EIGHT
PEACE, BEAUTY, AND JUSTICE
Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you, too, will prosper.
Jeremiah 29:7
The Biblical idea of justice is comprehensive and practical, but it is also high and wonderful. It is part and parcel of what God is doing in history. God is reconciling humanity to himself—and as a result of this great transaction, he is reconciling all things to himself. He is bringing all things in heaven and earth together in Christ (Colossians 1:20; Ephesians 1:10). What does this mean?
The Artwork of God
The Jewish Scriptures were virtually unique in their view of how the world began. Most other ancient accounts depict creation as the result of a battle or of a struggle between warring cosmic forces.
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A Chinese account describes how the primordial giant Pangu emerged from the ancient cosmic egg, and when he died the parts of his body became the world—his eyes the sun and moon, his body the mountains, his blood the waters, his muscles the land, his beard the forests. One African story tells of a giant who got sick and vomited out the world, first the sun, moon, and stars, and then vegetation and human beings. The Gnostics taught that the high God was unknowable, and in contradiction to God’s will, some lower deity, a “demiurge,” created the profoundly flawed material world. In Norse mythology the god Odin killed the giant Ymir and used his body to create the universe and its inhabitants. The Babylonian account, the Enuma Elish, tells a similar story of the god Marduk who defeats the ocean goddess Tiamat and produces the world out of her members.
In most ancient myths, therefore, the visible universe resulted from conflict, powers in tension with one another. The Biblical creation account, however, stands in stark contrast. Biblical scholar Gerhard von Rad has argued that, unlike any of its neighbors, Israel could conceive of no divine powers on a par with those of the Lord.
164 Creation was therefore the work of God without a rival, who made the world not as a warrior digs a trench but as an artist paints a picture or shapes a sculpture. God is a craftsman, an artisan.
A House and a Garment
Sometimes the imagery the Bible uses to describe creation is architectural. God says to Job:
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation. . . . [and] marked out its dimensions?” (Job 38:4-6). In the beginning, God built the world to be not only our home but his royal dwelling (Isaiah 66:1). In the Psalms we learn that when he built the world it had to have, as does any house, a foundation, and that foundation was “righteousness and justice.” Jewish scholar Moshe Weinfeld says, “This refers to the imposition of equality, order, and harmony upon the cosmos and the elimination of the forces of destruction and chaos.”
165 God brought order out of chaos, as a builder takes a pile of raw materials and rightly relates them to one another in order to form a house.
The Bible describes the making of the world not only as the building of a house, but also as the weaving of a garment. God turned a chaos into a cosmos, and also turned a tangle into a tapestry. Woven garments were long in the making and valuable in ancient times, and therefore they were an apt metaphor for the wonder and character of the material world. The sea (Psalm 104:6), the clouds (Job 38:9), the lights of the sky (Psalm 104:1), and all the forces of nature (Psalm 102:26) are called garments that God has woven and now wears.
As a result, the world is not like a lava cone, the product of powerful random eruptions, but rather like a fabric. Woven cloth consists of innumerable threads interlaced with one another. Even more than the architectural image, the fabric metaphor conveys the importance of relationship. If you throw thousands of pieces of thread onto a table, no fabric results. The threads must be rightly and intimately related to one another in literally a million ways. Each thread must go over, under, around, and through the others at thousands of points. Only then do you get a fabric that is beautiful and strong, that covers, fits, holds, shelters, and delights.
God created all things to be in a beautiful, harmonious, interdependent, knitted, webbed relationship to one another. Just as rightly related physical elements form a cosmos or a tapestry, so rightly related human beings form a community. This interwovenness is what the Bible calls shalom, or harmonious peace.
Forms of Shalom
“Shalom” is usually translated “peace” in English Bibles, but it means far more than what our English word conveys. It means
complete reconciliation, a state of the fullest flourishing in every dimension—physical, emotional, social, and spiritual—because all relationships are right, perfect, and filled with joy.
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When your body is healthy, especially when you are young, you have energy, strength, and beauty, because all the parts of your body are working in unity. But when you are injured, parts of your body may be out of alignment with others. Cancer cells work not with but against the other systems of the body. When the parts of your body fail to work interdependently, you experience the loss of physical shalom or well-being. And when you die, you literally unravel.
When you experience a season of mental well-being, it is because the things your emotions want are those of which your conscience and reason approve. Your inner faculties are working together. However, you may find yourself longing intensely for something that your reason tells you is futile or your conscience tells you is absolutely wrong, but you can’t stop wanting it or seeking it. Then you experience an inner unraveling of psychological shalom, commonly given names like “guilt,” “being conflicted,” or “anxiety.”
