I’ve been out of touch lately because work has picked up significantly, and I haven’t had enough time to process thoughts that are swirling around in my head. But – I will be back to share some bits of thought at some point in the next few days, hopefully sooner rather than later.
In the meantime, I offer to you the text of a speech that one of my favorite law professors delivered sometime in the last academic year. This professor is one of the few Christians on staff here at the law school, and it has been a real privilege to get to know him over the years. Besides being a dedicated Christian, he’s also one of the most genuinely humble men I know, as well as one of the most brilliant legal minds I’ve ever met – I’m currently writing my final paper [it’s like a thesis almost] under his supervision, and wow… everything becomes so much clearer after I sit down to discuss things with him!
Anyways – here is the text. I hope you glean from it as much as I did.
I’ve been reading two Scripture passages a lot lately: the book of Job and the parable of the talents in Matthew 25. Those passages seem to have nothing to do with each other, nothing in common save that they’re both in the Bible. Actually, I think they have a common thread. And the common thread here is one that has particular relevance to Christians in our place and time. Three words are key to that thread: fear, justice, and beauty.
Here’s the argument in a nutshell. It has four steps:
Step 1. We live very fearful lives much like the bad servant in the parable of the talents: we often live as though we’re terrified of messing up.
Step 2. The REASON we live fearful lives is that we make the same mistake Job’s friends made: we believe, wrongly, that the world is an orderly place, and that whether things turn out well or badly depends on whether WE get life right or wrong. In other words, we believe it’s a just world, and that makes us nervous.
Step 3. The key to breaking out of that cycle of fear is to change our definition of “justice.” Instead of thinking of justice as something I GET, I need to think of it as something I DO — not a system of rewards or penalties, but a way of life. And the essence of that way of life is sacrifice, service.
Step 4. So how do you live a just life? How do you live sacrificially? The only way to do it is to do what lovers do – lovers sacrifice for one another because they’re captivated, because the person for whom they sacrifice is beautiful to them. There has been one human being who really did live a perfectly just life – and the only way to emulate Him is to be captivated by Him, by what He did, by who He is.
All this sounds familiar, and of course it IS familiar – I’m using different terms than we generally use to talk about the Gospel, but it is the Gospel I’m talking about. Still, I think the different terms are important, especially for people who plan to spend our working lives in a profession that, supposedly, promotes justice.
OK. Let me say a little more about each of those four steps, and then I’ll stop and take questions.
Step 1. We live fearful lives.
Here’s an irony about fear: the less cause you have for it, the more you feel it. I don’t know if that’s true in your experience, but it’s true in mine. The most fearful times in my life have not been the times when I’ve suffered the most — on the contrary, those have been the LEAST fearful times. I tend to fear when I think I have a lot to lose. Just like the servant who buried his talent. I also tend to fear not so much the loss itself, but the disappointment that comes with it – again, just like the servant who buried his talent, who feared how his “hard” Master would react if he lost the buried talent. I fear failure. I fear letting down people who are counting on me. I fear not living up to expectations – my boss’s, my colleagues’, my students’, my own, my God’s.
Maybe I’m unusual. But my sense is, a large fraction of the Christian students I’ve known in the law schools where I’ve taught have felt those same things. We are, you and I, among the most favored human beings in this world’s history: we have an amazing array of opportunities set before us, a long list of prosperous, useful, interesting professional lives we might live. We’re generally blessed with health and most of us will be blessed with very long lives, at least by the standards that prevail elsewhere in the world. And yet, we seem to live constantly looking over our shoulders, dreading the bad things that might happen to us. Fearing those bad things turns out to be a good deal worse than experiencing them. The consequence is, while we fail and suffer much less than our forebears, failure and suffering seem to bother us much more, shape our lives more powerfully. Why?
Step 2. I think the answer is that we believe instinctively in a just world C but it’s the wrong kind of justice.
Think about the bad servant again. Why did he bury the talent? Scripture says, because he was lazy, and I’m sure that’s true. But the text suggests another answer as well: he was afraid things would work out badly, afraid he’d mess up. What did Job’s friends say when Job was afflicted? They said: You messed up. You brought this on yourself; you obviously have displeased God, and God is responding.
