Sermon Thirty-three: JUSTICE, THE WORK OF COMPASSION

“The just will live forever and their reward is with the Lord.” (Ws. 5:16)^a

These words are in the Epistle for today and are spoken by the wise person: “The just shall live forever” (Ws. 5:16), From time to time I have said what a just person is, but now I say it with a different meaning: A just person is one who is conformed and transformed into justice. The just person lives in God and God in him. Thus God will be born in this just person and the just person is born into God; and therefore God will be born through every virtue of the just person and will rejoice through every virtue of the just person. And not only at every virtue will God rejoice but especially at every work of the just person, however small it is. When this work is done through justice and results in justice, God will rejoice at it, indeed, God will rejoice through and through; for nothing remains in his ground which does not tickle him through and through out of joy. Ignorant people have to believe this, but enlightened ones should know it.

The just person does not seek anything with his work, for every single person who seeks anything or even something with his or her works is working for a why and is a servant and a mercenary. Therefore, if you wish to be conformed and transformed into justice, do not intend anything in your work and strive for no why, either in time or in eternity. Do not aim at reward or blessedness, neither this nor that. For such works are truly fully dead. Indeed, I say that even if you take God as your goal, all such works which you do with this intention are dead and you will spoil good works. And not only will you spoil good works but you will also sin, for you will be like a gardener who was supposed to plant a garden but instead uprooted the trees and then wanted to have a reward for it. In this way you will spoil good works. Therefore, if you want to live and if you want your works to live, you must be dead to all things and you must become in touch with nothingness. It is peculiar to the creature that it makes something from something; but it is peculiar to God to make something from nothing. Therefore, for God to make something in you or with you, you must first make contact with this nothingness. Therefore, enter into your own ground and work there and these works which you work there will all be living. And therefore the wise person says: “The just person lives.” For because he is just, he works and his works live.

Now the wise person says: “His reward is with the Lord.” Now take a minute to consider this. If he says “with,” that means that the reward of the just person is there where God himself is; for the blessedness of the just person and the blessedness of God are one blessedness, because the just person is blessed where God is blessed. Saint John says this: “The Word was with God” (Jn. 1:1). He also says “with,” and therefore the just person is like God, since God is justice. And therefore whoever is in justice is in God and is God.

Now we will speak further about the word “just.” The Book of Wisdom does not say “the just person” or “the just angel” but, rather, only “the just.” The Father gives birth to his Son as the Just One and the Just One as his Son; for all virtue of the just and every work of the just which are born from the virtue of the just person are nothing other than the event of the Son being born from the Father. Therefore the Father never rests; he always runs and hurries in order that the Son be born in me, as the Scriptures say: “For Son’s sake I will not hold my peace and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until the just are revealed and shine forth like a flash of lightning” (Is. 62:1). “Zion” means the fullness of life and “Jerusalem” means the fullness of peace. Indeed, God rests neither for the fullness of life nor for the fullness of peace; he always runs and hurries for this purpose, that the just person may be made known. In the just nothing should work except God alone. For all works are surely dead if anything from the outside compels you to work. Even if God were to compel you to work from the outside, then such works would surely all be dead. If your works are to live, then God must move you inwardly, in the innermost part of the soul, if they are really to live. There is your life and there alone you live.

And I say that if one virtue seems greater than another and if you hold it in greater esteem than the other, then you do not live it as it is in justice and God does not work in you. For as long as a person values or loves one virtue more than another, he does not love and take the virtues as they are in justice; nor is such a person just. For the just person loves and works all virtues in justice as they are justice itself. Scripture says: “Before the creation of the world, I am” (Si. 24:9). This means “Before I am” which means that if a person is raised up beyond time into eternity, then the person works one work there with God. Some people ask how a person can work these works which God has worked a thousand years ago and which God will work a thousand years from now and they do not understand it. In eternity there is no before and no after. Therefore, what happened a thousand years ago and what will happen a thousand years from now and what is now happening is one in eternity. Therefore, what God did a thousand years ago and has done and what he will do in a thousand years and what he is now doing—all this is nothing but one work. Therefore a person who is risen beyond time into eternity works with God what God worked a thousand years ago and will work a thousand years hence. This too is for wise people a matter of knowledge and for ignorant people a matter for belief.

