Justice and Suffering

My friend Holly’s post about Reconciliation and Justice brings up some great topics and highlights how difficult it is in our world to find true, biblical justice, or true, Godly reconciliation. Both are incomplete now in our reality and yet we in the church try to work toward them and try to be with those who suffer under injustice – but in some ways we will never “succeed”.

My exposure to Desmond TuTu and his amazing life has always pushed me to think through suffering, truth, justice, reconciliation – because South Africa is still heavily laden from its decades of oppression, racism, and injustice. TuTu’s work on the Truth and Reconciliation Committee profoundly moved the world with its request of both truth and forgiveness, and it was likely the only way that this nation torn by violence and brutality from mltiple sides could ever move on – but it left many feeling like they needed more “justice” in the legal sense for the deaths of loved ones. Once police officers “testified” in front of the committee about how, when, where, and why they killed and tortured someone, they were free to leave, while the dead person’s family often stayed and weeped. Suffering and injustice were met with grief and with listening, but not with inflicting punishment or suffering in some way back toward the perpetrator – and of course, imbalances of power and racial prejudice were rampant in almost every case.

We cannot end all suffering, all brokenness, all sin – I think maybe we need to learn more how to both fight against oppression and violence and suffering, and learn how to support and be with others who will still be the victims of this reality. Bell’s “Liberation TheologyAfter the End of History: the Refusal to Cease Suffering,” made me think and grieve and curse and reflect on this idea (this is also a central thesis in most of Hauerwas’s writings). In short, the question boils down to the fact that God’s justice isn’t totally available to us yet. Relying on nationalistic or violent means to attempt to secure that justice and peace now, here, is counter to God’s intents. So we should not try to end suffering at all costs – and Bell argues Latin America and others who are poor don’t want the US to swoop in with capitalism in order to rescue them – but we still have to live in between the tension of the kingdom being “here and not yet fulfilled.” Sort of depresses me, sort of liberates me.