Injustice Sucks...and God Knew It

Whether you are a news junkie or not, there is a good chance you have seen and connected to the events of this week – multiple bombings at the Boston Marathon, an explosion at a Texas fertilizer plant, and this morning a city locked down and on edge.  Such events have an impact.  Appropriately, they move us reflect upon life, spur conversations about the rapture, and prompt us to hold onto our children, friends, and family a little more tightly.
I played football for 10 years, and one of the rules of the game is that, once the whistle blows, you’re not allowed to “pile on.”  You can't jump on those vulnerable to attack after the play is over.  Just about every time episodes of destruction and terror hit, it feels a bit like a “pile on.”
Tragically we live in a world where we have seen and experienced far too much pain, heartache, death and devastation.  Our ancestors could not have imagined planes flying into buildings, neighborhoods being bombed, and sink holes engulfing homes and cars.  It leads us to personally live our lives in “elevated Terror-alert”, wondering when that “elevated” will need to be raised to “high” or “severe.”  We ask questions like, “Why?”  And we think about what might cause a person to do the things that they do or how our creations can turn into (or be turned into) instruments of terror.  Ultimately for many, it begs the question, “Why does God let this stuff happen?”
That last question is called “Theodicy,” and when I Googled “when bad things happen to good people,” it brought up more than 378,000,000 hits.  There are all kinds of ways to explain it and many angles to approach it, but if we were to narrow it down to a common statement it would be that those “bad things” are injustices.  And injustice sucks.  Plain and simple.
There seems to be no reason for such pain, and we beat our heads trying to come up with some meaningful answer, which never satisfactorily comes.  Our responses vary, for there are some who are ready to take up arms and act, while others pull back in fear.  Others pray and pray and pray, while others give up on prayer.  And all of us do two things: 1) ask the question, and 2) acknowledge to our core that injustice sucks.
        And yet, God knows it.

In the Gospel story of Christ’s trial, we see blaring injustice, and in fact, the authors themselves, even the villain Pilate, names that Jesus was innocent.  And yet it did not matter.  They still beat him, humiliated him, and killed him.  And that injustice sucked.

More personally to Jesus, at the table Jesus predicted that Peter would betray Him.  Peter, of course, denies it, but when the are standing outside the meeting of the Sanhedran, warming their hands by the fire, three folks accuse Peter of being one of Jesus’ disciples.  Three times he denies it.  For Jesus, for Peter, for those of us who can see ourselves denying Jesus in our own lives, that’s injustice.  And injustice sucks.
Even after He has told them that He was going to beat this thing called death, and He DOES, they still have a hard time believing it.  In multiple accounts, He has to convince them that what He said was true, and in a way that is an injustice.  Injustice sucks.
And yet Jesus knew it.

The great Good News and a comfort to us as we live in these days where injustice seems to run rampant, control is gone, and our alerts are heightened, is that Jesus knows the injustice and in fact is in the middle of those injustices bringing comfort, hope, healing and goodness.  Jesus is the One who transforms death into life, pain into healing, and despair into hope!  Jesus is the One who knew from the very beginning that things had to go the way they did.  That injustice would kill Him, BUT that injustice and death would not have the last word.  Instead, Jesus took the world’s injustice and planted into this world God’s Justice, from that day on to forever.

We live in painful times where injustice can seek to lay a pall over everything, but if you lift the corner of that pall, if you look into the death and the pain, you’ll see that the One who withstood the greatest injustice brings justice, life, hope, and healing. You'll see evidence in those who turned toward the violence rather than ran away, in those who care for the injured, and in those who seek peace rather than violence.  He brings light in the darkness, and for those who follow the Christ, our call is to live as He did and do what He did – bring that same hope and life, especially where justice is needed.
The reality is that injustice sucks, but God knew.  Injustice sucks, and God knows.  And because God knows, there is hope.

Where do you see God at work in the midst of the injustices in our world?  In your community?  In your life?