York Minster

Isaiah 61: 1 – 4 & 8 – end and John 1: 6 – 8 & 19 – 28

Date: 14th December 2008
Preacher: The Reverend Dr Stephen Hampton, Dean of Peterhouse

Tomorrow morning, there will be a schoolboy sitting outside my keeping room door.  He will be neatly dressed; his face will be freshly scrubbed; and he will be looking somewhat pale.  I shall hand him a photocopy of a rather juicy passage of Friedrich Nietzsche.  Ten minutes later, his first question will be: what is the author trying to say?  Then, it will get a little harder.

It is the divinity admissions exercise in Cambridge this week.  By tomorrow evening, I shall have all the information about our candidates that I expect to receive.  My colleagues and I shall then have to decide which of these talented, charming and intelligent young people we are going to reject.  Whose dream of punting and candlelight and mellow brick are we going to shatter?  Which family will wake up next week to discover that their beloved son or daughter has not made the grade?

Our decisions are life-changing, and we take them very seriously.  There is a lot of information to digest.  There are personal statements and teachers’ reports.  There are essays which the candidates have sent to us, and there are answers to the in-house examination which we will set them.  And then there are the notes which we have all taken from the interview.  Our aim is to use all the data to work out which of these clever teenagers will make the best theologian.

Of course, there are some people who think that other kinds of information should be brought to bear as well.  They would like us to consider the economic background of the candidates, the kinds of schools they went to, whether they come from a family with a history of higher education and so on.  In brief, they would like us to make an academic decision upon non-academic grounds.

Now moral theologians have an expression for that kind of thing; they call it: “respect of persons.”  And it is a sin.

Respect of persons involves focussing on who someone is, rather than what they can do.  So it is respect of persons if I decide to admit a candidate because she is my cousin.  It is respect of persons if I decide to admit a candidate because he is good at rowing.  And it would be respect of persons if I decided to admit someone merely because they come from a deprived background.

To do any of these things would be wrong, because it would be unjust.  As the Emperor Justinian put it “justice is the constant and perpetual wish to render to every one his due.”  In other words, justice requires that in our selection of someone for any position, we should have regard only to their aptitude for that position.  We must not, therefore, take into account anything that might be jolly good about them, but which will not tell us about their ability.  So, if I am selecting the 1st VIII, I may well need to assess how good someone is at rowing.   But that information is not germane to the selection of undergraduates.  Though as Senior Treasurer of the boat Club, I occasionally wish it was.

It follows, of course, that all discrimination, and that includes positive discrimination, is unacceptable.  Every kind of discrimination involves respect of persons, and is consequently incompatible with justice.  As it says in Leviticus: “You shall not render an unjust judgement: you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbour.”

Now this demand for justice runs throughout the scriptures.  The law and the prophets alike were seized with a raging thirst for equity, and they talk about it constantly.  Think of Deuteronomy 16 verse 20 “Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue.”  Think of Psalm 33 verse 4 “the word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness.  He loves righteousness and justice.”  And think of our first lesson today:  Isaiah 61 verse 8 “For I, the Lord, love justice, I hate robbery and wrongdoing.

For the biblical writers, the people of God are called to act justly, because our God is just.  The pursuit of justice is, in other words, a vital aspect of our imitation of God.  And it is in the imitation of God that holiness consists.  “ You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

Of course, God is not just in exactly the same way that you and I should aim to just.  For you and me, justice is a habit; an attribute, which we might or might not have.  If we repeatedly do just things, we acquire the habit of justice.  But whether I become more just, or less just, I am still me.  Justice is, in other words, an attribute which I may or may not develop; it is not part of what makes me what I am.

But justice is not an attribute which God might or might not have.  For God, justice is not a habit, which He has acquired by acting in some ways and could lose if he acts in others.  God is not contingently just, like you or me, God is necessarily just.  He is always and inevitably just.  To be God is to act justly.

