Saturday, May 16, 2009

Social Justice is God’s Justice

Lal Varghese, MTC Farmers Branch, Dallas

The social justice of Jesus was better than what Carl Marx or any other social system offered when Jesus called those who suffer, come to me I will provide comfort you. When we are gripped by God’s love and by His calling our life is becomes different. We grow close to one another and become organs of a mystical body, ruled by a spirit of unity—one heart and one soul. The necessity for force and coercion, for law and moral striving, is removed because the true spirit, which the law expressed imperfectly, comes to rule our lives. Jesus brought the new righteousness ‘goodness of heart’ which embraces all human existence. It is the justice of the future and it no longer needs to take into account the restraints and injuries that are part of our present legal relationships. This new justice is unconquerable because it is God’s goodness. It can be neither weakened nor changed, for it manifests a life energy that wants to unfold in every area of life. This justice is goodness, because God is good. His goodness is love. His justice reveals all the powers of love. Any attempt to reach this goodness on the basis of legal rules or regulations will end in failure.

 Jesus brings a totally different righteousness because he brings God himself, who encompasses everything and tolerates nothing being isolated. He brings God’s radiating light and flooding warmth; the living God, who wants nothing but life; the God of riches, whose being consists in giving. Those who lose themselves in God have the new justice. Where God himself lives and works, this justice of the warmly pulsing heart replaces the stony tablets of the law. There is so much pain on the earth around us. If we are filled with God's love, we will experience this pain ourselves; we will feel the need of children, the elderly, the mentally challenged and disturbed, the unwanted, and the starving.  We cannot ignore those around us for whom social justice is denied by the world of today. On one side wealth is accumulating, and the surplus of everything and on the other side people is living in poor conditions without even the means to afford one meal a day.

When we see the world's churches as they are today, where money has so much power and there is so little compassion for the poor, we should feel challenged to reach out more. We know that the first believers in the church at Rome fed their own poor and the poor of the whole city. They lived in the love of Jesus, and that is what we are missing now. The world around us demands that we need to return to this first love. In Matthew 25 Jesus speaks of those who are hungry, thirsty, naked, and in prison, and the need to provide to them, and speaks about the reward to such people. So we must be concerned about the hungry, thirsty, naked and those being isolated themselves from the society for several reasons. We need to share our resources and talents with these brothers and sisters. To be complacent in the face of injustice is a terrible sin. Many people are making sacrifices for righteousness, and some have even sacrificed their lives. But the fight for social justice itself will not bring the kingdom of God, and we must not lose sight of this, in spite of our respect for those who sacrifice everything for it. Something much greater must come into being, something we ourselves cannot make: the powerful atmosphere of the spirit of Jesus, which must penetrate into the world.

As injustice continues to increase, let us hold on to our hope in the kingdom of God and seek to live according to it, so that we can show the world a new righteousness that embraces the principle of show love even to the enemy. This is the answer to the great need of our time in the world at large especially on the political and racial scene we see around us. We need to thrive for the best from us and need to deliver the best for others. We are all responsible for the social injustice, the human degradation, the wrongs people inflict on each other, both public and private. Each one of us bears guilt toward all humankind because we are deaf and blind to their degradation and humiliation. Remember the calling of Jesus in Mathew ______ that those who suffer come to me I will provide to you. That is the calling we need to make to our brothers and sisters who are suffering around us, so that we can continue that social justice Jesus Christ began during His worldly ministry.

Simple, apostolic mission to do justice to others does not require large sanctuaries or halls and long pulpit preaching. It is much simpler than that just open your heart to do justice to others who are being ignored by the world around them. It means finding the living thread from one person to another, from house to house, from one town to the next. It means discovering the footsteps of Jesus Christ to see which way He went, so that we can go to the very place where He has been. Jesus didn’t make the Pharisees or other people in authority in position as His disciples, but He went and gathered those who were in the lowest strata of the society to be with Him and to do His justice in the world. He entrusted the twelve disciples to continue to spread the Good News, the Gospel so that social justice will be served to those marginalized people.

So the main purpose of any mission is to make all the world aware of who God is and what His will is, of His power to bring about perfect love through Jesus Christ, and that this love can be put into practice here and now in a community life. And that today, unity can be lived out in complete social justice, and brotherliness. Our mission should include the whole world, and that includes those in high places as well as the masses of underprivileged, know that something that had almost been forgotten or neglected by our churches is after all a reality and still possible through the love of Jesus Christ. Let us also take this as a challenge in our individual life that we should feed at least a few those who cannot afford to feed themselves so that when we stand before Lord in the final day, He will reward us with eternal life since we fed the hungry, the thirsty, and clothed the naked. So let us do our part to do justice to others so that it can be God’s justice to those underprivileged.

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