Both/And

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I wrote recently about a production of Godspell that I directed earlier this summer – a wonderful experience. But while watching rehearsals, I noted again a line in the Beatitudes section that was one of my assigned lines in the production I performed in years ago. Blessed are those who hunger . . . “and thirst for righteousness.”

“That’s justice, not righteousness,” my director Randy corrected me in notes one day.

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Yep. Check the script.”

And he was right. And I got my gander up a bit. Because I had memorized the Beatitudes long ago, and that verse says “righteousness”. Whatever, Mr. Tebelak. Just change the words of scripture to say what you want it to say.

Except he didn’t really do that. The Greek word is dikaiosyne, and it can apparently be translated as either righteousness or justice. That’s how closely related the two concepts are.

Which brings me back to my viper post (which you can click there to read).

You see, there has been a big divide in the Church about these ideas. There is one branch of the Church that is all focused on righteousness. We need to be right with God! We are sinners headed for eternal punishment! And our sinful behavior is evidence of that. Get cleaned up! Come to Jesus!

And yes, this is all true.

But then there’s the Social Justice branch of the Church. They are all about justice. Take care of the poor! Condemn the oppressors! Welcome the stranger! We need to make a just society! We’ll make that happen!

And this is true, too.

They are BOTH true. They are both dikaiosyne. We just have a hard time doing both.

Yes, we need RIGHTEOUSNESS. We need to be right with God. And being right with God results in right behavior. But what was the right behavior Jesus said we’d be known by? Feeding the poor, visiting the sick and imprisoned, freeing the oppressed . . . how did we forget all those verses?

And yes, we need JUSTICE. We need to bring God’s kingdom to earth now. But y’all . . . nonbelievers are doing good deeds like that, too. Aren’t we supposed to be different from them? What is supposed to set us apart? Might it be our righteousness? Our right standing with God. That should make us markedly -- VISIBLY -- different from the rest of the world. And are we?

Our righteousness should result in justice. Our justice-making should flow from our righteousness. We need to be concerned about ourselves and our own right standing AND the world and its right standing. This seems to be asking a lot of us -- like we might need the three arms the woman has in the ChatGPT picture above. Sigh . . .

I guess if it were easy to do, Jesus wouldn’t have needed to die to save us from ourselves.

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