Justice is one of those tricky words to nail down. You think you know exactly what it means until you’re asked to give a definition for it. Our generation’s confusion over whether or not there is absolute truth or morality further complicates this.
Rather than attempt to address that struggle, I’ll simply borrow a definition from several online dictionaries for this post. Justice is, “Conformity to moral rightness in action or attitude; righteousness.”
As a Christian, I find it very significant that God chooses to identify Himself as a God of Justice. If you were to elevate me to a position of infinite knowledge and power, I would still lack the attribute of Justice because, as life has proven to me, I would be completely unable to hold a morally consistent standard for myself. In fact, the power and knowledge would probably just enable me to be increasingly morally inconsistent, again, as life experience has taught me about myself. But God is not like this.
This thought embodies much of what the Biblical call to justice is. To be, and to do right, especially when we are in positions of power, wealth, or influence. And the UNC students that we work with are certainly in positions of influence, power, and wealth in proportion to most of the world. If you’re reading this on a computer you own, then you probably are too.
So how do we as a community seek to live out this Biblical call to justice?
First, we seek to be aware of the ways that we individually need to repent and seek after justice in our own lives. For UNC IV this has looked like, hearing talks about racism that exists systemically in our country, as well as personally in our lives. A big eye-opener to me has been learning about white privilege, and all the ways that I have blindly not valued or respected other ethnicities around me – shout out to my friend Joe Scott for helping me to see this in my own life. As a community we’re still learning how to respond to this truth, but we’re grateful to have taken the first step to actually begin dialoguing and learning about it.
Second, we as a community are seeking to care for the poor, the powerless, and the underprivileged around us. This has happened in a variety of ways: students in small groups volunteering at one of the homeless shelters in Chapel Hill, one of our students choosing to move to an impoverished neighborhood in Richmond and teach and tutor there post college (see http://www.chatrichmond.org/ if you’re curious about it), through canned food drives to provide food for the poor around Chapel Hill and through participating in human trafficking walks to raise awareness for trafficking in the U.S. and around the world.
We’ve still got along way to go in figuring this “justice” thing out. But most of all we’re grateful that God, in all of His power and perfection, has cared for us in our spiritual and moral poverty.
“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)
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