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Putting the world to rights

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I had a dream the other night, a powerful and interesting dream. And the really frustrating thing about it is that I can’t remember what it was about. I had a flash of it as I woke up, enough to make me think how extraordinary and meaningful it was; and then it was gone. And so, to misquote T. S. Eliot, I had the meaning but missed the experience.

Our passion for justice often seems like that. We dream the dream of justice. We glimpse, for a moment, a world at one, a world put to rights, a world where things work out, where societies function healthily, where I not only know what I ought to do but actually do it. And then we wake up and come back to reality. But what are we hearing when we are dreaming that dream?

It is as though we can hear, not perhaps a voice itself, but the echo of a voice: a voice speaking with calm, healing authority, speaking about justice, about things being put to rights, about peace and hope and prosperity for all. The voice continues to echo in our imagination, our subconscious. We want to go back and listen to it again, but having woken up, we can’t get back into the dream. Other people sometimes tell us it was just a fantasy, and we are half inclined to believe them, even though that condemns us to cynicism.

But the voice goes on, calling us, beckoning us, luring us to think that maybe there might be such a thing as justice, as the world being put to rights, even though we find it so elusive. We are like moths trying to fly to the moon. We all know there is something called justice, but we can’t quite get to it.

You can test this out quite easily. Go to any school or playgroup where the children are old enough to talk to one another. Listen to what they are saying. Pretty soon one child will say to another, or perhaps to a teacher: ‘That’s not fair!’

You don’t have to teach children about fairness and unfairness. A sense of justice comes with the kit of being human. We know about it, as we say, in our bones.

You fall off your bicycle and break your leg. You go to the hospital and they fix it. You stagger around on crutches for a while. Then, rather gingerly, you start to walk normally again. Pretty soon you have forgotten about the whole thing. You’re back to normal. There is such a thing as putting something to rights, as fixing it, as getting it back on track. You can fix a broken leg; a broken toy; a broken television.

So why can’t we fix injustice?

It isn’t for want of trying. We have courts of law and magistrates and judges and lawyers in plenty. I used to live in a part of London where there was so much justice going on that it hurt – law-makers, law-enforcers, a Lord Chief Justice, a police headquarters and, just a couple of miles away, enough barristers to run a battleship. (Though, since they would all be arguing with one another, the battleship might be going round in circles.) Other countries have similarly heavyweight organizations designed to make laws and implement them.

And yet we have a sense that justice itself slips through our fingers. Sometimes it works; often it doesn’t. Innocent people get convicted, guilty people are let off. The bullies, and those who can bribe their way out of trouble, get away with it – not always, but often enough for us to notice, and to wonder why. People hurt others badly and walk away laughing. Victims don’t always get compensated. Sometimes they spend the rest of their lives coping with sorrow, hurt and bitterness.

The same thing is going on in the wider world. Countries invade other countries and get away with it. The rich use the power of their money to get even richer while the poor, who can’t do anything about it, get even poorer. Most of us scratch our heads and wonder why, and then go out and buy another product whose profit goes to some rich company.

I don’t want to be too despondent. There is such a thing as justice, and sometimes it comes out on top. Brutal tyrannies are overthrown. Apartheid was dismantled. Sometimes wise and creative leaders arise and people follow them into good and just actions. Serious criminals are sometimes caught, brought to trial, convicted and punished. Things that are seriously wrong in society are sometimes put splendidly to rights. New projects give hope to the poor. Diplomats achieve solid and lasting peace. But just when you think it’s safe to relax … it all goes wrong again.

And even though we can solve a few of the world’s problems, at least temporarily, we know perfectly well that there are others we simply can’t and won’t.

Just after Christmas, 2004, an earthquake and tidal wave killed more than twice as many people in a single day as the total number of American soldiers who died in the entire Vietnam war. There are some things in our world, our planet, which make us say ‘That’s not right!’, even when there is nobody to blame. A tectonic plate’s got to do what a tectonic plate’s got to do. The earthquake wasn’t caused by some wicked global capitalist, by a late-blossoming Marxist, or by a fundamentalist with a bomb. It just happened. And in that happening we see a world in pain, a world out of joint, a world where things occur which are like the small injustices of the playground and the law court, but about which we seem equally powerless to do anything very much.

