Confronting
There are many forms of injustice in the world. This is nothing new. As long as people have been around, there has been injustice. Likewise, for as long as people have been around, there have been efforts to overcome such injustice.
One of the challenges is defining what injustice is. It’s difficult to define because most people look at life through a lens. Some hear the word injustice and immediately think in terms of their ideology. It’s the lens that they see things through. When that happens, an injustice is just another thing in the ongoing ideological battle – not something that actually has a negative impact on people.
Justice has to do with something that is morally right, or treated fairly. Justice often has to do with relationship – not romantic in nature, but rather societal. We can talk in terms of the justice system or a just society. In theological terms justice and righteousness are closely related. Both have to do with being in a right relationship. A simple way to think about this is that righteousness is someone having a right relationship with God. It’s more individual in nature. Justice is more communal – how a person relates to a society or community and vice versa.
The foundation of injustice is based on three core beliefs. 1. Might makes right. 2. Only the strong survive, and 3. The ends justify the means.
When you take a stand against injustice, be prepared to face attacks from those who think they benefit from the injustice. It’s been said by a wise man that there are those who confuse criticism of an unjust system as an attack on someone, when in reality the person feeling threatened has so closely aligned with injustice that it becomes a part of them. I think that was Thomas Merton, but I’m not certain and I can’t find the exact quote.
Responding attacks are predictable in this regard. And the attacks will be consistent with the core foundation. These attacks will employ violence, labeling, insult, scapegoating and more. All of this is an effort to make you adopt unjust methods, thus making the core beliefs correct. This is why responding to such attacks with anger or attack is counter productive – you are only giving ammunition to unjust methods.
Injustice sees the world through an impersonal lens. It has too. Using violence, labeling, insult, and scapegoating are all ways to dehumanize another person. That way the other person is no longer a person, but a thing to be crushed and destroyed.
The way of Christ is through seeing the image of God in others – especially one’s enemies. It’s to turn the abstract into the personal and personified. This shouldn’t be a surprise though. In the birth of Jesus, God goes from the infinite and abstract into a finite and enfleshed being. People aren’t abstract things, pawns in a never ending war. Rather people have value and worth by the very nature that they exist and are made in the image of God.
This is why grace and love are so very difficult. People like to claim that they support love and grace, but love and grace go against the foundation of injustice. Grace is getting what you don’t deserve. Love is vulnerable. Love requires seeing the image of God. Grace is an act of God – a freeing act.
The core value of injustice is about control – control of others. The core value of the way of Christ is not about control at all – it is about fulfillment of being. To move towards the fullness of who we were created to be. To be out of control, in a sense, because we recognize that we were never in control. Only is capable of control and love isn’t about controlling others, but inviting others into vulnerable relationship willingly.
The whole foundation of injustice is a rejection of God’s love and what love is really about. Injustice isn’t invitational because no one would accept it. So it has to force people into it. To control them. Control to the point that people have been conditioned to see it as normal and to see love as abnormal.
Cruelty is a means to that end. Cruelty is the point of injustice. Cruelty is about declaring someone as inhuman, worthless. Something to be controlled. All things based on injustice are predictable and have the same ultimate goal, which is unobtainable – control. Whether you call it fundamentalist thought or belief systems, partisanship, greed, toxic masculinity, racism, sexism, mysogyny, Christian nationalism, or any number of other unjust belief systems, they are the same at their core. Their end is control. And they won’t rest until they get it, which means they never rest. They never take a sabbath. They always demand compliance, and correct thinking and belief. They offer no grace or mercy. They focus on punishment. Their burden is heavy – often unbearable.
And they all end up failing. Because their goal is unnatural and in opposition to God.
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Hey, what thoughts do you have on victims?
There is such a push for victim empowerment, and I must say, to a very large degree, I support that. However, victim voices have power. They maybe powerless in some quarters and/or at some times, but in other places, they wield a LOT of power.
The victim voice can, and does in some instances, victimize others.
