The Example of the Prophets
For Father Richard Rohr, the work of justice is rooted in the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures. He says:
Christianity has given little energy to prophecy, which Paul identifies as the second most important charism for building the church (1 Corinthians 12:28; Ephesians 4:11). Too often, when Christians talk about prophecy, we think prophets make predictions about the future. In fact, prophets say exactly the opposite! They insist the future is highly contingent on the now. They always announce to the people of Israel that they have to make a decision now. You can go this way and the outcome of events will undo you or you can return to God, to love, and to the covenant. That’s not predicting the future as much as it’s naming the now, the way reality works. The prophet opens up human freedom by daring to tell the people of Israel that they can change history by changing themselves. That’s extraordinary, and it’s just as true for us today.
The prophets ultimately reveal a God who is “the God of the Sufferers” in the words of Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965). [1] I’d like to put it this way: it is not that we go out preaching hard and difficult messages, and then people mistreat and marginalize us for being such prophets (although that might happen). Rather, when we go to the stories of the prophets and of Jesus himself, we discover the biblical pattern is just the opposite! When we find ourselves wounded and marginalized, and we allow that suffering to teach us, we can become prophets. When we repeatedly experience the faithfulness, the mercy, and the forgiveness of God, then our prophetic voice emerges. That’s the training school. That’s where we learn how to speak the truth.
The prophets were always these wonderful people who went to wounded places. They went to where the suffering was, to the people who were excluded from the system. They saw through the idolatries at the center of the system because those who are excluded from the system always reveal the operating beliefs of that system. Speaking the truth for the sake of healing and wholeness is then prophetic because the “powers that be” that benefit from the system cannot tolerate certain revelations. They cannot tolerate the truths that the marginalized—the broken, the wounded, and the homeless—always reveal.
Are we willing to take the risk and become prophets ourselves? It’s not that we get to preach or speak hard words and then feel justified and righteous when we are excluded. It’s that we experience some level of exclusion or heartbreak, and then we have the inner authority to preach what may sound like hard words. Sadly, they will sound like very harsh and even unfair words to people who have never been on the edge, or the bottom, or who have never suffered. The prophets always bring the sufferers to the center.
God’s Loving Justice
Richard Rohr writes that justice is an essential part of God’s nature. It does not manifest as vengeance or “getting even” but as a method of restoration and healing:
God’s justice begins to be revealed in the Torah. If you are God, you don’t have any criteria outside yourself that you can conform to and make yourself just. God is simply faithful to who God is. God can only be true to God’s own criteria. For God to be just, therefore, is for God to be faithful to God’s own character and words. This is very different from any vengeful and retaliatory understanding of justice, which is the later juridical understanding.
God’s power for justice is precisely God’s power to restore people when they are broken or hurt. God uses their mistakes to liberate them, to soften them, to enlighten them, to transform them, and to heal them. No text in the Hebrew Scriptures equates God’s justice with vengeance on the sinner. It might look like that on the surface, but if we read the whole passage and understand the context, chastisement is always meant to bring us back to love and union. God’s justice is always saving justice, always healing justice. What is experienced as punishment is always for the sake of restoration, not for vengeance. Therefore, justice for the people is to participate in this wholeness and spaciousness of God, to be brought into God’s freedom.
Richard describes the freedom of contemplatives who have discovered the “prophetic position”:
True contemplatives have changed sides from inside—from the power position to the position of vulnerability and solidarity, which gradually changes everything. Once we are freed from our paranoia, from the narcissism that thinks we are the center of the world, or from our belief that our rights and dignity have to be defended before those of others, we can finally live and act with justice and truth. Once these blockages are removed—and that is what contemplative prayer does—then we just have to offer a few guiding statements of social analysis to name what is really going on beneath the surface of a system, and people get it for themselves. They start being drawn by God and by love instead of being driven by anger and retaliation.
True contemplation is the most subversive of activities because it undercuts the one thing that normally refuses to give way—our natural individualism and narcissism. We all move toward the ego. We even solidify the ego as we get older if something doesn’t expose it for the lie that it is—not because it is bad, but because it thinks it is the whole and only thing! We don’t really change by ourselves; God changes us, if we expose ourselves to God at a deep level. This is why Christian meditation will never fill stadiums; not so many people want their narcissism and separateness to be exposed as the silliness that they are.
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