True justice for the nations

Law school

There is pride in believing that we are the people towards whom all evolution has been aimed and all the gadgets of our age were in gestation just for us. And I doubt I am the only one who has often unreflectingly assumed this is so.

This morning at 0506 a tremor went through our house in East Lusaka. It was like an underground train passing – but we don’t have underground trains – and I checked at breakfast whether others had also noticed. They had, and the clock of one of us fell to the floor. We had a lesson on seismology for breakfast and I learnt that our tremor could be measured in Tokyo and Dublin. The earth is one and tectonic activity in one place is felt everywhere. I had thought it a “little local matter.”

So I ended up with a parable about our thinking on space and time. What I comfortably saw as part of my little world was in fact caused by – and causes – ripples everywhere and in all time. It is easy to see that we have built on the achievements of our ancestors. But it is less easy to see how we can have an impact in generations yet to come.

This Sunday we celebrate the formal inauguration – not of a new American president; we will do that this time next year – but of the Messiah who steps into the Jordan and is baptised by John. It was a simple affair which few noticed, But it had massive antecedents and even greater consequences. Isaiah had repeatedly – even in our short passage he says it three times – spoken of the one who would bring “true justice to the nations.” Our Sunday celebration will be seen as “irrelevant” to millions of our contemporaries, evoking the limited view of the parable.

The broad picture of the past two thousand years speaks of pruning and pruning again. All these great advances we enjoy are the result of rocks tumbled until diamonds emerge. You can forget the tumbling if you want and just enjoy the diamonds. But history suggests that might not be wise.

10 January 2016                      Baptism of the Lord

Isaiah 42:1-7                           Acts 10:34-38                         Luke 3:15…22