Justice is a bad idea.
I don’t say justice is a bad idea in order to suggest that God does not want us to do what he has asked us to do, in this case, spread justice. But justice is a bad idea because we, Christians, fail to properly talk about justice and so fail to do justice. Christians want Jesus to be the center of everything, and he should be the center in our pursuit of justice. But we unfortunately have gone off track.
First, we begin to talk about justice in philosophical terms rather than theological ones. We are attached to the idea of suum cuique (i.e., render each what is due). We make justice an “eye for an eye” culture. Murders should be murdered. The wrong wronged. The evil evil-ed. Terrorists terrorized. Sex offenders offended. This is not the New Testament way of doing justice at all.
Second, along with our attachment to suum cuique, the way we, Christians, often talk about and do justice in no way distinguishes us from secular pursuits of justice. We start with Jesus (i.e., “Jesus was about justice and so should we!”), but then all we really want is to be invited to the table with the secular “big boys” of justice. We want the United Way to think we have the chops to stick around. But, in this way, Jesus is not the center but only a motivator for doing justice. So we ultimately misuse Scripture and divorce justice from the work of the Church:
…advocates of social justice read Scripture for values and principles they think crucial to motivate Christians, in [Dan] Bell’s words, ‘to get off their pews, leave the stained glass bliss of the congregation and its liturgy behind, and go out into the world to do justice.’ Such an approach…presents justice as an external standard to which Christianity is accountable. Indeed it is assumed, and therefore it is also assumed that justice can be understood apart from Christian theological conditions and practices” (Hauerwas, War and the American Difference, p. 101).
Hauerwas continues:
…if such a view of justice displaces the church, it also results in a subtle displacement of Jesus. Jesus is relegated to being a motivator to encourage Christians to get involved in struggles for justice. Even if Jesus is thought to have practiced justice in his ministry, he is appealed to as a symbol or example. For what really matters is not Jesus, but justice (Hauerwas, p. 102).
Jesus simply becomes the guy who makes us feel good about what we are doing. He isn’t the center at all! What’s the Church have to do with it? Nothing. Thus, instead of seeing Jesus as a motivator to do justice, we should see Jesus as the justice of God,
Jesus is the justice of God…precisely because in Christ God refuses to render unto humanity what is due sin, bearing offense without exacting compensation, instead continuing to extend the offer of communion. Jesus as the justice of God plays havoc with justice understood simply as suum cuique (Dan Bell, “Justice and Liberation,” The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics p. 189).
Thus, justice is a bad idea. In our ordinary ways of speaking about God’s justice, we are doing secular justice. We buy into justice as “an eye for an eye.” In reality, if we keep Jesus at the center of our pursuits, we don’t end up with suum cuique. We end up with mercy. God’s justice is Jesus, and Jesus is merciful and forgiving. Therefore, when we, Christians, are talking about justice, we are really talking about mercy. But more on this in Part II.