Pray for Peace

Living Faith 8.4 and 8.5

God is not always fair, but God is always just. I recently prepared a sermon on our Lord’s parable, “The Workers in the Vineyard.” Jesus’ story tells about labourers receiving the same pay for different hours of work. In our reckoning, this discrepancy—of equal pay for unequal work—doesn’t seem right. In the words of the tax advocate commercial, “It’s not fair.”

Somehow we expect God’s justice to always be fair. And, in turn, we expect that we should be fair as well. After all, Living Faith declares: “God’s justice is seen when we deal fairly with each other” and “justice seeks fairness in society” and “it requires fair laws justly administered.”

I wonder though if there seems to be a fixation on fairness in Living Faith and in contemporary society that sees fairness as equivalent to justice. John Rawls of Harvard University famously argued that, “Justice is Fairness.” But as one critique of Rawls put it, “the fallacies in Rawls’ theory are not simply the product of a naivety in thinking that fairness will automatically come about by consensus in a pluralistic society. Rawls’ fundamental problem is his underlying rationalistic, Enlightenment belief that man is essentially good and will, through self – respect, ascend to higher moral goals, choose proper societal principles, and be able to put them into practice nationally and internationally.”

Is fairness beyond our grasp as humans? A noble goal, but perhaps not attainable.

On the other hand, Living Faith gets it right when it claims, “God is always calling the church to seek that justice in the world which reflects the divine righteousness revealed in the Bible.” God in His grace bestows righteousness on the unworthy, so that the people of God are called upon to “seek justice” (Isaiah 1:17) in the sense of pleading for the widow and “[judging] the cause of the poor and needy” (Jeremiah 22:16). Biblically speaking, justice connotes goodness (Luke 23:50) and loving consideration (Matthew 1:19). There is little evidence to suggest that in biblical categories, justice equals fairness. In fact, sometimes, to borrow the phrase from Shakespeare’s twisted sisters in Macbeth, “fair is foul.”

Not only is God calling the church to “seek justice,” but also, as Living Faith says, “Christ, the Prince of Peace, calls his followers to seek peace in the world.” Our subordinate standard suggests that we “seek peace” when we “protest against the world arms race;” when we “fear nuclear war;” and when we “affirm that God is at work when people are ashamed of the inhumanity of war.” It further urges us to “pray for peace.”

What Living Faith fails to include is a broader understanding of peace in the sense of biblical shalom. The Old Testament word for peace, shalom, means “completeness,” “soundness,” and “well – being.” If we are to seek peace, then we must be concerned about much more than issues related to war. We must be working to bring about “shalom,” in all its rich nuances, to all aspects of society.

I’d like to give an example of an organization with which I am involved. This is one way we can pray for peace, though not the only way: Over 800 mothers die every day in childbirth from preventable causes. In the 20th century, pregnancy and childbirth killed more than tuberculosis, suicide, traffic accidents and AIDS combined, and more women died in childbirth than soldiers were killed in both world wars. And for every woman who dies in childbirth, about 20 women suffer injury, infection or disease—approximately 10 million women each year.

Seeking peace (and justice) means we need to do something about issues such as the tragedy of maternal death.

Save the Mothers, a small Canadian NGO, is training cross – disciplinary professionals in East Africa to bring about the systemic change needed there to ensure that women don’t die in the effort to give life. We are educating and equipping business leaders, journalists, politicians, social workers and clergy to seek justice and peace—through their own occupational spheres of influence—for mothers and their babies.