What is the common thread in those two reactions? Both Job’s friends and the servant believed the world is an orderly place – a place where things work the way they’re supposed to. When you do right, you do well; when you do wrong; you do badly. If you think that way about life, fear is perfectly natural, for two reasons. First, I KNOW I’m going to mess up – it’s a mortal lock. And second, in a world like the one Job’s friends described, I am never spared the consequences of my sins and mistakes. It’s a deadly combination. Believe those things, and life becomes unbearably heavy.
I don’t know whether life feels heavy to you. But I do know that a great many people at Harvard are living unbearably heavy lives. They are convinced that they are one step away from disappointing their parents, their spouses, their colleagues, and themselves. They are terrified of failing, even though they hardly ever fail at anything – and are quick to cover up even the most trivial of missteps. It’s a sad way to live. And, while I’m less confident about this next point, I think I’ve seen the same symptoms among Christians here. It often seems to me that Christian students at Harvard carry around all the same burdens and fears that your non-Christian colleagues carry – plus the fear of disappointing God. It’s not a good way to live.
But here’s where the good news of Job comes in. Most people don’t think of Job as a “good news” book – but I think it is. Job’s friends are wrong. Life ISN’T orderly; things DON’T work as they should. It’s a fallen, upside-down world that is groaning with the pain of the new birth. People do terrible things yet don’t suffer for them. Other people suffer for what seem utterly arbitrary reasons — as arbitrary as Satan’s decision to afflict Job.
That sounds like terrible news, but it isn’t. On the contrary: it’s the best news imaginable. Why? If all suffering were deserved, if pains and penalties were distributed as they ought to be, if all our actions carried the consequences those actions merit — if those things were true, life would be terrifying. Whenever you mess up, you could be certain that bad consequences would follow. Given that each of us knows just how consistently we mess up, that would not be a pleasant life.
But if awful things might happen either way — if suffering is often distributed in ways that seem arbitrary from this world’s perspective — you don’t need to be so scared. You can take chances: bad stuff is going to happen anyway.
As most of you know, my back hurts, and it hurts a lot, and it hurts all the time. Before my back turned South several years ago — I think my back went South when the rest of me moved North: a funny little irony — before my back began giving me trouble, I would have guessed that, if anything like this ever happened to me, the one thing I’d want more than anything else was a REASON, an explanation. Some story of cause and effect — this is happening because THAT happened; here’s the causal chain. Turns out, that’s the LAST thing I want. If there is a clear reason for my pain, if there is someone to blame for it, then one of two things is true: either it’s MY fault, or it’s someone else’s. You’d have to say, the odds are on the first possibility, but they’re both equally awful. I can live with the pain, but living with the omnipresent thought that I did this to myself, that it could all have been avoided if only I hadn’t changed that tire or loaded that moving truck, or if only I had been more observant in my devotional times or if only I had loved my students or my family better — that’s unbearable. It might be even worse to go through every day living with the thought that some doctor or the driver of some car that ran into mine did this to me. I almost can’t bear to utter the words; those thoughts are so hideously awful to me.
I don’t think I’m that unusual. So it seems to me a great mercy that God leaves the reasons for my pain a mystery to me. In this setting, ignorance is bliss. Arbitrariness is mercy.
And of course He gives me far more than ignorance and arbitrariness. God doesn’t relieve most of our pains in this life, but He does something infinitely better — and vastly more surprising. He gets down in the trenches and BEARS those pains with us. In the face of the worst disappointments and heartaches and betrayals, he says: I felt this too. I know how bad it feels. And I’ll give you the resources you need to keep going — and to do much more than keep going. As we are knocked down by this arbitrary world, we are regularly, astonishingly, lifted up by the One who made that world. And He takes those pains and disappointments and heartaches and uses them to do unimaginably good things: as Joseph’s slavery and imprisonment were used to save millions from starvation. Bad things still happen, and they’re still bad things — but redemption happens too, and it’s better than words can describe.
We fear so much the bad things that might happen, and we try so hard to avoid them, and by doing so, we are often only denying ourselves access to the grace that comes our way when we turn to our God and say: I need your help. It’s so wrong — so backward, so upside-down — to fear that moment. I can’t say I welcome my own pain; I don’t — I’d be thrilled to be rid of it. But I couldn’t bear the thought of being rid of the grace that comes with it. Fear gets in the way of that grace. Better to be rid of the fear.
Step 3. So how do you GET rid of the fear?
