hot. A pickup truck drives slowly by – stopping at a group of men. After a brief exchange of words – the men climb onto the back and the pickup drives off. Maybe the driver of the pickup is in construction. Maybe he’s a farm foreman. Either way – he’s on the lookout for day laborers who abound at any number of pickup points in the carparks that dot not only the Phoenix landscape but towns and cities across the Southwest.

At whatever time of day, you can find scatterings of such men –seeking the only work easily available to them as below minimum wage undocumented day laborers. Numbers throughout the day fluctuate, yet, even towards the end of the working day some still patiently wait for the ever-decreasing possibility of finding a day’s hire. What of those who are not hired as the sun sets?

Manual work – now there’s an expression! It means to work with one’s hands. Unskilled day laborers who have nothing but their labor to trade have always been and remain vulnerable to the dehumanizing conditions we impose on those who have no power, no voice, no country, no other marketable skills.

Even skilled workers who like the members of the United Autoworkers Union – or the Writers Guild of America – workers whose manual labor takes the form of an application of necessary knowledge and skill are forced to strike for an equitable share of the huge profits generated from their labor. It’s odd how even today capital refuses to recognize that the most valuable commodity in the creation of profit are the workers whose labor produces it.

And so it was ever thus as we plainly see from Jesus’ parable in Matthew 20 – in which he addresses the economic plight for a class of Jewish tenant farmers and small landowners who had become the losers in the 1st-century global economy. In the 1st-century – Galilee was a cosmopolitan mishmash where Syro-Phoenicians, Greeks, Roman incomers, and Jews mixed freely. It was the most fertile and productive agricultural region in the Middle East. Therefore, Galilee was also at the heart of the socio-economic upheavals that accompanied an agrarian revolution in which Jewish tenant farmers and small landowners were being displaced by the influx of Roman new money.

The Roman new money wanted to amalgamate land holdings to create larger farms to form more economic units to maximize profit for the landowners through scaling-up agricultural production to feed the Empire’s rapidly increasing population. As a story this one is not an unfamiliar one from the pages of history – where page after page evidences the eviction of tenant farmers and small landholders reducing them to the status of day laborers. Jesus would have encountered men standing idle in the marketplace – an ancient Home Depot carpark – awaiting hire to work the land they had once farmed.

This story opens with Jesus describing it to his listeners as a parable of the kingdom of heaven. In other words, he’s telling them that this is a story about God. Jesus’ stories about God take the form of parables – that is- stories that draw on the familiarity of the hearers’ everyday experience to expose them to an unexpected and somewhat disturbing conclusion – a kind of sting in the tail ending.

Read from our 21^st-century perspective this parable about a landowner presents him as a man with a strong social conscience. He acts to do what he can to stem the tsunami of injustice afflicting his society. He not only pays his laborers above the daily minimum wage but is concerned for the plight of those who as the day progresses have still not been hired. He goes out at intervals through the day and hires them in batches – promising them the same daily rate as those he had engaged in the early morning. So far, so good.

But the surprise comes when at the end of the day, he pays everyone the same amount regardless of the hours worked. I mean, who does that? How can this be fair – we cry?

Both Jesus’ 1^st and 21^st-century hearers are confronted – if not affronted by this man’s behavior. How can it be fair to pay those taken on late in the day – working only and hour or so – the same amount as those who have been toiling since 7am? But remember, this is a story about God. The employer – standing in for God counters – why accuse me of being unfair when I am actually being generous. Those who have worked since sunrise receive exactly the wage I’d promised. In effect, my generosity is my own business and not your concern.

Wow, can God really be like this? Where’s then – the incentive to work hard and do the right thing if God is so indiscriminate in the distribution of their generosity? This story assails our cherished distinctions between the deserving and undeserving – those entitled and those with no claim whatsoever.

Jesus’ parables – his stories about God – are at their heart stories about justice. If aliens from outer space were to observe how we Christians talk about God, they might conclude that the thrust of God’s concern as evidenced in Jesus’ teaching is about personal sexual morality. They would be correct because that’s what most Christians and non-Christians believe.

Closer reading of the gospels reveals that Jesus never speaks about personal sexual morality in social life. The closest he comes is in his parable about the woman taken in adultery and we know upon whose heads his judgment is heaped here. The other example is his teaching on the indissolubility of marriage – but this is a teaching honored mostly in the breach. 99.8% of Jesus teaching directly addresses the societal and religious issues of his day reframed through the lens the kingdom’s justice revolution.

What is justice? Jesus shows us that justice is love in action. Justice has little to do with fairness and everything to do with generosity. Thus the right to earn our daily bread through the dignity of human labor is an aspect of justice viewed through the lens of the kingdom revolution – where Justice requires the dignity of human labor honored by the equitable distribution of both risk and profit.

On a baptism Sunday, we hear Jesus opening words The kingdom of God is like. He sets the expectations of the kingdom within this parable about an employer’s seemingly – to us – unfair remuneration of his laborers. Through it we learn that God is not interested in fairness at all. God is only interested in generosity. Like all stories of the kingdom revolution our conventional expectations of the way things should work – are upended.

We live in a world in which so much is governed by the principle – first come first served. In the workplace it’s enshrined in notions of reward for seniority – protections for length of service– and corresponding vulnerability of the last in to being the first out the door when downturn strikes.

The task of the Christian community is to reflect less the values and arrangements of the world and more the expectations of the kingdom’s justice revolution. In the kingdom there is no such thing as seniority nor greater reward based on length of service. In the Christian community there should be no discrimination according to status. Among us, there is only the status of the baptized. Baptism is the common denominator that elevates us all to the same level of significance in God’s eyes. Whatever distinctions we enjoy in the world – whatever lack of privilege and disrespect we suffer in the world – all inequality is leveled through baptism.

When Lucca is baptized in a moment – he will be admitted to a community of equals – taking his place with the rest of us who sit in the front row in the House of God. For my generosity is my own business and not your concern – says the Lord.

Tag: justice

Let the Scriptures be fulfilled in our hearing

Who’s talking Fairness?