Then there is social shalom. In the Frank Capra movie It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey and his family run a savings and loan company in the small town of Bedford Falls, New York. Over the years they had helped innumerable families get mortgages at fair and reasonable rates, and had been patient and caring when loans couldn’t be repaid. As the CEO of his company, George’s “bottom line” was not maximum profits, but the flourishing of his community and customers. George, of course, did not get rich with this kind of approach! But at one point in the movie, when he is suicidal, he is given a vision of what Bedford Falls would have looked like if, as he wished at the moment, he “had never been born.” What he sees is a community consisting of some wealthy families surrounded by an impoverished, dysfunctional town. Instead of kindly neighbors, there are brutal and self-interested parties in constant conflict with one another. Without George Bailey’s efforts the town had lost its social shalom.
When the society disintegrates, when there is crime, poverty, and family breakdown, there is no shalom. However, when people share their resources with each other, and work together so that shared public services work, the environment is safe and beautiful, the schools educate, and the businesses flourish, then that community is experiencing social shalom. When people with advantages invest them in those who have fewer, the community experiences civic prosperity or social shalom.
Losing Shalom
But the world is not, by and large, characterized by shalom. How did we get into this place? The beginning of the book of Genesis tells us how in the Garden of Eden, humanity walked with God and served him. Under his rule and authority, it was paradise. We know something of this on a mundane level. Excellent managers can take over unprofitable businesses or losing sports franchises and, through their leadership skills, turn everything around. Under new, competent authority morale builds, the conflicts end, the team jells, vision is recaptured, and everyone thrives. This is just a dim hint of what happens under the absolute reign of the true and living God. All things reach their potential and flourish in perfect harmony.
All that ended, however, when humanity turned away from God, rejecting his rule and kingdom. The third chapter of Genesis spells out the results in comprehensive detail. Sin entered the world to deface and mar everything that had been made. Because we became estranged from God, we also are alienated from our true selves, and from each other. Our primal self-absorption has led to profound social evil—to war, crime, family breakdown, oppression, and injustice. When we lost our relationship with God, the whole world stopped “working right.” The world is filled with hunger, sickness, aging, and physical death. Because our relationship with God has broken down, shalom is gone—spiritually, psychologically, socially, and physically.
Justice and Shalom
Now we are in a position to see even more clearly what the Bible means when it speaks of
justice. In general, to “do justice” means to live in a way that generates a strong community where human beings can flourish. Specifically, however, to “do justice” means to go to places where the fabric of shalom has broken down, where the weaker members of societies are falling through the fabric, and to repair it.
167 This happens when we concentrate on and meet the needs of the poor.
How can we do that? The only way to reweave and strengthen the fabric is by weaving yourself into it. Human beings are like those threads thrown together onto a table. If we keep our money, time, and power to ourselves, for ourselves, instead of sending them out into our neighbors’ lives, then we may be literally on top of one another, but we are not interwoven socially, relationally, financially, and emotionally. Reweaving shalom means to sacrificially thread, lace, and press your time, goods, power, and resources into the lives and needs of others.
An intriguing real life example of an entire community doing justice and seeking shalom is laid out in Yale professor Nora Ellen Groce’s book
Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language.
168 In the 1980s Croce was researching hereditary deafness on Martha’s Vineyard. In the seventeenth century the original European settlers were all from a region in Kent, England, called “the Weald” where there was a high incidence of hereditary deafness. Because of their geographical isolation and intermarriage the percentage of deaf people increased across the whole island. By the nineteenth century one out of twenty-five people in the town of Chilmark was deaf and in another small settlement almost a quarter of the people could not hear.
169 (Today, because of the mobility of the population and marriage with off-islanders, hereditary deafness has vanished. The last deaf person born on the Vineyard died in 1952.)
In most societies, physically handicapped people are forced to adapt to the life patterns of the nonhandicapped, but that is not what happened on the Vineyard. One day Croce was interviewing an older island resident and she asked him what the hearing people thought of the deaf people. “We didn’t think anything about them, they were just like everyone else,” he replied. Croce responded that it must have been necessary for everyone to write things down on paper in order to communicate with them. The man responded in surprise, “No, you see everyone here spoke sign language.” The interviewer asked if he meant the deaf people’s families. No, he answered, “Everybody in town—I used to speak it, my mother did, everybody.” Another interviewee said, “Those people weren’t handicapped. They were just deaf.”
170 One other remembered, “They [the deaf] were like anybody else. I wouldn’t be overly kind because they, they’d be sensitive to that. I’d just treat them the way I treated anybody.”
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Indeed, what had happened was that an entire community had disadvantaged itself en masse for the sake of a minority. Instead of making the nonhearing minority learn to read lips, the whole hearing majority learned signing.