I think, more and more, the key lies in a different definition of justice. As long as I think of justice as something I RECEIVE, my life will be dominated by fear — since I know better than anyone precisely what sort of justice I DESERVE to receive.
Not long ago, I listened to a sermon tape by Tim Keller, a pastor in New York whom many of you have probably heard. He said something very interesting on this subject: He said that, Biblically speaking, justice isn’t something I GET. Justice is something I DO. It’s an active concept — not a system of rewards and punishments, but a way of living. The essence of that lifestyle is what it produces: shalom — the Biblical word for wellness, peace, a state in which we flourish and thrive as we were made to. To live justly is to bring a measure of shalom to those around you.
There are two crucial steps, Keller says, to living that sort of life. The first is a change in orientation: away from me, myself, and I — the holy trinity in most of our minds, most of the time — and toward those around me. To live justly is to SERVE, to CONTRIBUTE to the world around you. The second step, he says, is that just living is always sacrificial. We live in a world in which clients with money buy lawyers to help them find a way out of their problems. But in the divine litigation to which each of us is a party, it’s the LAWYER — the one whom the Bible calls “Counsellor” and “Advocate” — who buys the CLIENT: you and me. As He laid His life down for mine, so I am called to lay mine down for you, and you’re called to lay yours down for each other, and so on down the line.
There is a deep magic in that sacrificial dance. Somehow, through some mechanism that is far beyond my understanding, the sacrifices disappear; they aren’t sacrifices at all. Invariably, on those rare occasions when I DO lay down my life for someone else, I end up very much the richer for the transaction. Whenever we lose our lives, we gain them. By trying so hard NOT to lose them — by acting as did the servant in the parable — we only heighten the loss. The only sure way to avoid losing what you have is to stop fearing that you will.
It’s terribly important to emphasize something here: Living a life of service DOESN’T mean identifying the one job that is most useful to God’s Kingdom, getting that job, and doing it. You and I can’t make those judgments; we don’t have the necessary information. He does, and He has the power to take us to the places where we belong. Rather, living a just life, a life that brings shalom to others, means simply this: Wherever you are, whatever it is you do, look around you and ask: How can I love these people around me — my colleagues, my clients, my boss, my secretary, my students — a little better? What can I contribute to THEM? How can I make this community — because all of us will spend the bulk of our lives working in COMMUNITIES — just a little healthier? You can do that as much in a law firm as in a legal aid bureau. Do jobs that your heart draws you to, and then GIVE your heart to the people you work with, and for, and over, and under. Serve THEM — and you’ll be bringing a measure of justice to a profession that uses that word constantly, but often seems not to know what it means.
Step 4. Well, THAT doesn’t sound like much help. Who can manage to live a life of service in the midst of heartache and suffering? Actually, you can, and I can. Anyone can. How? How does that work? How do you “walk justly” through life’s path; how do you live a life of service in the midst of your own disappointments? How do you come to see justice not as something you should GET but as something you need to DO?
The truth is, human beings regularly do that, in ordinary life, at least sometimes: we DO live and love sacrificially. We do it for lovers, for our children, for the ones who are beautiful to us. Justice is service, and it flows from love. Love, in turn, is action that flows from a captivated heart. Hearts are captivated by beauty. And the most beautiful thing — it’s a terrible beauty, but it is utterly captivating — the most beautiful thing in this world is a God who says to you: I know the worst you’ve felt. I’ve felt it too. I’ll feel it right beside you. And we will, you and I (He says), take these pains and disappointments and make something grand and glorious with them. They will still hurt, just as the nails and the spear and the betrayal still hurt Me. But they will also be part of the grand symphony, grace notes in the love song that has no end.
That, my friends, is captivating. Choose to be captivated by it. Look at it, and see its beauty, and be moved to tears by it, and you may find yourself looking around for ways to bring a small slice of that beauty to your neighbors and friends and family members. That’s what living justly looks like. Do that, do it often enough, and I think you’ll find that your fears seem much smaller than they once did.
Life often seems arbitrary. There are no guarantees, save that “in this world, you will have trouble” even if you do everything right — which you won’t. That sounds like a hard truth. Actually, it’s the gentlest truth there is. You and I need not feel the weight of the responsibility for making it all turn out right. You can’t. I can’t. But it will.