The most telling examples are the ones closest to home. I have high moral standards. I have thought about them. I have preached about them. Good heavens, I have even written books about them. And I still break them. The line between justice and injustice, between things being right and things not being right, can’t be drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them’. It runs right down through the middle of each one of us. The ancient philosophers, not least Aristotle, saw this as a wrinkle in the system, a puzzle at several levels. We all know what we ought to do (give or take a few details); but we all manage, at least for some of the time, not to do it.

Isn’t this odd?

How does it happen, on the one hand, that we all share not just a sense that there is such a thing as justice, but actually a passion for it, a deep longing that things should be put to rights, a sense of out-of-jointness that goes on nagging and gnawing and sometimes screaming at us – and yet, on the other hand, that after millennia of human struggle and searching and love and longing and hatred and hope and fussing and philosophizing, we still can’t seem to get much closer to it than people did in the most ancient societies we can discover?

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Recent years have witnessed extravagant examples of human actions which have outraged our sense of justice. People sometimes talk as if the last 50 years have seen a decline in morality. But actually these have been some of the most morally sensitive, indeed moralistic, times in recorded history. People care, and care passionately, about the places where the world needs putting to rights.

Powerful generals sent millions to die in the trenches in the First World War, while they themselves lived in luxury behind the lines or back home. When we read the poets who found themselves caught up in it, we sense behind their poignant puzzlement a smouldering anger at the folly and, yes, the injustice of it all. Why should it have happened? How can we put it to rights?

An explosive cocktail of ideologies sent millions to die in the gas chambers. Bits and pieces of religious prejudice, warped philosophies, fear of people who are ‘different’, economic hardship and the need for scapegoats were all mixed together by a brilliant demagogue who told people what some at least wanted to believe, and demanded human sacrifices as the price of ‘progress’. You only have to mention Hitler or the Holocaust to awaken the question: How did it happen? Where is justice? How can we get it? How can we put things right?

And in particular: How can we stop it happening again?

But we can’t, or so it seems. Nobody stopped the Turks from killing millions of Armenians in 1915–17 (in fact, Hitler famously referred to this when he was encouraging his colleagues to kill Jews). Nobody stopped Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda from killing each other in very large numbers in 1994. The world said ‘Never again’ after the Nazi Holocaust, but it was happening again, and we discovered to our horror that there was nothing we could do to stop it.

And then there was Apartheid. Massive injustice was perpetrated against a very large population. It went on a long time. Other countries, of course, had done similar things but were simply more effective in squashing opposition. Think of the ‘reservations’ for ‘native Americans’. I remember the shock when I saw an old ‘Cowboys and Indians’ movie and realized that when I was young I, like most of my contemporaries, would have gone along unquestioningly with the assumption that cowboys were basically good and Indians basically bad. The world has woken up to the reality of racial prejudice; but getting rid of it is like squashing the air out of a balloon. You deal with one corner only to find it popping up somewhere else. The world got together over Apartheid and said, ‘This won’t do’; but some at least of the moral energy came from what the psychologists call ‘projection’, the easy way in which we condemn someone else for something we are doing ourselves. It’s very convenient, and it provides a deep but spurious sense of moral satisfaction, to rebuke someone on the other side of the world while ignoring the same problems back home.

And now we have the new global evils: rampant, uncaring and irresponsible materialism and capitalism on the one hand; raging, unthinking religious fundamentalism on the other. As one famous book puts it, ‘Jihad versus McWorld’. (Whether there is such a thing as caring capitalism, or for that matter thoughtful fundamentalism, is not the point at the moment.) This brings us back to where we were a few minutes ago. It doesn’t take a PhD in macroeconomics to know that if the rich are getting richer by the minute, and the poor poorer, there is something badly wrong.

