One thing I love about today’s passage is how Paul describes the result of a life of light as not one thing, or even one thing of a few options, but an amalgamation of three things: goodness, justice, and truth. It’s that middle one, justice, that’s the interesting one in the mix. If it was just goodness, or even goodness and truth, it would be perfectly possible to see those things in our own lives without affecting the world around us. Sure, we would affect our friends and family, maybe even a few strangers, but goodness and truth are often things that happen very close to us.
Justice is interesting because it implies the existence of injustice; without injustice, there would be no need for justice. Justice is something we can seek out for ourselves, but it is usually something we try to accomplish for other people. If we’re looking at justice as a counter to injustice, the greatest need for us to enact justice in the world is in places where there’s great injustice. Unfortunately, for some of us, we know people who have experienced terrible injustices; but, for many of us, the greatest injustices are uncomfortably far outside of our comfortable lives.
Injustice is something that’s provoking a lot of discussion right now, but it’s not new; social justice is one of the biggest themes in the Bible, and it was the topic of many of the Old Testament prophets’ warnings against ancient Israel. Paul’s inclusion of justice in this trinity of outcomes is not an isolated message; it’s a continuation of a long line of justice-related messages in the Bible.
So where do we find injustice? It’s unfortunately all around us, and yet invisible to so many of us that don’t have to deal with it. The greatest injustices are systemic and have very rational-sounding reasons to justify them because they’ve been the norm for, in some cases, thousands of years. The point isn’t that we need to figure all of this out on our own; in many cases, we just need to listen to the people facing oppression and injustice—listen to their stories and experiences, and let those affect how we think and live.
I, as a mostly white person, can theorize about racism, but it’s much more important for me to listen to people who experience systemic racism everyday. I, as a Christian, can theorize about religious persecution in modern America, but I’ll never understand it until I talk to some of my Muslim friends whose lives have been threatened because of their religion. I, as a man, can theorize about some of the challenges women have to face in the workplace and beyond, but it’s going to pale in comparison to what I could learn by simply listening to the women who are already talking about it.
Paul’s correlation of these three things is powerful because it forces us beyond personal morality and into the realm of social justice. But with that comes another promise: where justice is found, goodness and truth are sure to be found as well. The three are meant to go together, and it’s important to make all three a part of our lives.
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July 13, 2021 at 08:31PM
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Light = goodness, justice and truth - Leawood - Church of the Resurrection
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