What is Justice?

The Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37):

On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?” He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind;' and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.” But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’ “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

To ask, “Who is my neighbor,” is to doubly ask, “What is justice.”  Justice, according to John Perkins, is responsibility. But what is responsibility other than the ability to engage in a response? Justice, I argue, is responsiveness, and I simultaneously regard injustice as unresponsiveness.

          
If justice is the responsibility that each person has for all other persons, then injustice occurs wherever a person refuses to respond to another, whether that other's condition be that of pain or pleasure, joy or sorrow, laughter or tears. To be responsible, and so also to be just, one must respond with celebration in the presence of the happy, one must respond with mourning in the presence of the sad, one must respond with aid to the needy, one must respond with company to the lonely, food to the hungry, a song to the victorious, and encouragement to the defeated. Justice is to respond to others, to be a participant in the lives of others. To find injustice, one need only look for unresponsiveness on the part of one human to another. To be just, therefore, is to live as though there are other people in the world. To be unjust is to live as though there is no one else but you.

          
The parable of the Good Samaritan perfectly describes justice because, in it, Jesus reminds us that to be just is to be a neighbor, and to be a neighbor is to respond always to those we encounter on life’s roads. But, because we today live in a world of planes, trains, and automobiles, we forget that everywhere we go in life people are there also. As Arthur C. McGill reminds us in his book Suffering: A Test of Theological Method, when we travel, we isolate ourselves from the road and from the others traveling along it. We make it easy to be like the priest and the Levite in the story of the Good Samaritan. How much easier it has become to pass people by as we travel at 60 miles per hour, where once we were lucky to travel at 6 miles per hour!

Though we all praise the Good Samaritan, few of us really want to be like him. Few of us care to take responsibility for strangers, thus few of us actually care to be just. We would, for example, rather throw money at the poor and call that justice than throw ourselves at the poor. Let us not deceive ourselves; doles are not a way to respond to the poor, they are merely a clever way to ignore the poor. The dole is merely avoidance disguised as a response. Avoidance can be so easily disguised as responsibility that we often rarely can recognize the distinction between justified and unjustified actions. If we ever justify our failure to respond, we do so by claiming that we have other responsibilities that supersede any responsibility we might have to those immediately present. The priest and the Levite reasoned that they had other responsibilities that superseded any immediate responsibility they had for some ritually unclean, beaten, half dead man lying on the side of the road, for they had to remain ritually clean so as to perform their duty as priests in God’s Temple. Surely their responsibility to ensure the salvation of the entire Jewish people outweighed their immediate responsibility to this one man. But what they thought to be reasonable was actually irresponsible. They justified the unjust and feigned responsibility for that which demanded a response.

But praise God that he is just! We have a God, who rather than unjustly throw his abundant power at the world so as to avoid the world, justly threw himself into the world so as to respond to his creation’s suffering. Though the world regards it as foolishness that God would suffer in response to the world’s pain, we regard it as evidence that we have a God whose justice is unsurpassed.