Doing justice – 17 July 2015

Some 800 years before the time of Jesus an obscure Hebrew prophet named Micah produced this luminous insight into what God is asking of us:  What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God [Micah 6:8].  Those three things.  Everything we might faithfully do to please God and to be useful in the world, in other words to be right, is summed up here.

And the first is: Do justice.   The Bible routinely links justice and truth – they are twins, and inseparable.  Lies and deceit, pretence, and also our fears, are implacable enemies of justice.  Moreover, says the prophet, we are to do justice, not merely admire it or praise it, or recommend it, let alone approximate to it. 

Our task at the moment is to see the relationship between doing justice, and contemplative life and prayer.  The best clue is truth and truthfulness.  The workings of grace within us in the disciplines of stillness and silence bring us ever more firmly into the realm of truth, rather than the cloudy land of dreams, fantasies hopes and regrets.  In John’s Gospel Jesus refers to the Spirit as the Spirit of Truth – making friends with reality and the present moment.

The first challenge, which never goes away, is to be truthful to ourselves, about ourselves – in other words, to do justice to ourselves.  The enemies of this, naturally, are all our excuses, alibis and the masks we have on hand to wear if necessary.   Other enemies are plentiful.  They include putting ourselves down as unworthy for all manner of reasons in the past, as though these things were outside love, mercy and understanding.  Truthfulness about ourselves, doing justice to ourselves, may eventually mean seeing ourselves, or glimpses, as God sees us – children of God’s, created, known and loved.

It is fundamental to grasp two things about doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly…  The first is to remind ourselves each day that we do not generate these qualities – they are gifts of God, instilled in us as we are still and accepting.  The second is that they depend on each other.  Justice requires mercy and humility.  If you are truly humble, you will be just.  If you love mercy, you will certainly have found humility and justice. 

Doing justice is a matter of the heart, before it is ever a matter of the law.  Doing justice means being a just person.  I am still in process of discovering what that might be, but I am sure it has to do with my attitudes to other people.  It is not just if I exclude anyone because they are different from me, or because they have done me harm (Jesus makes that clear enough).  I am not just if my own safety, let alone comfort, outweighs everything else.   I am not just if I cannot forgive.  Doing justice has implications also for the ways we conduct ourselves in the minefields of family life, the lacerations and resentments that can be generated – a contemplative person doing justice will be quiet, wise and thoughtful.

These are huge issues.  In the silence we are permitting our lives to be more and more conformed… in this instance to doing justice, in our actions of course, in our attitudes, in the ways we speak about others, in the causes to which we give support.