Meanwhile, we all want a happy and secure home life. Dr Johnson, the eighteenth-century conversationalist, once remarked that the aim and goal of all human endeavour was ‘to be happy at home’. But in the Western world, and many other parts as well, homes and families are tearing themselves apart. The gentle art of being gentle – of kindness and forgiveness, sensitivity and thoughtfulness, generosity and humility and good old-fashioned love – has gone out of fashion. Ironically, everyone is demanding their ‘rights’, and this demand is so shrill that it destroys one of the most basic ‘rights’, if we can put it like that: the ‘right’, or at least the longing and hope, to have a peaceful, stable, secure and caring place to live, to be, to learn and to flourish.

Once again people ask the question: Why is it like this? Does it have to be like this? Can things be put to rights, and if so how? Can the world be rescued? Can we be rescued?

And once again we find ourselves asking: Isn’t it odd that it should be like that? Isn’t it strange that we should all want things to be put to rights but that we can’t seem to do it? And isn’t the oddest thing of all the fact that I, myself, know what I ought to do but often don’t do it?

* * *

There are three basic ways of explaining this sense of the echo of a voice, the call to justice, the dream of a world (and all of us within it) put to rights.

We can say, if we like, that it is indeed only a dream, a projection of childish fantasies, and that we have to get used to living in the world the way it is. Down that road we find Machiavelli and Nietzsche, the world of naked power and grabbing what you can get, the world where the only sin is to be caught.

Or we can say, if we like, that the dream is of a different world altogether, a world where we really belong, where everything is indeed put to rights, a world into which we can escape in our dreams in the present and hope to escape one day for good – but a world which has little purchase on the present world except that people who live in this one sometimes find themselves dreaming of that one. That leaves the unscrupulous bullies running this world, but it consoles us with the thought that things will be better somewhere, sometime, even if there’s not very much we can do about it here and now.

Or we can say, if we like, that the reason we have these dreams, the reason we have a sense of a memory of the echo of a voice, is that there is someone there speaking to us, whispering in our inner ear, someone who cares very much about this present world, and our present selves, and who has made us, and it, for a purpose which will indeed involve justice, things being put to rights, ourselves being put to rights, the world being rescued at last.

Three of the great religious traditions have taken this last option, and not surprisingly, they are related; they are, as it were, second cousins. Judaism speaks of a God who made the world and built into it the passion for justice because it was his own passion. Christianity speaks of this same God having brought that passion into play (indeed, ‘passion plays’ in various senses are a characteristic feature of Christianity) in the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth. Islam draws on some Jewish and some Christian stories and ideas and creates a new synthesis in which the revelation of God’s will in the Koran is the ideal which would put the world to rights, if only it were obeyed. There are many differences between these three traditions, but at this point they are agreed, over against other philosophies and religions: the reason we think we have heard a voice is because we have. It wasn’t a dream. There are ways of getting back in touch with it and making it happen. In real life. In our real lives.

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This book is written to explain and commend one of those traditions, the Christian one. It is about real life because Christians believe that in Jesus of Nazareth the voice we thought we heard became human and lived and died as one of us. It is about justice because Christians not only inherit the Jewish passion for justice but claim that Jesus embodied that passion, and that what he did, and what happened to him, set in motion the creator’s plan to rescue the world and put it back to rights. And it is therefore about us, all of us, because we are all involved in this. As we saw, a passion for justice, or at least a sense that things ought to be sorted out, is simply part of being human and living in the world.

You could put it like this. The ancient Greeks told a story of two philosophers. One used to come out of his front door in the morning and roar with laughter. The world was such a comical place that he couldn’t help it. The other came out in the morning and burst into tears. The world was so full of sorrow and tragedy that he couldn’t help it. In a sense both are right. Comedy and tragedy both speak of things being out of order; in the one case, simply by being incongruous and therefore funny; in the other case, by things not going the way they should, and people being crushed as a result. Laughter and tears are a good index of being human. Crocodiles look as though they’re crying, but they’re not sad. You can programme a computer to say something funny, but it will never get the joke.

