Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Dear Family,
I must apologize to “Tennessee” our service dog -in-training. I referred to ‘her’ as ‘him’ in my letter two weeks ago. As befitting her great disposition, she never said a word. Don’t forget, we’re having a party when we can all pet her once the training is over. Until then, whenever she has her training vest on, we resist petting her.
As usual, I’m writing this Twitch about five days before you read it. As I looked at today’s Scriptures, the refrain for our Psalm response caught my eye. “One who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord.”
My mind immediately flipped back to that wonderful passage from Micah 6:8. “You have been told, O mortal, what is good, and what the LORD requires of you: Only to do justice and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God.”
In The Catholic Study Bible, there is a note on that passage:
“To do justice refers to human behavior in relationship to others. To love goodness refers to the kind of love and concern which is at the heart of the covenant between the Lord and Israel; it is persistently faithful. To walk humbly with your God means to listen carefully to the revealed will of God.”
Doing Justice! I want to recommend an article by Rev. Tim Keller entitled, What is Biblical Justice? You can find it online simply by typing in the title. I’m quoting some highlights from that article here, and you probably are going to hear this in some form today in the homily. For me it’s still last Tuesday, so we’ll see. Anyway…
The Hebrew word for justice is misphat and it occurs over 200 times in the Hebrew Scriptures. It means justice, not simply for punishing the criminal but for the rights of people.
From a biblical perspective there were four categories of people that were traditionally the objects of justice. Keller says, “if you look at every place the word is used in the Old Testament, several classes of persons continually come up. Over and over again, mishpat describes taking up the care and cause of 1) widows, 2) orphans, 3) immigrants and 4) the poor—those who have been called ‘the quartet of the vulnerable.’”
Keller continues, “The mishpat, or justness, of a society, according to the Bible, is evaluated by how it treats these groups. Any neglect shown to the needs of the members of this quartet is not called merely a lack of mercy or charity but a violation of justice, of mishpat. God loves and defends those with the least economic and social power, and so should we. That is what it means to “do justice.”
How appropriate are those categories in our own time? You might not have widows and orphans immediately jumping on your radar screens, until you see Keller’s examples. I don’t think we’d have much problem seeing the challenges to immigrants and the poor. If having to put up with some of the rhetoric of the current political verbiage about immigration means we might get to a more enlightened state, then I say ‘Babble on.”
The icing on today’s cake comes from our second scripture, James, Chapter 1: “Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.”
And James adds: Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” How about that!
Justice creeps into the New Testament!
In Jesus,
