Advent: Waiting for What We Don't Deserve.

Nuestra ultima esperanza esta en la injusticia de Dios.

Our last hope is in the injustice of God.

-An Aphorism of Don Colacho

Justice has been on my mind lately.  Everyone gets treated unfairly at one point or another, and when we do it's tempting to cry out for justice.  Indeed, one of my favorite verses in the whole Bible is Micah 6: 8, "He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness (mercy), and to walk humbly with your God?"

Whether I'm writing a sermon or making a decision about how to live my life, that verse is never far from my mind.  For us, justice is a pretty good code to live by, especially when it is properly tempered with kindness-mercy and humility.  In the Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures there are two words, transliterated misphat, and sedaqua, or something along those lines.  Misphat means "justice."  Sedaqua means "righteousness."  They go together like peanut butter and jelly, they are foundational words for understanding God, and, as per usual, we only think we know what they mean.

These are dynamic words, words that mean more than just one thing, and words that have a sort of living relationship.  You really can't have one without the other.  Justice, one of our most primary values as a culture, is too small a thing, by itself.  Justice and righteousness can defined narrowly.  From the perspective of Pilate, crucifying Jesus was just, he went through the proper motions, he washed his hands of the guilt and probably went to bed with a clear conscience, even if he thought for a moment about whether or not it was right, due process was followed, such as it was.  If you are a member of a privileged class, anything and everything that is done to protect your privilege and security and privilege is righteous, righteous bombs may fall on the innocent with proper pretense.

We are masterful, as a species, at framing our own selfish interests in the gilded squares of justice and righteousness.  It is a perverse skill indeed.

Micah uses a different word as the partner of misphat, instead of sedaqua, he uses hesed, which means goodness, kindness and mercy.  That changes everything, it does not invalidate either concept, but it certainly adds a bit of a different flavor.  Hesed points us in the direction of seeing things from the perspective of the other.  Hesed shapes Misphat in a different way, and redefines sedaqua.  Righteousness now has some important qualifications to live up to.  It's not good enough just to look out for your own interests, while abiding by the letter of the law, now you must consider a more abstract idea, and most importantly consider how it effects others.  This triad of words is now a more complete relationship (wonderfully Trinitarian no?).

We often want to limit God to one, or maybe two of these attributes, but the fact of the matter is that God exhibits and desires and even insists on all three, not as disconnected abstractions, but as living truth.

Disconnect one element and you're smack dab in a big old theological, ethical and existential mess.  God's justice is so perfect that we get what we do not deserve, in fact, you could call it, what Don Colacho did: injustice.  But it's not injustice in the way we understand it.  It's a turning away from the punishment that we certainly have coming, it's a commutation of the sentence for our egregious and repeated violations of righteousness.  It is justice because it confirms God's original assessment of Creation, putting aside everything that we have done to violate and invalidate that judgment.  It is righteous because the Creator alone has the right to judge, and it is good and kind, because that is the nature of God.

It's kind of a shame that we have chosen to celebrate the birth of Christ by telling our kids that Santa keeps a list of the naughty and nice.  It's kind of a shame that we seem to get caught in the mindset of "exchanging" gifts and, whether we want to or not, find ourselves silently figuring whether we've been treated fairly (with justice).  This whole thing is about how God gave us something we didn't earn and certainly don't deserve, but which is the only thing we need.