I just ordered Jurgen Moltmann’s new book: Sun of Righteousness Arise: God’s Future for Humanity and the Earth. He is borrowing a line from Wesley’s classic lyrics of the cherished hymn Christ whose Glory Fills the Skies. The line in full is, “Sun of righteousness arise, triumph o’er the shades of night.” The word for righteousness that appears frequently in New Testament literature and in the Hebrew Septuagint is more accurately translated in the Koine Greek as “justice”. I am reminded of Glen Beck’s (of Fox News) recent appalling and ignorant comment that if clergy in the churches preach on social justice, then one should and must find another church. What Mr. Beck fails to realize, or has ignored, is that the concept of God’s justice is the central theme of the Gospels; this is distributive justice…justice that corrects, reorders the inequities of our common life….the Magnificat in Luke’s Gospel a cardinal example….the concept of “household” in John wherein family is redefined as a community of equals across the social classes…the society reordered into radical, sacrificial friendship, another case in point…Jesus’ close attention to the outcasts of society as if their well being had everything to do with the well being of all, another. The gospels are decidedly calling for a renewal of the way of things….a reordering renewal of the structures of polity and socio-economic reality, so that all may live in a sustainable good. There is no avoiding such an interpretation if one reads these texts in due context.
We are in the great fifty days of Easter, the season of resurrection…resurrection, the life that Jesus bequeaths to us, to all people of faith and conscience…His legacy of serving the common good, he wills to us… the means of God’s gracious commonweal that trembles with the pangs of birth…we now the midwives…new life to be shared with the dead of our world, contingent to our rising from the dead of indifference…those who are subject to the crippling injustice that greed and envy and arrogance and self-interested power bring…they belong to us….so what is raised at the resurrection is the life force, the good, the true…the light force, that seeks to change the way of things…resurrection, not an ancient feat of magic, but a renewed enlightened spirit of setting right the wrongs of our world, nurturing with all due compassion the good, the excellent and the true, so that the light of God’s love reaches every dark corner with blinding dignity…and indeed triumphs over the shades of night.
And this work, this call, this sacred way is larger than the human community. It has everything to do with the planet entire…this Earth become fragile…this earth our mother….even she victim of crippling injustice… The resurrection has to do with new creation, all creation. It is not anthropocentric…It has to do with the entire created order and our contingency to it and our undying love of it…so Eco-justice becomes a gospel issue as well…When did we humans decide that we were somehow separate from nature? No, we are in it and of it…of same substance…and stewards, friends to it. So resurrection is a call to profound responsibility. Pray for courage.
Sons and daughters of Justice arise and may God’s love, our only hope, triumph like the dawn of the new day….risen indeed.
We must not cease from Mental Fight
Nor let pens or swords sleep in our hands
Till we have built Jerusalem
In these our greening pleasant Lands (pardon the paraphrase)
Jim, when I see you or someone else tackle this topic, I am always reminded of the time I was asked if you could be a Christian and vote for a Democrat (in a strange twist of irony, the guy who asked me that turned out to be a child molester…). My response was that I don’t understand how anyone who considers him/herself a Christian could be a republican. And I don’t. You’ve gotta give it to them, though, they have done one helluva job (pun intended) of incorporating Christian discourses into their political marketing machine in order to achieve their elitist, secular, pharisaical ends…
God bless dear William B. We’ve still not caught up with him. JF