Doing Justice: International Justice Mission

Friends,

I want to share a couple of thoughts with you in this post. First, a personal reflection on Mark 6:14-29and some comments I made the other day at the blog of a friend of mine. Second, I want to share a preliminary report on a mission that I did not even know existed until I read about it in a new book by Art Lindsley Love: The Ultimate Apologetic.

First, Mark 6:14-29:

14King Herod heard about this, for Jesus’ name had become well known. Some were saying, “John the Baptist has been raised from the dead, and that is why miraculous powers are at work in him.” 15Others said, “He is Elijah.” And still others claimed, “He is a prophet, like one of the prophets of long ago.” 16But when Herod heard this, he said, “John, the man I beheaded, has been raised from the dead!”

17For Herod himself had given orders to have John arrested, and he had him bound and put in prison. He did this because of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, whom he had married. 18For John had been saying to Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” 19So Herodias nursed a grudge against John and wanted to kill him. But she was not able to, 20because Herod feared John and protected him, knowing him to be a righteous and holy man. When Herod heard John, he was greatly puzzled; yet he liked to listen to him.

21Finally the opportune time came. On his birthday Herod gave a banquet for his high officials and military commanders and the leading men of Galilee. 22When the daughter of Herodias came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his dinner guests. The king said to the girl, “Ask me for anything you want, and I’ll give it to you.” 23And he promised her with an oath, “Whatever you ask I will give you, up to half my kingdom.”

24She went out and said to her mother, “What shall I ask for?”  ”The head of John the Baptist,” she answered. 25At once the girl hurried in to the king with the request: “I want you to give me right now the head of John the Baptist on a platter.”

26The king was greatly distressed, but because of his oaths and his dinner guests, he did not want to refuse her. 27So he immediately sent an executioner with orders to bring John’s head. The man went, beheaded John in the prison, 28and brought back his head on a platter. He presented it to the girl, and she gave it to her mother. 29On hearing of this, John’s disciples came and took his body and laid it in a tomb.

I sort of became interested in the ‘topic’  the other day when I engaged in a conversation with a friend at his blog. We were discussing and essay by NT Wright Kingdom come: The public meaning of the Gospels.

Wright makes this comment in his essay:

This witness comes into sharp focus in John 16:8-11. The Spirit, declares Jesus, will prove the world wrong about sin, righteousness and judgment-about judgment because the ruler of this world is judged. How is the Spirit to do that? Clearly, within Johannine theology, through the witness of the church, in and through which the Spirit is at work. The church will do to the rulers of the world what Jesus did to Pilate in John 18 and 19, confronting him with the news of the kingdom and of truth, deeply unwelcome and indeed incomprehensible though both of them were. Part of the way in which the church will do this is by getting on with, and setting forward, those works of justice and mercy, of beauty and relationship, that the rulers know ought to be flourishing but which they seem powerless to bring about. But the church, even when faced with overtly pagan and hostile rulers, must continue to believe that Jesus is the Lord before whom they will bow and whose final sovereign judgment they are called to anticipate. Thus the church, in its biblical commitment to “doing God in public,” is called to learn how to collaborate without compromise (hence the vital importance of common-good theory) and to critique without dualism.

In particular, as one sharp focus for all this, it is vital that the church learn to critique the present workings of democracy itself. I don’t simply mean that we should scrutinize voting methods, campaign tactics or the use of big money within the electoral process. I mean that we should take seriously the fact that our present glorification of democracy emerged precisely from Enlightenment dualism-the banishing of God from the public square and the elevation of vox populi to fill the vacuum, which we have seen to be profoundly inadequate when faced with the publicness of the kingdom of God. And we should take very seriously the fact that the early Jews and Christians were not terribly interested in the process by which rulers came to power, but were extremely interested in what rulers did once they had obtained power. The greatest democracies of the ancient world, those of Greece and Rome, had well-developed procedures for assessing their rulers once their term of office was over if not before, and if necessary for putting them on trial. Simply not being reelected (the main threat to politicians in today’s democracies) was nowhere near good enough. When Kofi Annan retired as general secretary of the United Nations, one of the key points he made was that we urgently need to develop ways of holding governments to account. That is a central part of the church’s vocation, which we should never have lost and desperately need to recapture.

