Knowing Justice

Knowing Justice

In both our Old Testament and Gospel readings lurks the questions of theodicy, from the Greek meaning literally “justifying God.” That is, justifying an almighty and an all good God, when we are faced with injustice and evil, and we see bad things happening to good people and good things happening to bad people. So, when God says to Moses, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt,” he is responding to questions that Moses has at least been asking himself.

So here’s Moses’s backstory. Moses was an Israelite, saved by Pharoah’s daughter from Pharaoh’s order that all Israelite newborn boys be killed in order to keep the Israelites from multiplying so much that they might overwhelm the Egyptians. Raised Egyptian, at some point, Moses learned of his Israelite heritage, because we are told earlier in Exodus, “he went out to his kinsmen and saw their enslavement.” And when he saw an Egyptian overseer abusing an Israelite slave, Moses killed him out of a sense of outraged justice. But then Moses learned that his fellow Israelites didn’t see necessarily the justice in it, when the next day, he intervened between two Israelites fighting each other, and one said to him, “are you going to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” So, Moses ran away to Midian, north of Egypt, settled down with his wife and his father-in-law, Jethro, and seemed content to be a shepherd.

But it seems that Moses continued to seethe with a sense of outraged justice, yet feeling helpless to do anything about it, and no doubt spent those years questioning the God who has finally appeared to him in the burning bush. And so God answers the question that off stage, so to speak, Moses has been asking: “Have you not seen the misery of your people? Why have you done nothing about it? God answers, “I have observed the sufferings of my people.“ Not just that God happened to glance at the Israelites’ suffering and move on. God has “observed,“ taken the time to really examine what is being done to the people, God’s people, the people of Abraham, Isaac, Isaac, and Jacob. God also says, “I know my people‘s sufferings.“ That Hebrew word, ya-da, certainly carries the meaning of knowledge, but also of experience, as in the classic phrasing in the King James version. “Adam knew his wife, Eve, and she conceived.” So even thousands of years before the incarnation, God says to Moses that God has observed closely the suffering of God‘s people, and has experienced that suffering.

In our gospel, Jesus is first asked about some Galileans (Jesus's own people since he was from Galilee) who were murdered by Roman soldiers on the orders of the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, as they were bringing sacrifices into the temple to be offered to God. Presumably they were killed in the outer precincts of the temple. And yet, rather than ask about how outrageous this was of Pilate, those questioning Jesus seemed to have found a way to blame the Galileans. “Do you think these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans,” Jesus asks, knowing what they were really asking him. This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that human beings, find ways of “justifying God” by blaming others when they might be tempted to blame God.

“But unless you repent, you will perish just as they did,” Jesus says. And perhaps some of those questioning Jesus might still have been alive in Jerusalem some 35 years later as the Romans put a terrible end to the Jewish rebellion by besieging the city of Jerusalem, capturing it, razing it to the ground, and dispersing the people to distant lands. And those reading or hearing Luke's gospel for the first time would have been reading or hearing it after that tragedy. In other words, Jesus is warning those who can't quite figure out whether they're more angry at God or at those Galileans, to not misdirect their righteous anger into a hopeless rebellion that doesn't accomplish any justice, in the same way as Moses struck out in anger at one Egyptian overseer and accomplished no justice at all.

Then Jesus turns to a recent apparently random terrible accident, a falling construction tower. Was it incompetence, was it simply an act of nature? We don't know. Jesus might well have been anticipating the Roman siege works that would bring the walls of Jerusalem down on its defenders to make the same point about repenting of self-righteous futile anger.

But what God only hinted at to Moses in his “knowing” of the sufferings of God’s people, we know that God’s Son will fully experience in solidarity with his oppressed people, but not in a futile expression of anger but in a deliberate act of sacrifice that even the oppressor will know as an act of freedom and power that says I will endure the worst you can do to me in faith, hope, and love. What we endure, God has endured. His self-offering and sacrifice “for the sins of the whole world,” includes even those who crucified him then, and would do so today, though they might nor know it.

So, we who follow Jesus on his Way of the Cross, speak the truth of the oppressed to those in power, and to their supporters. But we speak that truth in love, not condemnation. We even identify with them in their own righteous anger, bearing their pain and fear, as we ask them to bear ours, person to person, mind to mind, heart to heart. That is where mutual repentance and reconciliation start. That is the way to knowing true justice, not as an ideological abstraction, but as personal experience.

3rd Sunday In Lent

The Rev. David Kendrick

March 23, 2025