When the early Christians told the story of Jesus – which they did in a number of ways to make a number of different points – they never actually said that he laughed, and only once that he burst into tears. But all the same, the stories they told of him constantly hinted at laughter and tears in fair measure.

He was constantly going to parties where people had plenty to eat and drink and there seemed to be a celebration going on. He grossly exaggerated to make his point: here you are, he said, trying to take a speck out of your friend’s eye, when you’ve got a huge great plank in your own eye! He gave his followers, especially the leading ones, funny nicknames (‘Peter’ means ‘Rocky’; James and John he called ‘Thunder-boys’). Wherever he went, people were excited because they believed that God was on the move, that a new rescue operation was in the air, that things were going to be put right. People in that mood are like old friends meeting up at the start of a holiday. They tend to laugh a lot. There is a good time coming. The celebration has begun.

Equally, wherever Jesus went, he met an endless supply of people whose lives had gone badly wrong. Sick people, sad people, people in doubt, people in despair, people covering up their uncertainties with arrogant bluster, people using religion as a screen against harsh reality. And though Jesus healed many of them, it wasn’t like someone simply waving a magic wand. He shared the pain. He was deeply grieved at the sight of a leper and the thought of all that the man had gone through. He wept at the tomb of a close friend. Towards the end of the story, he himself was in agony, agony of soul before he faced the same agony in his body.

It isn’t so much that Jesus laughed at the world, or wept at the world. He was celebrating with the new world that was beginning to be born, the world in which all that was good and lovely would triumph over evil and misery. He was sorrowing with the world the way it was, the world of violence and injustice and tragedy which he and the people he met knew so well.

From the very beginning, two thousand years ago, the followers of Jesus have always maintained that he took the tears of the world and made them his own, carrying them all the way to his cruel and unjust death to carry out God’s rescue operation; and that he took the joy of the world and brought it to new birth, as he rose from the dead and thereby launched God’s new creation. That double claim is huge, and I won’t even try to explain it until Part 2 of this book. But it makes the point that the Christian faith endorses the passion for justice which every human being knows, the longing to see things put to rights. And it claims that in Jesus God himself has shared this passion and put it into effect, so that in the end all tears may be dried and the world may be filled with justice and joy.

* * * * *

‘Well,’ I can hear someone say at this point, ‘the followers of Jesus haven’t made much progress so far, have they? What about the Crusades? What about the Spanish Inquisition? Surely the church has been responsible for more than its own fair share of injustice? What about the people who bomb abortion clinics? What about the fundamentalists who think Armageddon is coming soon, so it doesn’t matter if they wreck the planet in the meantime? Haven’t Christians been part of the problem rather than part of the solution?’

Yes and No. Yes: from very early on there have always been people who have done terrible things in the name of Jesus. There have also been Christians who have done terrible things knowing them to be terrible things, without claiming that Jesus was supporting them. There is no point hiding from this truth, however uncomfortable it may be.

But also No: because again and again, when we look at the wicked things Christians have done, whether or not they were claiming that God was on their side, we can see in retrospect at least that they were muddled and mistaken about what Christianity actually is. It is no part of Christian belief to say that the followers of Jesus have always got everything right. Jesus himself taught his followers a prayer which includes a clause asking God for forgiveness. He must have thought we would go on needing it.

But at the same time one of the biggest problems about the credibility of the Christian faith in the world today is that a great many people still think of Christianity as identified with ‘the West’ (an odd phrase, since it normally includes Australia and New Zealand, which are about as far east as you can go) – that is, Western Europe and North America in particular, and the cultures which have grown from their earlier colonial settlements. Then, when (as has happened recently) ‘the West’ makes war on some other part of the world, particularly when that part happens to be largely Muslim in religion, it is easy for people to say ‘the Christians’ are making war on ‘the Muslims’. In fact, of course, most people in the Western world are not Christians, and most Christians in today’s world do not live in ‘the West’. Most, actually, live in Africa or south-east Asia. Most Western governments do not attempt to put the teaching of Jesus into practice in their societies, and many of them are proud of the fact. But that doesn’t stop people putting two and two together and making five – in other words, blaming Christianity for what ‘the West’ chooses to do. The so-called ‘Christian’ world continues to have a bad press, much of it well deserved.