Also, Jesus preaches FORGIVENESS. In fact, it is a thing so vital that without giving it, you are assured you won’t get it either. Yet, preaching forgiveness to victims is both easily abused and easily insensitive. Nevertheless, the victim voice’s POWER needs to be held accountable just like any other power.
Care to navigate some of that?
Good questions. I think a lot depends on the context. Are victims’ voices being used in a partisan way? Or for advocacy? Or to tell the story? Or what? And who is using the victim’s voice?
I would say generally that if one group of people is trying to get power over another, then it is wrong. If a victim is just trying to get a level playing field, or get back to where they were before they were abused, then that is more oriented towards the concept of shalom. But if a victim is trying to victimize their oppressor, then all they are doing is reversing the role for the sake of revenge.
I think we need to be really careful with the idea of forgiveness when it comes to victims. I think as a society we are too quick to want to force the victim into forgiving when they haven’t even grasped what has happened yet. A victim, by definition, is vulnerable. Is the push to forgive quickly really about forgiveness, or is it about covering up what an oppressor did so we can move on and the oppressor doesn’t have to repent?
I think I raised more questions than I answered, but that’s how it works more often than not.
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I am sensitive about forcing the subject of forgiveness on victims. That just sounds and feels manipulative. I don’t have a manual for navigating that, but I think it is the high road. I think it is the good way. And as I read Jesus, I find it unyieldingly necessary.
But I certainly don’t come with my sermon to the aid of victims. Somewhere along the way, I will bring it up if they don’t, but not on day ONE. Not as a kneejerk reaction, and not simply to make myself feel better.
In the meantime, I will watch and listen for the victim to suggest it. When that happens, I will totally jump on board and support it.
Did you ever see on TV the story of Marietta Yeager? There are no stories of forgiveness more stark than hers, except Jesus. And hers is modern, full of surprising layers. The kidnap and murder of her daughter was the very first case the FBI actually deployed their psych profiler methods, and they nailed him to a tee on the first run. Also, Marietta’s husband died a bitter, angry man with heart disease, but Marietta became friends with the killer’s mother.
Marietta challenges me! I hold to this ideal as an ideal, but I don’t know how to forgive like she did. I have to trust her when she says, she started by deciding to do it, and then took baby steps in prayer for the bad guy who at the time she did not know. A year after the abduction, the FBI profiler predicted the kidnapper would call, and he did. And they got ready to “trace the call” like you find in the movies, but all their technological wizardry failed.
But no one had banked on what was going on inside Marietta.
She had spent the year praying for this man, and when he called, she had him on the phone for an hours sobbing in shame and sorry about what he had done. THAT is how the FBI caught him.
We – I – need that story.
Meanwhile, I am all for empowering victims in so far as it takes us to shalom. I am not in favor of empowering victims to get their vengeance. I think our society kinda leaves that door open and unattended. Any one of us MIGHT one day want to go through it and explore our anger and rage, and we don’t want to preempt it before hand.
That lady cop who accidently shot Mr. Wright last year and got convicted made a terrible mistake. I do not believe we can whitewash what she did. But then I don’t think she does either. I think from the moment she realized what she did, she was so very sorry for it. I think she is overly burdened with it.
Mr. Wright’s mother is aggressively unforgiving. That white cop killed her black son, and there is a societal rage about that.
As a category of problem, I am there too, but in this instance, that rage is misplaced.
Mr Wright’s mother has a right to be bitter if she wants, but she is destroying herself and chipping away at the larger cause with her misplaced rage.
The lady cop in Dallas who mistakenly thought she was shooting an intruder in her own apartment was way more culpable than this one, yet the victim’s family forgave her, and they made a huge impression on the public by doing it.
At last, I recall the school shooting several years ago at the little Amish school. The Amish schooled me in that one. I need those stories. I have too much of the victim rage in me too, and I need it tempered with peace.
Forgiveness is always difficult because we get wrapped up in what people deserve. Forgiveness can’t be earned. It can only be freely given with no strings attached. Forgiveness though is not the same as reconciliation.