Tuesday of the Third Week of Advent

Lectionary: 194

This is the name they give him:

“The LORD our justice.”

In today's readings, the words just and justice appears ten times, and the word righteous three times. The words apply to God, the Messiah and to Joseph, the righteous man. Justice is more than a Christian virtue; it is the name, or identity, of a Christian individual. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote,

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is — As Kingfishers Catch Fire​

Periodically, I must return to a statement by Reinhold Niebuhr, especially since I meet this mystery almost daily as a hospital chaplain: 

The high estimate of the human stature implied in the concept of "image of God" stands in paradoxical juxtaposition to the low estimate of human virtue in Christian thought. Man is a sinner. His sin is defined as rebellion against God. The Christian estimate of human evil is so serious precisely because it places evil at the very center of human personality: in the will. This evil cannot be regarded complacently as the inevitable consequence of his finiteness or the fruit of his involvement in the contingencies and necessities of nature.
Sin is occasioned precisely by the fact that man refuses to admit his "creatureliness" and to acknowledge himself as merely a member of a total unity of life. He pretends to be more than he is. Nor can he, as in both rationalistic and mystic dualism, dismiss his sins as residing in that part of himself which is not his true self; that is, that part of himself which is involved in physical necessity. In Christianity it is not the eternal man who judges the finite man; but the Eternal and Holy God who judges sinful man. Nor is redemption in the power of the eternal man who gradually sloughs off finite man. Man is not divided against himself so that the essential man can be extricated from the non-essential. Man contradicts himself within the terms of his true essence. His essence is free self-determination. His sin is the wrong use of his freedom and his consequent destruction. 
       The Nature and Destiny of Man. Reinhold Niebuhr (1941) ISBN 0-02-387510-0

Professor Niebuhr has said this as well as anyone since the Bible. This "evil at the very center of human personality: in the will" challenges each one of us in our inner consciousness, and it challenges us in our relations to one another. 

Here's a fellow who is killing himself with alcohol. He knows it, he sees it happening, he cannot deny what is obvious to everyone including himself. And yet he returns again and again to the drink. 

If sin were a reasonable choice he would not choose it; if he compiled all the evidence and arrived at a coherent conclusion, he would not drink. And yet he does because he wants to. 

Here's a diabetic who will eat that stale jellyroll doughnut. He knows he shouldn't. He doesn't need it; it's not that appealing. It may cost him his toes, feet and legs. And yet he eats it.

Loved ones stand in helpless amazement as they watch this madness and yet they cannot change its course. Often the most helpful thing they can do is respect the right of one who chooses wrongly and let the consequences speak for themselves.  

This is not an alien demon that possesses us, as some people would believe. This is not an intractable instinct, like the salmon that tries to swim through the hydroelectric dam. 

This bad choice is what I do. It is what I make myself, unjust. 

But the evil goes far beyond the individual. There is a collective dimension as we realize we have been consistently making this bad choice -- racism, for instance -- for generations. It's a tradition built into our language, laws, architecture, and city streets. 

Salvation cannot come from outside the human heart. We cannot be lifted out of this world into paradise because, "Wherever you go, there you are!" The problem, as the story of Noah and the Ark, demonstrates, is the evil within the human heart that cannot be uprooted with any kind of threat, promise or punishment. Not even the threat of cosmic catastrophe can force the human will; God has created us in his own image and likeness with that godlike freedom. 

To save us, Jesus must be born a human being, and he must breathe into us that penetrating spirit of obedience that transform my will to his. Becoming through Baptism, Eucharist and Confirmation his Body, I want what he wants with the same self-sacrificing passion. If there any element of self-will left in my desire; if I am not just, I can have no part with him. 

Justice is one of God's names. It must be my name as well. If that is to be, I must be obedient as Jesus and the Holy Spirit are to the Father, who humbly, sacrificially "bends down" to save mortal man.