Saint Paul says: “We are eternally chosen in the Son” (Ep. 1:4). Therefore we should never rest until we become what we have eternally been in him (Rm. 8:298.). For the Father runs and hurries in order that we be born in the Son and become the same as what the Son is. The Father begets his Son and in this birthing the Father takes so great a rest and a pleasure that his entire nature is absorbed in it. For whatever is always in God moves him to beget; indeed, from his ground, from his essence, and from his being the Father is moved to beget.

Sometimes there is revealed in the soul a light and a person thinks he is the Son and yet it is only a light. For when the Son is revealed in the soul, the love of the Holy Spirit is also revealed there. Therefore I say that it is the essence of the Father to beget the Son and the essence of the Son that I be born in him and in his image. It is the essence of the Holy Spirit that I should be burned into him and should be completely consumed in him and become entirely love. Whoever is in love and, in this way, has become entirely love thinks that God loves no one but himself alone. And he knows of no one else who has loved anything else or has been loved by anyone else except by God alone.

Some professors maintain that the spirit receives its blessedness from love; others maintain that it receives it from the contemplation of God. But I say: It receives it neither from love nor from knowledge nor from contemplation. Now one might ask: Has the spirit no vision of God in eternal life? Yes and no. Insofar as it is born, it has no contemplation and no vision more of God. But insofar as it is being born, it has a vision of God. Therefore the blessedness of the spirit lies where it is born and not where it has been born, for it lives where the Father lives. This means in the simplicity and the nakedness of being. Therefore turn away from all things and take yourself naked into being. For what is outside of being is an accident and all accidents bring about a why.

That we “live forever,” may God help us. Amen.

COMMENTARY:  God Is Justice and to Be in God Is to Be in Justice/Birth and Breakthrough Are Resurrections into Justice/Toward a Spirituality of Work: Working Without a Why or Wherefore/Our Work, Giving Birth to the New Creation

Eckhart has an entire theology of work and it is based on his theology of creativity, justice, and compassion. We saw this theology of work as art and creativity in Sermon Twenty-nine. In the present sermon Eckhart explores the subject of work from the perspective of justice. Only work for justice and out of justice is living work. This kind of work makes God delighted—God rejoices . . . especially at every work of the just person, however small it is. Why is this? Because God is justice. Elsewhere Eckhart says that “God is the most just—justissimus.”¹ Again, “God is, as it were, justice itself.”² Therefore to be in God is to be both in compassion and in justice. Indeed, as we saw in Sermon Thirty, “compassion means justice.” Because “God and justice are completely one/’³ Eckhart can say in the present sermon that whoever is in justice is in God and is God. So convinced is Eckhart that to be in justice is to be in God and to be in God is to be in justice that he can say elsewhere: “If God were not just, the just person could not consider God.”⁴ And again, “Since God is justice you must embrace justice as it is in itself, as it is in God.”⁵

We are called to do justice in all our work, but first we need to be reborn into justice. For our true breakthrough and birth is a resurrection into justice and into God who is Justice. The birth of the divine Word is a birth of Justice. “For the just person, the ‘word’ of justice is justice itself, as we read later in the tenth chapter of John: ‘I and the Father are one.’ For the just person denotes justice alone.”⁶ Our birth is to be a conformation and transformation into justice. After all, if the Word of God by nature is the “Son of Justice,”⁷ then we who are the adopted words—the bywords—and adopted sons of God must also be sons and daughters of justice.

The just person is the “word” of justice, by means of which justice declares and manifests itself . . . The just person is the offspring and son of justice. He is called, and actually is, the son because he becomes different in person but not in nature . . . Now if the Father and the Son, justice and the just man, are one and the same in nature, it follows that the just man is equal to, not less than, justice.⁸

Since justice, like compassion, lies at the very core of the Godhead and at the center of the origin of our existence, our being born is a being born out of justice. “The just person is always in the process of being born from justice itself, just as he has been born from it from the beginning, ever since he has been just.”⁹ If the just person is the “word” of justice and if a word is that which flows out but remains within as we saw in Sermon Two, then the just person is rooted in justice at the same time that such a person is birthing justice. Eckhart links the birth into justice with the moment of breakthrough and of resurrection when he discusses the new experience of time—in eternity there is no before and no after. We are told to rise beyond time, to be resurrected from a time consciousness that thinks in terms of before and after, since that is the kind of time framework in which our own birthing takes place. To substantiate this point, Eckhart draws on wisdom literature and on Paul. In the Book of Ecclesiasticus we read:

From eternity, in the beginning, he created me,

and for eternity I shall remain . . .

I am like a vine putting out graceful shoots,

my blossoms bear the fruit of glory and wealth . . .

