Cease striving and know
The role of humanity in the true seach for real justice
December 5, 2007
Paul Foth
I was a young impressionable college freshman when I jumped onto the social justice bandwagon because I thought Jesus had plenty to say about how to structure our world to make things more just. Changing the social order is an integral part of bringing God’s kingdom on Earth. Or so I thought.
I tried reading the New Testament with my new social justice glasses, only to be quickly disappointed by Jesus; he never really talked about the sort of justice I was looking for. Instead he talked about righteousness. I found out later that the Greek word for righteousness can also be translated justice, but it is distant from our modern understanding of justice. While there is dispute over the exact meaning of the word, righteousness in the New Testament means right thinking and right acting. It entails personal and communal faithfulness and responsibility, but remarkably has nothing to do with institutional change.
You see, I have come to understand that God’s justice and kingdom have absolutely nothing to do with laws, public policy or politics as we have come to know them. The gospel does say one important political thing about how the world should be ordered: Christ must be at the centre. This means our purpose, as the church, is not to order the world ourselves, but instead call the world to be ordered around Christ. We do this by living distinctly kingdom lives through the Holy Spirit, proclaiming in words and actions God’s truth, hope, love, peace and light to a world of deceit, despair, hatred, violence and darkness. We must seek to reconcile the fallen relationships between man and God, between man and others, between each man and himself and between man and creation.
All this responsibility on our shoulders is a bit overwhelming. The truth be told, we can’t live up to it. This is where the teaching of Sabbath plays a very important role in the lives of Christians. Christ broke Sabbath codes (by healing and eating grain) to reveal himself to be Lord of the Sabbath; he showed us that the Sabbath is not about regulation, but about the recognition of God’s creation and order.
This view understands that humans are insufficient to create or save by their own power and are wholly dependent on God. Sabbath brings us a glimpse of the eternal rest and order of God. This idea of Sabbath is no longer relegated to one day a week, but to all of life. This does not mean we cease all our activities, but rather it means recognizing that what we do is not what makes a difference. Our ideas, our fights, our causes miss the point entirely. Our role is in God’s cause: the redemption and reconciliation of all things. This happens not by taking the government into our own hands, but by living as citizens of this different kingdom. We cannot control anything ourselves, only find our place in God’s unfolding kingdom, where there is real justice, real liberty and real peace.
Now you go...
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