(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “What Is Justice”, originally shared on April 22, 2021. It was the 109th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
After
the verdict convicting former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin on all
counts in the murder of George Floyd two days ago, the most common reaction I’ve
seen is one of relief. Yet some leaders have said that the verdict represented
accountability but not justice. And one Fox News commentator said that the
verdict was not justice but, “Please don’t hurt us.” What is justice, and how
do we know when it has been done?
It’s been said that there are four general kinds of justice: distributive (deciding who gets what), procedural (deciding how to
treat people fairly), retributive (deciding the appropriate punishment
for wrongdoing) and restorative (which seeks to restore relationships to
"rightness."). More than one kind of justice can be involved in any
particular issue.
It’s been said that these can be found in four general categories: social
justice, economic justice, political justice, and legal
justice. Like the four kinds, these can also be intertwined in any particular
issue.
Justice is often complicated.
In the immediate aftermath of the verdict being read, many commentators
expressed their opinion that the most convincing agreement by the prosecution
was, “Believe what you see.”
We all saw the tape. The whole world saw it.
George Floyd was on the pavement, face down, handcuffed behind his back, and
former officer Chauvin placed his knee on George Floyd’s neck for 9-and-a-half
minutes as he said over and over, “I can’t breathe”, as an off-duty paramedic bystander
told him that Mr. Floyd was dying, as Mr. Floyd called out for his mother, as arriving
paramedics told him to get off him.
But what did we see? Social, economic, political, and legal issues all
came into play. How we see them depends a lot on our life experience.
“Seeing is believing” but believing is also the way in which we see. We
don’t see things as they are, except maybe in the most superficial way. We see
things the way we are.
I spent a year in academic exile during my college years at a small
school in southern Wisconsin. It isn’t there anymore, but the things I learned
there are still vivid, and not all of them were learned in a classroom.
I arrived early for the fall semester because I
wanted to have everything unpacked and prepared when classes started.
I was assigned to a triple room on the first floor across from the dorm
mother’s (yes, they had those then) room. I was the first to arrive, so I picked
my bed and got everything unpacked and organized just so.
Not long after, a guy I later learned was from Texas, came steaming into
the room with the dorm mother, who seemed elderly to me at the time but was
probably way younger than I am now, behind him, stooped and wringing her hands.
He was shouting, “If my grandpappy knew what was happening just now, he’d
be rolling over in his grave. I ain’t living with no d* (n-word/s)! Why can’t I
stay here?” I think that the dorm mother was explaining that the other beds had
been assigned to other students.
I got the drift and said to her, “Well, if that’s his attitude, I don’t
want to live with him. I’ll move upstairs.” The look on her face couldn’t have
expressed more relief and near beatific gratitude.
I moved my stuff upstairs and met my new roommates. They had both been
gang members on the South Side of Chicago. One had been a member of the
Blackstone Rangers and the other had been a member of the Devils Disciples. The
former had recently returned from Vietnam and still had shrapnel growing out of
one leg. They had come to that college for the same reason I had. To keep
moving forward.
I saw another world that year. I saw it through their eyes.
There were only 6 or so black students in a student body of around 600,
as I remember. This was the 60’s and they weren’t always welcome.
We walked in a group whenever possible. There were threats. They took me
to a hardware store and helped me pick out a knife for me to carry. They showed
me how to carry it, and how to get the blade out fast. They showed me how to
carry a wire coat hanger and use it as weapon, and to drop it if the police
showed up.
These were not theoretical skills for them. They didn’t do drive-bys “back
in the day”. They told me how their gangs went after each other with hatchets, in
face-to-face, blood on your clothes angry fights with visible consequences.
The called me “Preacher Dave”.
I had seen racism. I was a part of a student exchange with kids from my
high school in Manitowoc, Wisconsin and kids from La Grange, Georgia, a suburb
of Atlanta. Theirs was a segregated high school for white students. I went back
in the summer to work at a camp for “underprivileged” children, also all white.