Approach me, you who desire me,

and take your fill of my fruits,

for memories of me are sweeter than honey,

inheriting me is sweeter than the honeycomb. (Si. 24:9, 17, 19–20)

And from Paul—not from Plato—there is a hint of this same préexistence in a time before time, a time beyond time:

Blessed be God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,

who has blessed us with all the spiritual blessings of heaven in Christ.

Before the world was made, he chose us, chose us in Christ,

to be holy and spotless, and to live through love in his presence,

determining that we should become his adopted sons, through Jesus Christ. . .(Ep. 1:3–6)

And so, in Eckhart’s as in Paul’s theology, our rebirth as sons of God took place “before the world was made,” that is to say in eternity. This link between our rebirth and the préexistence of Wisdom is made again in Romans, where Paul writes:

They are the ones he chose specially long ago and intended to become true images of his Son, so that his Son might be the eldest of many brothers. (Rm. 8–29)

Eckhart cautions that some people have already tasted of this eternity he speaks of—they know what he is talking about; others have still to believe in it. The enlightened ones know; the ignorant believe in these matters. It is evident that another scriptural text that Eckhart had in front of him for this sermon is from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 62. In that chapter the author discusses themes that have inspired Eckhart’s treatise on justice and God—themes of the integrity of virtue that the just person maintains; themes of God’s silence and of God’s running and hurrying and of God’s joy.

About Zion I will not be silent,

about Jerusalem I will not grow weary,

until her integrity shines out like the dawn

and her salvation flames like a torch.

The nations then will see your integrity,

all the kings your glory,

and you will be called by a new name . . .

but you shall be called “My Delight” . . .

You who keep Yahweh mindful

must take no rest.

Nor let him take rest

till he has restored Jerusalem,

and made her

the boast of the earth. (Is. 62:1–2, 4, 6–7)

Eckhart recognizes the similarity between Isaiah 62 and Wisdom 5 where both traditions, that of the prophets and that of wisdom literature, appeal to the royal throne as a symbol for justice. Isaiah says:

You are to be a crown of splendor in the hand of Yahweh,

a princely diadem in the hand of your God. (Is. 62:3)

Wisdom speaks:

But the virtuous live for ever,

their recompense lies with the Lord,

the Most High takes care of them.

So they shall receive the royal crown of splendor,

the diadem of beauty from the hand of the Lord;

for he will shelter them with his right hand

and shield them with his arm . . .

he will put on justice as a breastplate. (Ws. 5:15–17, 18)

We will discuss this theme of the royal person and justice in greater detail in Sermon Thirty-six. But the theme of a royal birth is very much in accord with Eckhart’s treatment of our birth as the birth of a Godly Word, the birth of Justice. The fruit we are to bear is to be “neither more nor less than God himself,” as we saw in the previous sermon. That would mean neither more nor less than Justice. When God’s he becomes I, then “God and the soul are eternally doing one work very fruitfully.”¹⁰ This fruitful work is also a blessing. Eckhart’s theology of blessing reaches a crescendo in the works of justice and compassion. (We saw in Sermon Thirty that “compassion means justice.”) The blessedness of the just person and the blessedness of God is one blessedness because the just person is blessed where God is blessed. Justice is a name for the full blessing of God.

Here, then, lies the basis for Eckhart’s theology of work: he envisions a trinity of word, birth, work. Our true work is from the creative Word itself. Eckhart’s theology of work is based on his theology of the Word that flows out but remains within. You cannot separate word from work in Eckhart’s thinking, for the truthful word is always fruitful and leads to the authentic work. They are related as fruit and vine. Indeed, the Word is the work when work is authentic. What is authentic work? Work that is without a why. Works that have an outside purpose to them are truly fully dead. Even if God is inserted as an outside purpose, such a work is spoiled. True work is ecstasy—an end in itself. It is the ecstasy that justice brings and the ecstasy that the work itself brings to self, others, or God. The just person does not seek anything with his work; for every single person who seeks anything or even something with their works is working for a why and is a servant and a mercenary. It is part of the merchant mentality to allow alienation and separation to come between us and our work. To work without a why is to touch one’s origin. “The end is universally the same as the beginning. It has no ‘why’ or ‘wherefore’ but is itself the ‘why’ of and for all things: ‘I am the beginning and the end’” (Rv. 1:8).¹¹ In this return to our origin we are also returning to the marriage of work and Word, for the Word is what “was in the beginning.”¹² When our work is without a why, it is a work of love, for love

has no why. If I had a friend and loved him because good and all I wished came to me through him, I wouldn’t love my friend but myself. I ought to love my friend for his own goodness and for his own virtue and for everything that he is in himself.¹³

Just as we are to love without a why and be just without a why, so are we to work without a why. Such work is a work of love, for “whoever is born of God as a son of God loves God for his sake, that is to say, he loves God for the sake of loving God and does all his work for the sake of working.”¹⁴ Our works that are done in God are to be works of justice.