Furthermore, since there is no difference between who God is and what God is, God is also identical with his own justice.  So he is not merely just, in other words, he is justice itself.  Justice is, as it were, hard wired into God’s being in a way that it simply is not hard-wired into ours.

The consequence of this is that God can never do something unjust.  And I do not mean by this that if God did do something unjust, it would be just, because He was doing it. I mean that if God ever did something unjust, he would not be God.  He would be acting in contradiction to his nature – which is impossible.  God can no more do something unjust than I can exist in two places at the same time.  There are, in other words, limits to what God can do.  But these limits are not constraints which are imposed on God by anything outside him.  They are constraints which exist because of the kind of being God is.

Now the assertion that God is justice, whilst it initially sounds appealing, should begin to seem just a little bit scary upon further reflection.  As I said earlier, justice is the property of giving to each person what is their due.  And that, for anyone with even a modicum of self-awareness, should be a rather frightening thought.

Because if justice requires that each person be given their due, then it also requires that those who do wrong bear the consequences.  There is, in other words, both a primitive and a vindictive aspect to justice:  there is justice in the allocation of rewards and there is justice in the correction of wrongdoing.  They are two sides of the same coin.  This is what Isaiah is alluding to when he says: “I, the lord, love justice, I hate robbery and wrongdoing.”

Now since, as St Paul reminds us, we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, the justice of God should make us rather uncomfortable.  Not one of us is worthy of a place in the kingdom. Not one of us has deserved eternal life.  On the contrary: by our many failings to serve God and to love our neighbour, we have given God endless reasons why, in justice, he should exclude us from it.  And if justice is indeed hard-wired into the divine nature, as I have suggested, then God cannot turn a blind eye to these shortcomings.  Justice requires that humanity make reparation for our sins, before we can be acceptable in God’s sight.

But God has not, of course, turned a blind eye to our shortcomings.  Instead, he became a human being precisely so that he could deal with our shortcomings and do that in a manner befitting his justice.  God became a human being in Jesus so that, as a human being, and in our place, he could pay the price for our sins.  And he paid that price by offering up his own life upon the cross.  His death was, in other words, the compensation for our sin.  The precise nature of this transaction is and will remain profoundly mysterious to us.  But I shall tell you what the 11th century writer St Anselm has to say about it. His thinking does not exhaust the mystery here; but it is at least a helpful piece in the puzzle.

Since human beings owe every moment of our lives to God, even Jesus could perform no act of living service which was not already a debt.  But death is not a service which any human owes, even to our maker.

It follows that the voluntary surrender of a human life is the only kind of offering which goes beyond what God is owed.  And when that human life is actually God’s human life, as it is in Jesus, then its free surrender takes on an infinite significance.  It is then a truly perfect sacrifice; it is an oblation and satisfaction, which carries enough ethical weight to counterbalance every sin.

The infinite worthiness of God in Christ is therefore like a veil or cloak which covers our sins.  In the words of Isaiah: “he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness.”  It is the alien righteousness of the Incarnate which beautifies believers in the sight of God, for he has paid himself the price for all our sins.   That which we could not supply, that which renders us acceptable to the justice of God, comes to us as a boon.  God’s justice means that sin cannot be overlooked.  God’s mercy is such that he has born the blame.

Now since our God died to see justice done, we must strive tirelessly to the same end.  We should be hungry and thirsty for righteousness both in ourselves and in our society.   So let me end by suggesting three concrete ways of making ourselves more just right now. 

First: be courteous.  For courtesy is an act of justice.  You owe it to everyone you meet, because they, like you, bear the image of God and are loved by Him.

Secondly: honour your parents, whether with your time while they live or by your prayers when they are dead.  For filial piety is an act of justice.  You owe it to your mother and father, because without them, you would never have been born.

Thirdly and finally: come to church more often.  For religion is an act of justice.  Your worship and praise and thanksgiving is due to God, because he constantly holds you out of the nothingness from which you came, and you owe all you are to Him.  Justice requires that you give everyone their due.  So make sure, this Advent, that you give God his.