Yearning for Justice
(Free Version) Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost- Jeremiah 31:27-34; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8
Find this week’s readings here. This week, in our “Deep Dive,” we explore the human longing for justice and how it shows itself in our lives. We look at the role of scripture and tradition in the community of faith. We also explain the struggle that widows faced in the first century, the role of judges (and the community in general) in advocating for them. We include an illustration from television and quotes from a variety of scholars and commentators.
What are we to do with our longing for justice? Like the people of Israel, Paul’s instructions to Timothy, and the persistent widow, we are to lean into it. We can’t ignore it. We can’t dismiss it. Being with Jesus will not let us do that.
Justification in our own hearts, injustice perpetrated against us, and justice for the world require a complete dependence on God’s great love. We trust that God wants justice more than we do, that he has created us to want that.
In our Old Testament reading (Jeremiah 31:27-34) God’s people, having walked through the cycles of grief: Denial, when their leaders told them that God would deliver them quickly from exile; Anger, when they lament to God for all that they have lost; Depression, when they are unable to sing their own songs in a foreign land; Bargaining, when they wonder what they could have done or what they could do now to return home; and finally acceptance, when God tells them through the prophet to build houses, settle down, and seek the peace of the city to which they have been carried into exile; now begin to see that their pain is not the end of the story. They begin to find meaning and hope. The period of uprooting is over and it is time to build and to plant.
This is a reminder to us of the faithfulness of God, the one who sits with us in our pain and also the one who is making all things new: including a new covenant written on our hearts. This is a reminder that our exile and disorientation are not the end of the story.
In our New Testament reading (2 Timothy 3:14-4:5), Timothy and the Ephesian Christians are facing a different kind of chaos: false teaching and the clamoring of the crowds who only want to hear things which excite or soothe them. In this, Paul reminds Timothy to “continue in” what he has learned, in the story which he has received from others by the Spirit. He is to do this in ever season and even when it involves suffering. God’s story, the scriptures and the received tradition, are to be his calibration.
In our gospel reading (Luke 18:1-8), Jesus tells the story of a persistent widow and an unjust judge. She keeps bugging him, crying out for justice until he relents. If this persistent widow kept pestering the unjust judge, the one who was bent against doing what was right…how much more should we continue to lean on, go back to, and turn our lives over to the One who wants nothing but good for us?!
He is the God who stepped in to our world and took injustice upon himself. He sits with us as we cry out and He has promised to make all things new. And as we, the church, stand with the world’s pain today, with more questions than we have answers, my prayer is that we might trust the one who is true love, who promises that the day will come when God’s people will be vindicated once and for all.