You make your mortgage payments. When a neighbor does you a favor, you do one for him. You work hard in return for the wages you are paid. Your spouse loves and cares for you, and you love and care for your spouse. Then by the classical definition, you are practicing “justice.” You are giving to others what is due to them.
Though the biblical view of justice comes at it from a very different angle, that same concept of treating others as they are due figures into it. When we look at our text for this Sunday, Isaiah 58:1-8a, we see concern for what is due in the complaint about those who engage in fasting as a form of righteousness before God, but who “serve your own interest… and oppress all your workers” in verse 3. The prophecy calls for that sort of injustice, that failure to treat others as they are do, to be corrected.
In classical thinking, then, the second cardinal virtue is justice. It is the regular habit of acting toward others as they are due. So justice has two dimensions. Justice is the state of things when people behave justly toward each other, and justice is also a virtue, a character trait of a good person.
Among a number of Christians these days, aiding the poor and helping those who are oppressed or disadvantaged is sometimes called “justice.” But on the classical definition we might suppose that such activity is not about justice. We have no obligation to the poor or to illegal aliens. They have done nothing to place us in their debt and to make helping them a matter of justice. If we help those in need, it is out a different virtue, out of love, out of charity.
Yet Scripture clearly expects that the just person will help and share with the poor. As Isaiah speaks about the kind of fast God desires, he says in verse 6, “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds on injustice…” and then in verse 7, “Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house…”
The NIV translates Proverbs 29:7 as “The righteous care about justice for the poor.” The NRSV reads, “The righteous know the rights of the poor.” In either case, there is a clear indication that being righteous includes a sense that something is due to those who are in need. One cannot be just in the biblical sense without fulfilling obligations that go beyond mere legal justice.
One way to understand the broader scope of biblical justice is to remember each of us owes everything to God. Not only are we His creation, owing Him our very existence, we also owe Him our redemption purchased by the sacrifice of Christ. As Scripture often states, we are all debtors before God.
Thus if God is concerned about the poor, if he lumps us together with them as debtors to His grace, then we find ourselves obligated to them by our obligation to God. Which is what Jesus suggests by the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, that a failure to help those in need is failure to help Jesus Himself, and help given to the needy is help offered to Jesus Himself.
Jesus demonstrates that same doing of justice to the poor in our Gospel lesson this week from Luke 7:11-17 when He raises a (poor) widow’s son from death. He takes pity on the poverty into which she will sink without her son to help support her and brings a bit of justice to her situation.
There’s much, much more to say about justice and about how the virtue of justice is cultivated and displayed in a complex world with many competing definitions for and claims on justice. Yet anyone who wants to live a whole and complete Christian life cannot ignore the call to do justice.