Where justice is at work, you are at work, because you could not but do the works of justice. Yes, even if hell were to interfere with the course of justice, you still would do the works of justice, and hell itself would not constitute any suffering; hell would be joy because you yourself would be justice, and that is why you could not but do the works of justice.¹⁵

Elsewhere Eckhart defines justice as “a certain rightness whereby every person receives his or her due.”¹⁶ We do the work of justice when we bring about this “certain rightness” among persons. Indeed, it is our just works that make us live. “For the just person as such to act justly is to live; indeed, justice is his life, his being alive, his being, insofar as he is just.”¹⁷ Like life itself, justice is its own reward. “The just person lives and works without reason of gain. As much as life has the reason for living in itself, in that same way the just person knows no other reason for being just.”¹⁸ Justice is the reason for justice. Just work is the reason for work.

To work without a why is to work from one’s inner self. Therefore Eckhart advises the person interested in good work to enter into your own ground and work there, and these works which you work there will all be living. Living works come from where life is: from our inner core where no why or wherefore enters, where all is one.

God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground. Here I live on my own as God lives on his own . . . You should work all your works out of this innermost ground without why. Indeed, I say, so long as you work for the kingdom of heaven, or for God, or for your internal happiness and thus for something outward, all is not well with you.¹⁹

Outside motivation is not worthy of the work we do. It separates us from our work and alienates us from our inner self. That way lies spiritual and personal death. When we work in that fashion our work is dead work.

Those deeds which do not flow from within your inner self are all dead before God. Those are the deeds which were engendered by causes outside of yourself, because they did not proceed from life. That is why they are dead, because only that is alive which has motion within itself. Consequently, for a person’s deeds to be alive, they have to come from within, not from something alien and outside himself.²⁰

One reason why outside-oriented works alienate us is that they are born of compulsion and not compassion or creativity, the way the creative Word gives birth. All works ore surely dead if anything from the outside compels you to work. Even if God did the compelling, they would be dead. Psychologist William Eckhardt makes a similar observation when he insists that compulsion is the Number One psychological obstacle to compassion and works of compassion.²¹ Meister Eckhart urges us to void all compulsion in our work. We should “become accustomed to work without compulsion,” he insists. How do we do this? By working from within, from our own being and needs of being, and not from outside. Many people are “being worked rather than working.” Such persons should learn to “cooperate with” God. This is learned from making contact with one’s inner person.²² It is from inside, as Jesus taught, that works are made holy.

People never need to think so much about what they ought to do, but they should remember what they are. Now if people and their ways are good, their works might shine forth brightly. If you are just, then your works are also just. One does not think of basing holiness on one action, one should base holiness on being. For works do not sanctify us, but we should sanctify the works . . . One should apply oneself with all diligence to being good, not so much to what one should do, of what nature the works are, but of what nature the ground of the works is.²³

When we are truly grounded, it is God who is involved in our works.

Such a person carries God in all his works and at all places, and all this person’s works are done purely by God, for if anyone is the cause of the work it is more properly and really his than that of the person who performs the work. If then we fix our minds on God purely and simply, then indeed he must perform our works and no one can hinder him in all his works, neither multitude nor place.²⁴

Such work is an occasion for expression and even reception of our divinity since it is a share in God’s work. We return God’s creative work—his compassion—to him.