Well, some of this ruffled my feathers a bit. I wrote back to my friend:

From my conservative American point of view, Annan had very little to offer in the way of valid criticism of the US. His politics smack of socialism and, perhaps to an extent, criminality. I don’t think he is one that can be trusted. Be that as it may, I don’t think it is the church’s vocation to hold governments to account. Governments exist for ALL the people, not just the church folk. Thus it is the responsibility of ALL those who elect government officials to rebuke government officials. Thus, I think it is naive, a bit, for Wright to assume that ‘being voted out of office’ is the ‘only danger posed to politicians’ in Republics such as the US. When your entire life is geared for only that profession, and you lose it, what else do you have left (generally speaking of course)? I’m not entirely sure what other course of action Wright would have us pursue.

Then today I read this passage from Mark 6 and I sort of started to understand. Here is John the Baptizer, prophet, forerunner of Messiah, Elijah, called to preach a baptism of repentance and why does he lose his head? Because he criticized the injustice of the local government. That may be an oversimplification, but it is close enough to make the point. Perhaps the Church does have something to say to the leaders of this world as Wright is suggesting. To be sure, I’m not certain what course of action this requires nor do I know if this is a specific mission of the church as Wright seems to be suggesting. However, I do think it is a part of the work we are called to do in order to bring justice and righteousness to bear on the communities in which we live. That’s what John was doing because in some way or another he saw Herod’s unrighteous activity in government and leadership and his personal life and gathered, through his prophetic eye, that this unrighteousness was somehow having a negative impact on the community in general, and the advance of the Kingdom of God in particular.

I need to think a little more on this, but I can make a small advance by noting that John the Baptizer, Messianic prophet that he was, said something about the current affairs (no pun) of the local government and what he said got him in trouble. That deserves some more thought. Now on to point two.

The funny thing about the book (Love: The Ultimate Apologetic) is that I was not supposed to get it. I am a member of the InterVarsity Press book club and I accidentally forgot to mail back the card declining last month’s selection. So this book, Love: The Ultimate Apologetic, came to me ‘on accident.’ I only just started reading it and I don’t even know yet how I actually ‘feel’ about it. What it has done at the start is awaken my mind to this work of what people in some segments of the church call justice. The author made a comment on page 34 about this man named Gary Haugen who is president of International Justice Mission. Below is an introductory youtube video, very well produced, and to the point:

I think a large part of my problem is that for me Christianity has been a very private thing. It’s about my salvation, my work, my ministry, and so on and so forth. This doesn’t mean I haven’t done things for the Kingdom, it just means that I have often thought of them merely as personal advances; things that encouraged my own private sanctification and holiness. This brings me back to Wright’s essay which is primarily about taking the Gospel public. Thus Wright can say:

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are all in their various ways about God in public, about the kingdom of God coming on earth as in heaven through the public career and the death and resurrection of Jesus. The massive concentration on source and form criticism, the industrial-scale development of criteria for authenticity (or, more often, inauthenticity), and the extraordinary inverted snobbery of preferring gnostic sayings-sources to the canonical documents all stem from, and in turn reinforce, the determination of the Western world and church to make sure that the four Gospels will not be able to say what they want to say, but will be patronized, muzzled, dismembered and eventually eliminated altogether as a force to be reckoned with.

The central message of all four canonical Gospels is that the Creator God, Israel’s God, is at last reclaiming the whole world as his own, in and through Jesus of Nazareth. That, to offer a riskily broad generalization, is the message of the kingdom of God, which is Jesus’ answer to the question, What would it look like if God were running this show?

This is part of our work in demonstrating these advance signs and I think after reading this story from Mark today, watching the above clip, and mulling it all over again and again, I think I am starting to understand what Wright is saying. I think I am starting to understand what I am supposed to be doing.

Thanks for stopping by. Don’t forget, comment moderation is off so please feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you are learning about these things too.

Soli Deo Gloria!

HT: Jason Goroncy