First Friday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
“No Justice, No Peace”: The Posture of Lament in Anticipating Restoration
by Xenia Chan
When the news of the national security bill had indeed been passed in Hong Kong, my stomach dropped through the floor. The last few months had already had me on tenterhooks, a low thrum of tension and scraped nerves—through the protests and the violence and the thought of home in such utter crisis. Was I seeing double—was I still truly in 2020 or had it somehow already become July 1, 2047?
On this side of the Pacific, as we entered into Canada Day, there seemed to be fewer things to celebrate. The pandemic has illuminated disparity and ills in our society on multiple levels, and the question of life has become sharply obvious an ethical question: whose lives matter? Are others truly our responsibility? Am I my brother’s keeper?
Peace, peace, they cry out.
The tragedy is that our mutual proximity to disaster and trauma has not, in fact, unified us. The divisions casually brushed over—with Canadian politeness or misguided churched values of “peace” and harmony—have never been so amply clear. This summer, the blood of our black and Indigenous brothers and sisters continues to cry out from the ground, how long, O LORD?
But there is no peace.
*****
I feel deeply uncomfortable with the level of outrage that experiencing and seeing injustice provokes within me. Yet, as New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley notes,“the demand to be calm and measured when dealing with matters of life and death runs against the prophetic grain” of our scriptures.[1] This demand, in part, arises from reading the scriptures with solely Western eyes—the notions of civility, rationality, and the disdain for emotionality. The hegemonic reach of Christendom is such that no evangelical community is untouched by Western-isms. This, in turn, has made our understanding of the scriptures and its transformational task in our lives and our communities anemic at best, and at worst, violated. The heresy of divorcing the Second Testament from the First has not helped, either.
In my own diaspora community, the tendency is to bury disagreement and conflict under guise of the urgency of the gospel: that somehow anything unpleasant brought to the light might discredit the witness of the gospel and prevent the salvation of lost souls. Historically this has happened again and again. The tensions created in the aftermath of the unrest in Hong Kong collided with anti-Chinese (now broadly, anti-Asian) sentiments: simmering towards full boil. We do not understand what justice has to do with peace—or with the gospel.
So, where does this leave us? If the charges directed at us are as dire as I have laid out, then what can be done to rectify what has been already done? What hope do we have?
*****
Our second passage today is Psalm 85. The psalmist and her congregation are perhaps in circumstances not unlike where we find ourselves today, and she responds by leading the congregation in a communal lament.
There are a few things to note here. First is the idea of God’s covenant and that the covenant is dependent on the character of God—his steadfast loyal love and his constant orientation towards relationship with his people and creation. Second is that though the covenant remains, relationship between God and his people have been ruptured. Yet, the psalmist is confident that God’s character is such that he will deliver and restore his people; she calls her congregation to that same confidence that God will speak shalom over them.
But what does it mean to be the people of God?
Verses 8-11 speak of a people who demonstrate God’s steadfast, loyal love, who live in God’s communal righteousness, and who live out God’s shalom. All of this is in context to relationship with God, our neighbours, and creation. Only then will we flourish; this, in essence, is what justice is.
Put another way, we cannot truly understand righteousness without considering the welfare of our neighbour.
We cannot say that we truly demonstrate love until we begin to understand the sort of commitment and loyalty with which God loves us.
We cannot truly proclaim peace without understanding our structures and systems, and whether they move us towards flourishing, or not.
As Old Testament scholar Walther Zimmerli reminds us, it is “never blind Justitia. [Justice] is always understood as an aspect of open-eyed compassion… divine demand for compassion towards the weak and the poor.” As a whole, the yearning for justice points our gaze to the plight of those who have been oppressed and speaks life into those experience. Paying attention and acting accordingly—as God does—recalls us to the flourishing that God intends for all of creation.
*****
If our communities ought to be places defined by justice, then how might we respond individually and as the Church? What does it mean to live in the hope that God’s intention for the restoration of creation is being and will be realized?
Like the prophet Jeremiah, we who know the Word have it as a burning fire shut up in our bones (Jer. 20:9). God’s character, his attributes, and his orientation towards right relationship ought to be so pressing within us that we cannot hold it in. Our relationship with the living God both grounds us in his restorative Presence (Jer. 1:8) but also radically compels us to look seriously at our neighbours’ grievances and the ways in which the world is not right (v.10). This moves us to lament with God, recognizing our potential to be intermittently oppressor and oppressed and wrestling in earnest with God at the state of affairs in our world. In our recognition, we begin to make room for the restorative Presence of God because we come to know how much we too need to be delivered and restored.
Our place in this time and space is no accident. God knows us intimately, and also knows what he is calling us towards (vv.7-10). We who have the Word are called to proclaim it, and to announce the restoring Presence of God—the Incarnation—is once again among us. The Good News takes seriously both the reality of our current circumstances and also proclaims that eschatological hope is even now being realized, just as it is still to come. From recognition of what the Good News is and how the Presence of God is moving among us, we begin to understand how it is we are to emulate the Incarnation—in our neighbourhoods, towns, villages, cities, and our world.
Personally, I have been convicted by the entanglement between lament and hope. The temptation is to remain in despair (or conversely, to try to fix things myself), but the act of lament pushes me to look beyond myself and settling for the status quo. In recognizing where we have lost the plot of things, what grounds me is the knowledge that Jesus is ever at work and is, by his Spirit, restoring all things, including his Bride. There is space for us to grieve and rage, even as we hope together for deliverance and restoration and partner with the Spirit in the work of creating communities of shalom.
This Advent season may feel strange, but in the greater narrative of the Christian story, perhaps we are just coming back to where we ought to have been all along. As we begin to prepare to celebrate the coming of Jesus, it is lament which makes hope evident—to understand why precisely we need the Incarnation.
Thank you for reading the New Leaf Advent Reader, a collection of reflections from writers across Canada. If you are enjoying the reader, sign up to receive the readings in your inbox each day here: SIGN UP
And please share this reflection with your friends and family who might also enjoy it.
One of the ways we have been connecting online since the pandemic pushed us online is through our Learning Centre, a weekly interactive Zoom call on a topic with a Canadian voice of wisdom. For the season of Advent, we will be featuring a few of our writers and making space to reflect together on the Advent Reader articles. Join us for the interactive sessions on Thursdays at 1:30 pm (Eastern time) or sign up and view the recordings of the sessions afterwards. SIGN UP for the Learning Centre Advent sessions.
[1] Esau McCaulley, November 2, 2020, 2:34PM https://twitter.com/esaumccaulley/status/1322985323052388355?s=19
