Empty Justice

Written By Jonathan Krogh

Dear Fellow Dreamers:

Yesterday I was honored to provide the keynote address for the La Grange Ministerium's annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Prayer Breakfast. My remarks were double the length of an average sermon, so I will not print them in their entirety. I offer this summary. 

In my remarks I mused on how, not long ago, we believed we were nearing a post-racial America. We had an African American president; women were finally busting through the glass ceiling, making almost as much as their male counterparts. We had gay friends who could finally legally marry, and we were ushering in a new world that welcomed gender fluidity. All we had to do was show up, deposit our tax dollars and campaign contributions, speak our truths, and the great pearl of human social advancement would be ours. Yet all that hope seemed to evaporate in 10 short years. Here we are.

We could blame the hucksters, the wheelers and dealers on both sides of the aisle who simply lied to us; but we shouldn’t be surprised there were bad-faith actors ready to sell us short. There are always bad-faith actors. It’s their stage, their script, their production company; so when they lie to us, we should not be surprised that these salesmen were more concerned about their commission than our future.

For my Scripture lesson, I considered the first 15 verses of John chapter 8. It is the story of the woman caught in adultery, brought before Jesus by the scribes and the Pharisees to “test [Jesus], so that they might have some charge to bring against him” (verse 6). While the scribes and the Pharisees focused on the Law and the humiliated woman, Jesus looked down at the ground, stooping down in fact, averting his gaze to preserve the woman’s dignity. 

Here we learn Jesus’ message was not about justice; it was about compassion. While adultery was a sin, it was also a sin to parade a woman’s nakedness, her vulnerability, her shame through the streets. Jesus responded by looking down, affording the woman some self-respect on what was likely the worst day of her life. Jesus knew she had a name; she was somebody’s daughter, somebody’s wife, likely somebody’s sister, maybe even somebody’s mother—but in that moment she was nothing more than a humiliated pawn being abused by those who wanted the upper hand in power. As happened repeatedly, Jesus was moved with compassion.

“You judge according to the flesh; I don’t judge nobody,” said Jesus (verse 15). (The Greek permits the double negative as an intensifier.) In my remarks I reflected on my tendency to quickly judge others according to my fleshly interpretation of the law. You can be certain, had I been there, I would not have thrown a rock at the woman caught in adultery; but I can guarantee you I would have been gathering stone after stone to fling at anyone who thought to use the “N” word.

I mused how justice that does not arise from compassion is a fool’s shortcut. If I am to have the mind of Christ, I need to lose my fleshly categories of legalism and uncompassionate attitudes towards justice. What welled up in Jesus was not righteous indignation that called for better legislation, better courts, better laws. Jesus responded with simple, direct compassion, averting his gaze out of respect—seeing the woman for who she was, a human being humiliated by an angry mob of power brokers.

Now our government is rounding up immigrants, seemingly without constraint. How did it come to this? I suggested it is because we had allowed masses of people to exist bereft of human compassion. Packed together in tiny apartments, working for sub-minimum wages, doing jobs no self-respecting citizen would take. There we averted our gaze when our system was abusing them; we pretended it wasn’t so bad because we benefited from their degradation. And now that they are being paraded through the streets, rounded up like cattle, we express our outrage, but still only learn the names of the white, upper-middle-class protesters. The calculated cruelty of the current administration isn’t sudden; it has been growing for years in the fertile fields of indifference among good white liberal folk, like me.

What is happening now is not because we’ve lost the concept of justice. It is because justice has become only a concept. We’ve treated it as an abstraction, a checklist of constrained privilege and dainty discernment. We lost the heart of compassion that led Jesus to avert his gaze to preserve a woman’s dignity. 

We believed we could change the world without going into it,
we could feed the hungry without missing a meal, 
we could bring healing without touching the sick,
we could shelter the homeless without making room,
we could clothe the naked and still wear designer labels,
we could educate the illiterate without taking time to tutor, 
we could eliminate poverty without losing our privilege,
we could preserve human dignity without the messy work of learning people’s names.

And so, here we are, because we didn’t want to pay the price of justice rooted in compassionate hearts. Now we are living with the violent reality of the uncompassionate. My critique is not a condemnation of powerful nincompoops; the critique is of myself. 

Going forward, I hope to live into the compassionate non-judgmentalism of Jesus, who said, “You judge according to the flesh—I don’t judge nobody,” and there remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh,
Your Pastor

Jonathan Krogh
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