Where is Justice?

Luke 3:19-20

What reward does John get for all his efforts at preaching good news? He is locked up in prison – and eventually beheaded.

John, whose preaching has been all about repentance, doesn’t stop with those who come out to hear him. He speaks against the religious and political authorities holed up in Jerusalem or in their palaces. He rails against injustice and unrighteousness wherever it is to be found and regardless the outcome.

Luke reports John’s imprisonment succinctly. Herod, the Jewish ruler, has taken his brother’s wife. And that is just for starters. Long before modern democratic understandings of human government, John was proclaiming that no one, not even the human authorities of the land, were above the law. This concept is almost taken for granted in our day and age. We who have lived through Nixon’s Watergate and Clinton’s impeachment, we who have seen political leaders on both right and left as well as in the middle slam up against a more willful rule of law, assume that this is a given: that rulers are not above the law of the land.

But not so long ago and certainly in the time of John, the idea that a ruler would have to submit to the laws of heaven or earth was a rare concept. Some of the ancient empires had codes of law that said that even the emperor could not change his own edict, but that was still a far cry from our concept of law above ruler. In any age, then or now, people who impose morality on others blithely find loopholes for themselves.

So Herod adds to all his other evil deeds, Luke writes with a touch of irony, by throwing John the Righteous in prison. Luke doesn’t dwell on the injustice of this, other than to report how in doing so, Herod adds to his own list of crimes. The incident is recorded almost as dry fact.

But the facts leave the reader reeling. After all the good John has done? Why? What has he done to deserve languishing in prison? What is the purpose of all this? The questions roll down like an avalanche. You can feel the collective gasp among the followers of John, among those who have heard John preach and have responded. Where is the justice in all this?

Then we remember what John said, that he is not the final actor on this stage. He is only the forerunner to the Christ. This Christ is the one who will make all things right, who will separate the good from the bad and burn up the bad. Surely he will sort this all out.

Anyone who lives to do right, who strives to proclaim justice, goes through times when the forces of darkness appear to overwhelm. The rich cheat the poor, the righteous are imprisoned by the wicked, the powerful step on the necks of the vulnerable, the innocent suffer. And the messengers of God find themselves at the mercy (or lack thereof) of those who oppose God’s will.

If we are “into” this passage as we read it, we walk away from this text feeling deeply unresolved. Where is Jesus coming on a powerful steed to rescue John in Zorro fashion? Why doesn’t he call down lightning or dispatch a zillion angels or something. Some readers will even say, if John had more faith, or if he had only listened more closely to God’s Spirit and kept his mouth shut at the right moment…

But that is not the way life works. Even those who do no wrong, even those who love justice and do mercy and walk humbly with their God find themselves in awful straights. Good people are going to be hurt by the evil deeds of others. And the righteous will suffer for their acts of righteousness. In the end, Jesus does not rescue John – nor many another saint down through the history of the Church.

Fortunately for us, Luke is writing a whole book and not a short story. So we turn the page to see what God will make of all this mess. Just as we wait with anticipation in our own lives to see how God will redeem the perils in which we find ourselves.