Advent 23
He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
—MICAH 6:8 (NRSVA)
For lawyer Bryan Stevenson, doing justice has meant spending a lifetime not only being a witness to injustice, but working to reverse it. He continues to fight a system that treats those who are rich and guilty better than those who are poor and innocent. He is compelled by the story in John 8, when Jesus stands in front of a woman about to be stoned. “Whoever among you is guiltless may be the first to throw a stone at her,” he says (John 8:7, NET). One at a time, the convicted men drop their rocks and walk away. Bryan says this instance reminds him not to be a stonethrower, but a stonecatcher.
Advent ushers in the promise of justice. But perhaps it is not justice as the world sees, but justice as Jesus defines it. Justice that is inherently linked to mercy. To paraphrase theologian G.K. Chesterton, the innocent call for justice and the guilty call for mercy.* The only way we can know what justice looks like in any circumstance is to look to Jesus, the ultimate stonecatcher. The one who calls us to forgiveness, who embodies mercy on the cross, who challenges us to turn the world upside-down (or maybe right-side up) this Christmas, to see people not as the worst thing they’ve ever done, but through a lens of love and grace.
*G.K. Chesterton. “On Household Gods and Goblins” in The Coloured Lands. (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1938). 195.