Of Social Justice

Every now and then I get asked the question about why we talk so much about social justice around All Saints, in preaching, and teaching and conversation….The short answer, of course, is that’s pretty much what the whole of scripture both Hebrew and New Testament talks about. Jesus said it best in all three of the synoptic gospels, lest we doubt his teaching emphasis, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like (my italics) it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets. (the Law and the Prophets meaning the whole of Hebrew scripture)” The Greek word for “like” translated literally means equal to….so Jesus’ point is that to love God is to love neighbor; to love neighbor is to love God. Now, how to love neighbor then is the great question, a time worn conundrum: clans, tribes, confederations, empires and nations have wrestled with it over the ages….some better than others.

Jesus’ proclamation about loving neighbor being the means of loving God is not original with him, nor with the writers of the synoptics…. Amazingly, or maybe not so much so, in the Far East the same premise surfaces with Confucius and the Buddha several hundred years earlier. In Western thought in the early fourth century B.C.E. Plato spoke of loving neighbor as humankind’s God-given vocation, Humankind’s highest aspiration…His masterpiece, The Republic, is his so-called “how to”  treatise on loving one’s neighbor. The original title was Dike in Greek, which simply means “justice” (and in Plato’s case, distributive justice). Justice of course not so simple, but Plato uses the example of the democratic polis (the Greek city state) as a possible means to such and end, a vision of the ideal in which justice is distributed equally among the people….a community in which all would have equal say as to decisions that affect the whole….a community in which the greater good trumps self interest. How we grapple with such a high ideal is the rub, but grapple we must.

For Plato however this philosophical system applied to the upper classes, and in some cases not to women, and certainly not for manual laborers and slaves (slaves comprising a good two thirds of the population). The gospel communities, on the other hand, used the same rhetorical use of Justice (dike) as to how one shall live in community, but the gospels applied the premise to all classes of society…men, women, slaves and freedmen. We see this ideal in the earliest of Christian writings, particularly in the writings of Paul whose letters preceded the gospels by three to five decades. So the Gospels and New Testament literature follow the time honored tradition in the east and in the west, that we must as our God given heritage strive to live together justly, inclusive of the entire human community…..and ours as people of faith is to try to figure that out in all its nuances and complexities in noble conversation and passionate exchange…”with all our heart, soul and mind”…In short, to reach this ideal of living together amid compassion and justice is our lives’ work.

And one more thing….that which empowers us to live such lives with singleness of heart, is the knowledge that God first loves us. The ancient prophets and sages tell us so…throughout the Biblical history of Israel God woos this strange and stubborn people, never ends God’s pursuit of them….the relationship is forever tested and rocky…like all relationships of love…but love no less….Jesus tells us so in his teachings and in parable …I think perhaps part of this work we’ve been given to do is to stop and recognize that God loves us first, in spite of the ups and downs of such a relationship….and therefore, as Lizzie McDonald said well in her piece in this edition of the Herald, ours is to “pay it forward.” To share the love of God that has been bestowed on us….and the time honored “how to”is to  feed and clothe and empower and dignify….and heal…and house and practice kindness and compassion…It’s this collective labor of love that holds the world together, and remakes it for the better….and from the great sages come before us from east and west, and from the one we follow called the Christ…the word is justice…simple justice.