I was cut on the back of my neck by a white barber in the Atlanta bus
station shaving my neck during a heated discussion about the civil rights
movement and what I was doing there.
This was different, though. This was seeing racism, large and small, and
its effects on people I cared about, while not actually receiving it because I
was white. I was there by choice and could leave at any time. We all knew that.
The students at that college were all around the same age, had
experienced the same national history, listened to a lot of the same music, and
were all there for the same reason, and that made the racism all the more
unjust.
I was blessed with seeing another point of view, however. And our point
of view can have a huge effect on what we see.
“Justice”, as most of us think of it, is not a major theme in the Bible,
and barely mentioned at all in the New Testament.
“Justice”, as a word, is linked in the Bible to the word “justified”, a
concept about which the Bible says a great deal. It is linked to the term “righteousness”.
“Justice”, in the Bible, means doing God’s
will. Our knowing what is God’s will is the work of the Holy Spirit, a metaphor
for which in the Bible is “streams of living water”. God’s will is not
something we decide; it is revealed to us through the Bible by the Holy Spirit.
To be justified means to be put in a right relationship with God. That’s
at the root of what righteousness is about. That is something that only comes
from God.
And it can only have ultimate authority because it comes from God, not
human beings.
Justice comes from a living relationship with the one true living God.
It does not depend upon our point of view. It is absolute, because it comes from
the transcendent authority that comes from and only belongs to God.
The prosecutor in the trial of Derek Chauvin said that that case was not
anti-police. It was pro-police. It was about justice for George Floyd and the
restoration in the community’s confidence that law enforcement was just that,
nothing more and nothing less, that the police indeed exist to protect and
serve, and that no one is above the law.
Derek Chauvin will likely go to prison and hopefully be led to repentance
and new life, and I hope we can all pray for that.
Prisons were once called penitentiaries because the concept of
incarceration was that it would lead to penitence, or “repentance”.
I think it was Pastor Michael Fisher of the Greater Zion Church in Compton,
who Sally saw saying on TV, before the verdict, that we need to pray for Derek
Chauvin’s family who though innocent is suffering now, and we need to pray for
Derek Chauvin who is also suffering. He needs to recognize what he did and
repent of it, not just say he is sorry but turn away from the things that led
him to commit that murder.
And, I wonder, with regard to our own sins and how God regards us, if we
would rather that God treat us with justice or with mercy?
We can, I think, count on both because of the cross, the gift of faith
that it made possible, and our baptisms
Paul writes to the church at Rome, the Romans, the 6th
chapter, starting at the 20th verse:
*Romans 6:20-23
This is our message to the world. God’s justice is not for “just us”. It
is for all people. Repent and believe in the good news of Jesus Christ. Seek
justice where it can be found, in doing the will of God, revealed by the Holy
Spirit, the streams of living water.
The divisions we make between us are overcome at the root of our common
humanity by God in our common relationship with God. Paul writes in Galatians 3,
starting at the 27th verse:
*Galatians 3:27-29
Doing justice is doing God’s will. Righteousness is being justified, being
put right with God, being made a new Creation, being born again, that leads to
action in God’s name. Doing justice means doing God’s will. As the prophet Amos
says in the 5th chapter, the 24th verse, speaking for God;
But let
justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (*Amos 5:24)
We see the will of God being done when we see the already but not yet Kingdom,
or Reign, of God breaking into this world by God’s grace. We see it in the transformation
of our lives lived as children of God. We see it wherever there is a loving
response to God by God’s people, acting as members or as the whole Body of
Christ from a living relationship with the one true living God.
Open your heart to presence and power of the Holy Spirit to wash and
form you, teach and inspire you from within you as streams of living water.
Live in such a way as to demonstrates the power of God within you to do God’s
will, God’s justice. As the prophet Micah writes in chapter 6, verse 8:
He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what
does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to
love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (*Micah 6:8)
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