More about Justice

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

In Poetic Justice I took up the subject of justice as the root question of all Western religion, taking up themes broached by Thomas M. King in Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris). From the Old Testament prophets to Jesus, from the letters of St. Paul to Revelation, the message is always that a godly kingdom of heaven, divine and just, is near at hand. The obdurate injustice of our world, of our everyday human experience, will give way to the order, harmony, and peace of a new world ruled by the Word of God.

It is hard for me to speak about this crucial biblical idea — the idea that God's justice wins! — without seeming to say that I have an inerrant sense of what is or is not just in God's eyes. I really don't. All I'm truly saying is that Jesus told the Pharisees, and others who challenged him, about real justice, which was not at all the kind of divine favoritism the Pharisees presumed their holy scriptures promised to them especially.

The Pharisees — and I fear I am pretty much a latter-day Pharisee myself, deep down — sought to export from their closed circle whatever woes living in an unjust world might otherwise bring them. They did this by vilifying and excluding those "unclean" Jews who were poor, ill-educated, crippled, leprous, or otherwise existing outside the Lord's obvious ambit of favor. Along came Jesus and reproached them, the Pharisees, for attempting in that way to immunize themselves against all worldly grievance.

Remember: among Jews at the time the idea of an afterlife was not particularly prominent. If one was not right with God, presumably one knew it by how blessed one was in this life. But God's blessing was not upon the individual so much as upon the nation. Ergo, the Pharisees said, our best bet for a happy life as a people is to cast out from among us whomever seems most infected with God's displeasure.

"Wrong," Jesus preached. "Injustice is part and parcel of the present world. You cannot, in a futile attempt to secure God's favor, export it from your midst by means of excluding the poor and all others whom you don't particularly like from your pristine circle. In fact, that just perpetuates worldly injustice and blocks God's kingdom."

At least for latter-day Pharisees like me, that preaching of Jesus goes against reflex. I admit it ... when I see someone who is sick or deformed or filthy, my first reflex is to get as far away as I can from ... yes, from such signs of injustice. What is less just than being born missing an eye or a limb? What is more foul than being unwashed and having no home to wash in?


It is not hard for me — now, after no small amount of reading and reflection — to see how wrong, how un-Christian, that attitude is ... and how difficult it is to eradicate from my soul.

It begins to look to me as if Jesus knew exactly how difficult it is when he said it is easier for a camel to pass through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter heaven. By rich, he meant those not poor, not visibly unclean, not seemingly out of favor with the Lord. Injustice pervades the inner world just as it does the outer world. Injustice is endemic to our world of experience, whether internal or external to the soul.

If that weren't so, the Bible would make no sense. Everything in the Bible revolves around the notions of justice and injustice. Why is the world so full of injustice and woe? Because of what happened in the Garden of Eden. What can be done about it? Get right with God. How? Follow the commandments. How best to do that? Love God and treat all his people as any "neighbor" ought to be treated. How? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Which means what, exactly? Treat them with justice.


In short, make the kingdom of heaven real, make it come to earth. The Jews speak of this by the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam: "repairing the world." Christians call it "good works." But it's not just about doing good external deeds — it's a spiritual healing of one's inner world as well. As King shows in Enchantments, it requires (metphorically speaking) two baptisms, the first of water and the second of fire and spirit. The first baptism — not the physical act but the inward mark it bestows — gives us our chance at faith, our capacity to become enraptured by the Word of God. The second baptism allows us to re-enter earthly experience, not blinded by the divine light, but changed and charged for the task of reparing the world.