No More Debates About 'True Justice'
by Steve Bradbury
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 60
Autumn 1998

Introduction

Ponderous debates about 'true justice' often reveal more about the debater than 'justice'

Steve Bradbury
Steve Bradbury is National Director of TEAR Australia. E-mail teardir@ozemail.com.au

ON MOST SUNDAYS YOU will find Grace Kaiso leading his suburban Kampala congregation in worship. It's a very large congregation, but then that's not so unusual in Uganda, for the growth of the church across all the denominations has been spectacular in that country.

During the week, however, Grace is less likely to be on the church premises. The chances are you'll find him somewhere in Kalerwe. This sprawling community of huts and shacks, built on reclaimed swampland, is home to many of Kampala's most impoverished families. There is no doubt in my mind that it is God who has placed Grace among these marginalised and neglected people, for here his work gives tangible expression to the justice and mercy of the gospel of Christ.
I find it hard to adequately express the sense of privilege I feel when I visit communities like Kalerwe in the company of someone whose friendship with Jesus has made them such a friend of the poor. The earthy reality of their faith, connecting them as it does to real need, in such contrast to much in the Australian church that is either other-worldly or me-centred.

Grace has laboured hard with and on behalf of his neighbours. As a result they now have a small primary school, a health clinic with trained community health workers, an AIDS counselling centre and piped clean water. What is more, Grace's persistent lobbying has pushed local authorities to improve both drainage and sanitation, vital for the health of the community.

When I asked him why he had worked so hard for this community, Grace's reply was short and simple: "twenty five per cent of the children I was baptising were dead before they reached six months of age. I had to ask, 'what does it mean to be Jesus' representative in this place?'"

What a good question. What a profoundly spiritual question. Grace sets an inspirational example for all of us who are rich-by virtue of our qualifications, opportunities, skills or finances. What does it mean to be Jesus' representative in a world where there is so much poverty; where the gulf between rich and poor is widening, not shrinking; where up to 40,000 children under the age of five years die each day because of the poverty of their parents or guardians; where so many labourers are denied a living wage; where "in arrogance the wicked persecute the poor" (Psalm 10:2) and where there are many who "long to satisfy their hunger with what falls from the rich person's table" (Luke 16:21)?

The Jesus I so inadequately seek to represent is one who utterly condemned those who carefully neglected God's instructions to "do justice and to love kindness" (Micah 6:8), while at the same time almost obsessively observing the lesser requirements of their religious laws.

Through their careful avoidance of the justice and mercy requirements of the law the scribes and Pharisees were denying that which was fundamental to the nature and character of God, and rendering their faith worse than useless. This explains the intensity of Jesus' anger.

To: Part 2