Is Justice a Fluid Concept?

Over the past handful of years, I have learned a lot about justice by being exposed to an unfathomable realm of injustice. This journey started with Mission Year and my time in Englewood. Now having been exposed in such a way, my life will never be devoid of the questions of 1) What is Justice?, 2) What does it mean to live a life of justice?, 3) What does my position in the world mean for the way I live my life?

The first question has a basic answer. What is justice? In the Bible, I think justice is shown to be the righting of wrongs, and particularly through Jesus, I see it as administration of mercy. In the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament, but one of my professors dislikes that term and prefers HB), there is the system of gleaning, which I think is an incredible economic idea that the Church should have a role in enacting somehow today. There is also the Year of Jubilee, where things are returned and set right. In Jesus, we see justice as not giving people what society thinks they should deserve (or even what religion thinks they deserve), but giving mercy (i.e. the story of the woman caught in adultery and the parable of the good Samaritan). "He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." (Micah 6:8)

After having read theories on social justice and the perpetuation of systemic injustice, I find no way to live a life in the U.S. that is devoid of injustice. Take sweatshops for example. Most of the clothes we buy are made by people working for cents a day, many of which are literally chained to their work stations. Do we boycott those stores? Refuse to shop from them? Besides the economics of it, where masses of people boycotting would collapse our own economic system and ultimately would cause the people currently working in sweatshops to have no means of making a wage, there are other things to consider.

Do you buy from other stores and companies? Do you know where those clothes come from? Do they? Do you only buy from thrift shops? Do you purchase any of the clothes that come from sweatshop brands? After all, your money isn't going to actually support those companies.

It's complicated.

Being the way that I am, I feel that anything that contributes or partakes in injustice to be wrong. But, what about Jesus? He ate food with the Pharisees, He accepted the gift of perfume spilled on his feet, He went to the house of Zacchaeus and ate food that he prepared...

I began to wonder if it was different for Him because He was on the side of those being treated unjustly. Howard Thurman wrote a book called Jesus and the Disinherited. It's written from a liberation theology by a black man in the midst of a decade of racial segregation. He's writing to others who are oppressed. So many books are written to the oppressors, to those who have privilege on their side.

This one's on the other end. Thurman demonstrates in his book how Jesus was on the oppressed side. Ethnically, religiously, economically... Those things shape his responses to the world.

For me, as a young woman with privilege on my side, do I respond to the world in like fashion to Jesus or differently? It wasn't even until after the death of Jesus that Gentiles, who were considered a privileged group ethnically, were even included. Would the gospel look different to them? What about to those with power? What about to Romans? Would the gospel look different to them?  What does it look like in my own nation, which I think is unfortunately, yet aptly described by Psalm 73.

The Magnificat, Mary's song in Luke, talks about an overturning of status and wealth. It is consistent with the Hebrew understanding of justice and the Messiah. Were they mistaken? Did Jesus amend this image or conform to it? And what if Jesus had been a person of privilege? How differently would he have done things? Or would it even have been possible for God to come in a form affording Him worldly power or would that, by its nature, require Him to be less than He is?

I don't have a lot of answers. I do think that God had to come in the form of the oppressed in society. He turned down worldly power, even escaping from those who intended to make Him king by force. Does that mean power is evil? No. He raised many leaders to have powers and He gave privileges that were to be used for the Kingdom, including the "least of these". It is not the gospel for one to have privilege and power that will not be used to benefit those who are disinherited.

What that looks like, I don't know. I think that the Quaker John Woolman had a pretty good idea of it. Woolman didn't support slavery. As a young adult, his boss required him to write a bill of sale for his boss's slave. Regretfully, he did. That was a formative moment. He felt that he had enacted an injustice. Had he refused, he would have lost his job, and the bill would be written by another. But he realized that had he refused, he wouldn't have participated in an evil.

From that point on, his entire life approach changed. As an advocate among the Quakers for the release of slaves, he had to deal with the fact that many of his friends had slaves. What was he to do when they invited him to dinner that the slaves prepared? He could refuse to go, but that would have hurt the community that God had put him in and in the end, probably would not lead his friends to question or change their beliefs. He could go and do/say nothing, but that would, in his mind, make him complicit with the evil he witnessed.

Instead, he went to dinner and enjoyed time with his friends. But he always paid the slaves for their services towards him. He could not speak for his friends, but he would not receive services for free from a person he believed should be free. This allowed him to maintain community, maintain his personal standards, and hopefully cause his friends to question their role in the situation as well.

Chris Heuertz writes on my questions and confusions in his book Friendship at the Margins. He tells a story of wearing a GAP shirt to his friend's house. His friend had worked in sweatshops and when she saw him that day, she recognized the shirt. She had made many just like it and had in fact, been doing work for GAP. He wrestled with how to deal with it. His answers aren't fully sufficient for me. He admits that there is and will be inconsistency at times with what we believe and what we do. His experience with those in the sex industry leads to even more difficult questions. He struggles with the answers. In the end, he doesn't always have them. In the end, he has more insight into the questions to consider that most of us would never think about. But his humility and how he deals with the idea of justice gives me hope.

It seems to me that in the world as it is, justice has to be a fluid concept. It can't be much else. But I will enact Justice as best as I can as I look to the New Heaven and Earth where justice is the mode of being. Where its fluidity is not so much in its conception, but where its fluidity is seen in this light:

Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream! 
(Amos 5:24, later quoted by Martin Luther King, Jr.)