172 All the hearing became bilingual, so deaf people were able to enter into full social participation. As a result of “doing justice” (disadvantaging themselves) the majority “experienced shalom”—it included people in the social fabric who in other places would have fallen through it. “When they had socials or anything up in Chilmark, why, everybody would go and they [the deaf] enjoyed it, just as much as anybody did. They used to have fun—we all did. . . . They were part of the crowd, they were accepted. They were fishermen and farmers and everything else. . . . Sometimes, if there were more deaf people than hearing there, everyone would speak sign language—just to be polite, you know.”
173 Deafness as a “handicap” largely disappeared.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Croce’s research was the revelation of how hearing people had their own communication abilities enhanced. They found many uses for signing besides communication with the deaf. Children signed to one another during sermons in church or behind a teacher’s back at school. Neighbors could sign to one another over distances in a field or even through a spyglass telescope. One woman remembers how her father would be able to stand on a windy cliff and sign his intentions to fishermen below. Another remembers how sick people who could not speak were able to sign to make their needs known.
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In other words, the “disadvantage” that the hearing Vineyarders assumed—the effort and trouble to learn another language—turned out to be for their benefit after all. Their new abilities made life easier and more productive. They changed their culture in order to include an otherwise disadvantaged minority but in the process made themselves and their society richer.
Martha’s Vineyard was a unique situation. However, in every time and culture, the principle holds. The strong must disadvantage themselves for the weak, the majority for the minority, or the community frays and the fabric breaks.
Justice and Beauty
In 1999 Harvard English professor Elaine Scarry wrote a book in which she took on the prevailing view of the late twentieth century academy, namely, that beauty and attractiveness was the handmaiden of privilege, masking political power interests. On the contrary, she said in the book with a title that conveys its main thesis—
On Beauty and Being Just. Beauty, she asserted, can lead us to a more just life. Her first argument was that the observer of beauty always receives a passion to share the beauty with others. This serves as “an introduction (perhaps even our first introduction) to the state of certainty.”
175 Beauty, she says, gives us the unavoidable conviction, even if we intellectually have no “metaphysical referent” for it, that life is not random and meaningless, that there is good and evil. We want to share that experience with others, to have others praise and enjoy the beauty with us.
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Her second argument was that beauty radically “decenters” the self and moves you to distribute attention away from yourself. She quotes philosopher and author Iris Murdoch’s famous lecture “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts,” in which Murdoch describes once having been absorbed in anxiety and self-pity, but then she looked out a window to see a bird riding the thermals.
We are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, self-preoccupied, falsifying veil which partially conceals the world. . . . [But] I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, brooding on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. . . . And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. . . .
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Scarry observed that, in Murdoch’s experience, the new vision of beauty occupied “all the space formerly in the service of protecting, guarding, advancing the self ” (or its prestige). In the presence of beauty you cease to be the hero in your own story. It is no longer all about you. You experience a “symmetry of everyone’s relation to one another.”
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Theologian Jonathan Edwards, in his book
The Nature of True Virtue, argued that human beings will only be drawn out of themselves into unselfish acts of service to others when they see God as supremely beautiful.
179 Here’s an example to illustrate what he means. If you listen to the music of Bach because you want people to think you are cultured (or because you want to think it of yourself), then the music is only a means to achieve some other end, namely the enhancement of your reputation. But if you play Bach because you find it not just useful but beautiful, then you are listening to it as satisfying in and of itself.
Edwards taught that if, through an experience of God’s grace, you come to find him beautiful, then you do not serve the poor because you want to think well of yourself, or in order to get a good reputation, or because you think it will be good for your business, or even because it will pay off for your family in creating a better city to live in. You do it because serving the poor honors and pleases God, and honoring and pleasing God is a delight to you in and of itself.
Scarry and Murdoch are not making anything like Edwards’s appeal to the beauty of God as the basis for just living. And yet together they acknowledge that there is an obstacle to doing justice in human nature that will not be removed simply through education, argument, and persuasion. It takes an experience of beauty to knock us out of our self-centeredness and induce us to become just.
Columbia professor Todd Gitlin reviewed Elaine Scarry’s book and was not convinced by it. Quoting George Steiner, he observed that the Nazis slaughtered people by day and enjoyed Mozart by night.
180 Edwards taught that “secondary beauty,” such as the beauty of art, may have some humbling, decentering effect, since all beauty is derived from God. But I’m sure he would have agreed with Gitlin that such beauty is insufficient to produce justice. There is, however, one supreme kind of beauty that will.
God in the Face of the Poor
Proverbs 19:7 and 14:31 are texts that sum up a great deal of Scriptural material. The first text says that if you are kind to the poor, God takes it as if you are being kind to him. The second gives us the flip side; namely, that if you show contempt for the poor it means you are showing contempt for him.