That, actually, is one of the reasons why I have begun this book by talking about justice. It is important to see, and to say, that those who follow Jesus are committed, as he taught us to pray, to God’s will being done ‘on earth as in heaven’. And that means that God’s passion for justice must become ours too. When Christians use their belief in Jesus as a way of escaping from that demand and challenge, they are abandoning a central element in their own faith. That way danger lies.

Equally, we should not be shy of telling the stories which many sceptics in the Western world have done their best to forget. When the slave trade was at its height, with many people justifying it on the grounds that slaves are mentioned in the Bible, it was a group of devout Christians, led by the unforgettable William Wilberforce in Britain and John Woolman in America, who got together and made it their life’s business to stop the horrible trade in human beings. When, with slavery long dead and buried, racial prejudice still haunted the United States, it was the Christian vision of Martin Luther King that drove him to peaceful, but highly effective, protest. Wilberforce was grasped by a passion for God’s justice on behalf of the slaves, a passion which cost him what might otherwise have been a dazzling political career. Martin Luther King’s passion for justice for African Americans cost him his life. Their tireless campaigning grew directly and explicitly out of their loyalty to Jesus.

In the same way, when the Apartheid regime in South Africa was at its height (with many people justifying it on the grounds that the Bible speaks of different races living different lives), it was the long campaign of Christian leaders like Desmond Tutu that brought about change with remarkably little bloodshed. (I well remember, in the 1970s, how politicians and news commentators took it for granted that change could only come through massive violence.) Tutu and many others did a lot of praying, a lot of reading the Bible with leaders and government officials, a good deal of risky speaking out against the many evil facets of Apartheid, and a large amount of equally risky confrontation with black leaders and gatherings who believed that only violence would work.

Again and again Tutu was caught in the middle, distrusted and hated by both sides. But under the new post-Apartheid government he has chaired the most extraordinary commission ever to grace the political scene: a Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, which has begun the long and painful process of healing the memory and imagination of a whole country, of allowing grief to take its proper course and anger to be expressed and dealt with. Who in the 1960s or even the 1980s would have thought such a thing possible? Yet it has happened; and all because of people whose passion for justice and loyalty to Jesus combined to bring it about.

These stories, and many others like them, need to be told and retold. They are the sort of things that can and often do happen when people take the Christian message seriously. Sometimes taking it seriously, and speaking out as a result, has got people into deep trouble, and even a violent death: the twentieth century saw a great many Christians martyred not only for their stance on matters of faith but more especially because their faith led them to fearless action in the cause of justice. Think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, killed by the Nazis towards the end of the Second World War. Think of Oscar Romero, shot by an assassin because he was speaking out on behalf of the poor in El Salvador. Think, again, of Martin Luther King.

They, and nine others, are commemorated in statues on the west front of Westminster Abbey. They are a reminder to our contemporary world that the Christian faith still makes waves in the world, and that people are prepared to risk their lives out of the passion for justice which it sustains.

That passion, I have been arguing in this chapter, is a central feature of all human life. It is expressed in different ways, and it can sometimes get twisted and go horribly wrong. There are still mobs, and even individuals, who are prepared to kill someone, anyone, in the distorted belief that, as long as someone gets killed, some kind of justice is being done. But all people know, in cooler moments, that this strange thing we call justice, this longing for things to be put right, remains one of the great human goals and dreams. Christians believe that this is so because all humans have heard, deep within themselves, the echo of a voice which calls us to live like that. And they believe that in Jesus that voice became human and did what had to be done to bring it about.

Before we can go any further down that road, we need to listen for other echoes of the same voice. And the first echo we overhear is one which more and more people are listening to these days.