The person whose aims and affections are thus fixed on God in all his works, to him God gives his divinity. All that this person works God works, for my humility gives God his divinity . . . God is not only the beginning of all our works and of our being, but he is also the end and rest of all beings.²⁵

God is the beginning of our work of compassion and justice because God is “in the beginning,” and when we are in God who is Compassion and Justice, and so firmly grounded there that our actions flow from this source, then God too flows from this source. The new creation is God’s too—though we are the instruments for it. God is eager to flow into our work—”God wants to do your work himself,” and will, “if you will only follow and resist him not at all.”²⁶ One might even say that God depends on us for the divine work of compassion and justice to happen-. “Just as little as I can do anything without him, he cannot really accomplish anything apart from me.”²⁷

What makes works live and makes them just and compassionate is the fact that they come from deep within. If your works are to live, then God must move you inwardly, in the innermost part of the soul, if they are really to live. There is your life and there alone you live. Only this kind of work is pleasing to God and returns a blessing to God. “There, in the soul’s innermost part, God works; there all works please God. No work will ever be acceptable to God unless it is accomplished there.”²⁸ There is no conflict, no dualism between the “outside world” and the innermost self, for the innermost self, filled with a consciousness of interdependence and panentheism, is itself capable of unifying outside and inside. Here lies the cure for compulsion.

One should not escape from the inward person, or flee from him or deny him, but in him, with him, and through him, one should learn to act in such a way that one breaks up the inwardness into reality and leads reality into inwardness, and that one should thus become accustomed to work without compulsion.²⁹

The so-called outside world also is divine.

You might say: “A person must turn outward if he or she has to do external things, for no work can be done except in its own form.” That is quite true, but the external form of images is nothing external for experienced people, since all things have for an inward person an inward divine mode of being.³⁰

Extrovert meditation, then, is not from the outside but from deep within, for even external forms of images come from that source in the experienced person. Work is not less divine because it is busy with external things; it is less divine if it does not flow from the innermost divine sources. It is from the inside that work is made vast and Godly.

The inward work is God-like and Godly, and it suggests the divine attributes in this respect: this outward work, its quality and its size, its length and its breadth, does not in the least increase the goodness of the inward work; it has its goodness in itself.³¹

This is why all vocations are holy, all work is divine and is a divine vocation. “You should know and you should have considered to what vocation you are most strongly called by God. For all people are not called to God in one way, as Saint Paul says” in 1 Corinthians 12:4–11.³² If the work is from inside, from our inness with God who is Justice and Compassion, it is God’s work and of divine size.

The outward work can never be small if the inward one is great, and the outward can never be great or good if the inward is small or of little worth. The inward work always includes in itself all size, all breadth and length. The inward work receives and draws all its being from nowhere else but from and in the heart of God.³³

Drawing its energy from the divine energy, all work that proceeds from the inside of oneself and from the “heart of God” is abundant and divine. It is also free, like God’s creative Word and work are free. God

is free and untrammeled in all his works, and he works them out of genuine love. That person who is united with God does exactly the same thing. He or she also is free and untrammeled in all his or her works and works them solely for God’s honor and does not seek his or her own; and God acts in that person.³⁴

There is still another dimension—and a divine dimension it is—to our work when it is grounded from the inside of ourselves. In our acts of creation we are imitating the ground of all creation, the Creator or Father of all being and all works. But this Father is always giving birth. From his ground, from his essence, and from his being the Father Is moved to beget. Indeed, it is the very essence of the Father to birth the Son. It Is the essence of the Father to beget the Son. If this be the case, then, where my ground becomes the Father’s ground, we give birth together and the Son is born at the time that the new creation is birthed. And the Father is eager and even busy to see this happen. Our work—so long as it originates in our center and inner core—is the birthing of God’s Son. The new creation is even more splendid than the first creation. “Always bear in mind that the faithful and loving God brought humankind out of a sinful life into a divine life. He made out of his enemy a friend, which is more than to create a new world.”³⁵ In the new creation we work one work there with God. There, in the bosom of Justice itself, all history is born anew. The Father gives birth to his Son as the Just One and the Just One as his Son; for all virtue of the just and every work of the just . . . are nothing other than the event of the Son being born from the Father. Thus our work becomes the Son, the new creation, the fruit of the “whole creation eagerly waiting for God to reveal his sons,” a creation that “has been groaning in one great act of giving birth” (Rm. 8:19, 22). Our inward work

receives the Son and is begotten as a son in the bosom of the heavenly Father . . . The outward work does not, but it receives its divine goodness by means of the inward work borne out and poured out in an emanation of the Deity.³⁶

In this same act of new creation, the Son is birthed and the Spirit flows out upon human history, and we are reborn as a lover like the Spirit of God. It is the essence of the Son that I be born in him and in his image. It is the essence of the Holy Spirit that I should be burned into him and should be completely consumed in him and become entirely love. In our work that is in God and therefore in Compassion and in Justice we become entirely Love. That is the goal of our work and of our being. But it is a goal without a goal, for love—like work—is without a why.