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Jesus Justice: So Easy a Five-Year-Old Can Do It
By Jeremy | May 28, 2007
Part 5 of 5
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[This is reprinted from the May-June issue of the Journal of Student Ministries.]Jesus loves justice so much that he built it into his response to the most fundamental of evangelical questions: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?†The question sounds innocent enough, but its questioner, a lawyer, was attempting to test Jesus. Jesus deftly turns the tables. “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?†he asked. The man replied simply: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’†“You have answered correctly,†Jesus said. “Do this and you will live†(Luke 10:25-28). Do this, and you will live. Coming from Jesus, those six little words burst with meaning. The unending life he offers brings joy and peace and abundance, and its citizenship rests in his Kingdom. If that’s the life to which we aspire, we must first understand “this†thing he requires of us. Curiously, “this†is not the salvation formulation we evangelicals describe. There’s nothing in the lawyer’s response about repeating a prayer or responding to an altar call or attending a 12-week discipleship class. Instead this life he promises grows in proportion to obedience to threeâ€â€not twoâ€â€commands. It begins by loving God, and receiving the grace his love offers. It continues by loving your neighbor. And it’s sustained, perhaps most difficult of all, by loving ourselves enough to receive God’s justice in our own lives. This third command is easy to overlook. Still, it’s there as the standard by which the other two are measured. It’s there when Jesus explains how we love God: with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind. If we resent who we areâ€â€if we think we’re not smart enough or we’re too weak or too unattractive or too emotionalâ€â€then we’re withholding our love for him. He wants us in our entirety, withholding nothing. It’s also there when Jesus says love your neighbor “as yourself.†Kingdom love for neighbor requires first appreciating and respecting who the King made us to be. Apostle Paul calls this offering ourselves as, “a living sacrifice…our reasonable act of worship†(Romans 12:1-3). Everything else, including the capacity to view our neighbors through the prism of heaven, flows from that. The lawyer understood the self-love part of the equation. Brimming with self-confidence, he was, after all, attempting to trap the incarnated Word in a battle of words. But “wanting to justify himself,†he comes back for more and asks the critical question: “Who is my neighbor?†Jesus responds with a parable about a man on a journey, as so many of his stories are. On an isolated stretch of road, thieves rob him, beat him, and leave him for dead, battered and bloodied in a ditch. In time, the local priest (or, in our context, the pastor) passes by on his way to the synagogue (a.k.a., the church). Too hurried to stop, he crosses the street and pretends not to notice. Then a Levite (the worship leader) also approaches, perhaps on the way to the same church. He follows the pastor’s lead and similarly ignores the man. Then a Samaritan rounds the corner. Unlike the pastor and worship leader, he doesn’t pretend not to see. Kingdom compassion compels him to right wrongs wherever he finds them, so he rolls up his sleeves and prepares to get dirty. In the process, this righteous Samaritan extended justice where a self-righteous pastor would not. Why did Jesus make the “neighbor†in his story a Samaritan? Why not the priest or the Levite? Why not a Jewish layman? The Jews to whom he was preaching, even Jesus’ own disciples, reviled Samaritans. Most infamously, in Luke 9â€â€the chapter before this parableâ€â€Jesus rebuked James and John (the disciple whom “he lovedâ€Â) for praying that fire would consume a Samaritan village. Samaritans were hated because they descended from Assyrian soldiers who centuries earlier had conquered Israel and marched all the able-bodied survivors across the desert as slaves. The infirmed and vulnerable who were left behindâ€â€women, children, and the elderlyâ€â€were pillaged and raped. When exiled Jews returned years later, they found children fathered by the Assyrian conquistadors. These they called Samaritans, and their presence in Israel reminded Jews of slavery, colonialism, and injustice. Yet this Samaritan’s love mirrors God’s Kingdom love. “Go and do likewise,†Jesus tells the lawyer. Learn to love like this Samaritan loved. Then you’ll truly live. How the Samaritan demonstrated love is much the same way my son prays for Lonnie. The Samaritan understood that Kingdom love moves beyond compassion to justice. Compassion compelled the Samaritan to respond to the bloody mass of human flesh beside the road. But justice kept him there. Kingdom justice required him to get dirty, and restoring Shalom meant overcoming the absence of adequate remedies for the battered man’s need. There was no 911 operator to call or even the technology to reach out for help. There were no EMTs to provide urgent care and high-speed transports to a hospital. There wasn’t an appropriate health-care facility nearby, and no insurance or Medicaid to finance treatment. Yet Shalom came to the man because the Samaritan was willing not only to sit with him in the ditch, give him water, and bandage his wounds (a compassionate response), but also to transport him to an inn, personally nurse him overnight, and prepay his medical expenses. Compassion, as commonly practiced in evangelical ministries today, would have served the man but stopped short of healing him. Instead, Jesus justice righted the wrongs that left him in the ditch. Jesus justice healed him, reconciled him, and restored him to wholeness. ________ Jesus righted the wrongs in our livesâ€â€restored us to justiceâ€â€by laying down his life so that we might truly live. Five-year olds understand that. The Samaritan, marginalized though he was, embodied it. Will you?
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