One of the more notorious practices of local banks is to “redline” poor and nonwhite neighborhoods. That is, they refuse mortgage and small business loans to applicants who live there. Their argument is that they simply look at the statistics and conclude that residents of those neighborhoods are more likely not to make good on the loan. God, however, says we are not to live that way in our relationships to the poor. He says, in effect, in Proverb 19:7: “Don’t you dare ‘redline’ people. Don’t look at someone and say, ‘If I get involved with that person I might be taken advantage of!’ I see a gift to the poor as a gift to me. I will, in some way, make the loan good. I will give you value, trust me.”
This is not a promise to match literal dollars for dollars, but to enrich your life and meet your needs (Mark 10:29-31). What a promise that is! In your life you may already have family members, friends, or neighbors who have chronic problems and who are difficult to love. And out in your community there are more. Don’t shrink, says the Lord, from spending yourself on the broken, the hurting, and the needy. I’m good for it.
But there’s a deeper principle at work here. If you insult the poor, you insult God. The principle is that God personally identifies very closely with the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant, the most powerless and vulnerable members of society. When the Old Testament says God identifies with the poor, that is a strong statement. But it still is basically a figure of speech. Not until you come to the New Testament can you fully grasp the degree to which God has done this.
In Proverbs we see God identifying with the poor symbolically. But in the incarnation and death of Jesus we see God identifying with the poor and marginal literally. Jesus was born in a feed trough. When his parents had him circumcised the offering they made—two pigeons—was that prescribed for the poorest class of people in the society.
181 He lived among the poor and the marginalized, who were drawn to him even as the respectable were repulsed by him. We see the kind of life he led when he said, “Foxes have holes, birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Luke 9:58). At the end of his life he rode into Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey, spent his last evening in a borrowed room, and when he died he was laid in a borrowed tomb. They cast lots for his only possession, his robe, for there on the cross he was stripped of everything. He died naked and penniless. He had little the world valued and the little he had was taken. He was discarded—thrown away. But only because of Him do we have any hope.
In Jesus Christ God identified not only with the poor, but also with those who are denied justice. Dr. James Montgomery Boice once preached a sermon entitled “The Illegalities of Christ’s Trial.”
182 Examining the account of Jesus’s trial before the Sanhedrin in John 18 he listed all the ways that the trial was a miscarriage of justice: There was no public notification; it was held in middle of the night; Jesus was allowed no defense; he was forcibly struck in the middle of the trial. Later the colonial governor, Pontius Pi-late knew the case was insufficient but he caved in to political pressure. Finally, Jesus was tortured cruelly and put to death. In all these ways, Jesus identifies with the millions of nameless people who have been wrongfully imprisoned, robbed of their possessions, tortured, and slaughtered.
Many people say, “I can’t believe in God when I see all the injustice in the world.” But here is Jesus, the Son of God, who knows what it’s like to be the victim of injustice, to stand up to power, to face a corrupt system and be killed for it. He knows what it is like to be lynched. I’m not sure how you believe in a God remote from injustice and oppression, but Christianity doesn’t ask you to believe in that. That is why the Christian writer John Stott is able to say, “I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the Cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?”
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And what does this mean? Remember Matthew 25. On the last day Jesus sits on the judgment seat, saying:
“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.”
Then the righteous will answer him, saying, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?”
And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”
Matthew 25:35-40
On Judgment Day, don’t say to the Lord, “When did we see you thirsty, naked, and captive?” Because the answer is—on the cross! There we see how far God was willing to go to identify with the oppressed of the world. And he was doing it all for us! There Jesus, who deserved acquittal and freedom, got condemnation—so that we who deserve condemnation for our sins can receive acquittal (Galatians 3:10-14; 2 Corinthians 5:21). This was the ultimate instance of God’s identification with the poor. He not only became one of the actually poor and marginalized, he stood in the place of all those of us in spiritual poverty and bankruptcy (Matthew 5:3) and paid our debt.
Now that is a thing of beauty. To take that into the center of your life and heart will make you one of the just.
Some years ago I heard a man relate the experience of a wealthy older woman that he once knew.
184 She had never married and had no children to serve as heirs. She had only one close relative, a nephew, who hoped to inherit her money. He had always been gracious and attentive in her presence, but she had heard things from others that made her doubt her impression. The disposal of her wealth was no small matter. She had to be sure that the person who received it would use it wisely and generously. So she decided to take matters into her own hands. One morning she dressed in tattered clothes, appearing to be a homeless person, and lay on the steps of his urban town house. When he came out, he cursed at her and told her to leave or he would call the police. And so she knew what his heart was really like. His response to the poor woman revealed his true nature.
Proverbs 14:31 says, “He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker.” The God of the Bible says, as it were, “I am the poor on your step. Your attitude toward them reveals what your true attitude is toward me.” A life poured out in doing justice for the poor is the inevitable sign of any real, true gospel faith.