Advent Week 1
For Advent we are going to write about the justice the birth of Jesus brings into the world, reflecting on Jesus’ justice through the themes of Advent: hope, peace, joy, and love.
One of the least discussed gifts we receive in Advent season is justice, which comes to us through the birth of Jesus. The prophet Isaiah speaks of the coming of the Messiah as the one who “will bring forth justice to the nations.” (42:1) Isaiah continues to prophecy, saying, “he will faithfully bring forth justice” (42:3) and that “he will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth.” (42:4) Of course, given how we in the United States have been trained to view justice as solely a means of punishing wrongdoers, justice seems to be an odd theme to mention when we are in the Advent season.
The four candles associated with Advent represent hope, peace, joy, and love. With justice being assigned the role of exacting societal, if not individual, vengeance, it naturally becomes challenging to associate justice with Advent. I doubt you will see a Hallmark Christmas movie this season with the theme centered on justice! But yet, the coming of Jesus the Messiah is also the time when we should be celebrating Jesus’ justice as much as we celebrate hope, peace, joy, and love, for when Jesus comes into the world he comes to establish justice for all the nations.
This week we will focus on Jesus’ justice and hope.
There is perhaps no one word that better describes Advent than hope. Hope is the anticipation of the birth of Jesus. Hope is what we feel when we realize that the entire world is changed at the arrival of a baby in a barn, far away from the centers of power and affluence. Advent carries the promise that something greater is happening in the world than we can possibly fathom. Hope is powerful and carries us through the hardest of times and the darkest of moments. It is what we cling to when we are overwhelmed with sadness and suffering.
How could justice possibly be integrated with hope?
Our answer to this question first means that we must put aside the societally assigned meaning and role of justice as solely retributive. The retributive function of justice serves to maintain the status quo; to keep the social, economic, and political order preserved. When justice is singularly retributive, the previous chasms that existed between rich and poor, powerful and marginalized, oppressed and oppressor, will be maintained and entrenched. Nothing is transformed from retributive justice.
On the other hand, Jesus’ justice is creative and inclusively abundant. Jesus’ justice works creatively to distribute God’s goodness and love; that those on the margins be brought in, that those who are without will receive all they need, and that those previously crushed will be made whole. While societal justice affirms the entrenched social order where the contributions of those on the margins are ignored, Jesus’ justice celebrates the gifts and contributions of all people, especially those on the margins since, as a baby born in such socially suspicious ways, Jesus is God’s gift to the world. Jesus is born into the margins so that we might know that God is not reserved for the elite. God is God of all people and God was made manifest most clearly through Jesus as he identified himself among the oppressed and the poor. God is God of all people.
Jesus’ justice is hopeful because it opens wide the possibility for those previously unheard to be listened to and acknowledged. Jesus’ justice is filled with possibility because it is primary distributive and retributive. Even a cursory reading of Scripture shows that Jesus repeatedly points to and lifts up those deemed unworthy or even suspect by society. And in lifting them up – from the woman at the well, to healed to lepers, to woman previously scorned, to even a Roman centurion, Jesus’ justice never maintains the status quo. Jesus’ justice is innately transformative, creating new roles and thus news worlds for those with new roles to inhabit. Jesus begins new works, he forges new relationships, he recruits new leaders for his movement, and in so doing, he constructs an entirely new social, political, and economic order. This new order bursts forth the hope of God – all things are truly possible because of Jesus’ distributive justice.
Advent is a time for us to feel the hope of new birth and it is the birth of a new order of being. Hope and justice belong together and it is the birth of Jesus that brings us both.
