Book Excerpt: Tony Payne’s The Christian Gospel is a book to give away to someone who wants (or needs) a short explanation of what following Jesus is all about and why anyone would do it. This except comes as Tony Payne unpacks the concept of justice.
One of the many strange decisions I have made in my life is to be an Arsenal supporter. I live on the other side of the world from England, and so could really have chosen any football team to go for. But Arsenal it is and will remain.
It’s a burden, of course, Arsenal’s form in recent years being what it is.
But the worst of it is that Arsenal suffers the most blatant refereeing injustice in the entire Premier League. It is frankly unbelievable. When a referee arrives at an Arsenal game, a switch flips in what passes for his brain. Not only will he call every 50/50 decision against us, but he will perpetrate the most blatant howlers and inconsistencies. Happens every time. We are always getting robbed, and I am constantly left shouting at the TV about the injustice of it all.
Strange thing, though—my brother, the Liverpool supporter, says exactly the same thing about how the refs treat his team. And so does my Spurs mate and the poor sap I know who goes for Watford.
Every football fan is a one-eyed judge. When a decision goes our way, it is absolutely reasonable and just. When a decision goes against us, it is an obvious injustice by a criminally biased referee.
It’s not just in sport, of course. When some idiot roars past
me driving dangerously fast, and then I come across him a few minutes later, parked on the side of the road getting a speeding ticket, I give a little satisfied grunt. Serves him right.
When I am the idiot driving too fast in a hurry to get somewhere, and a police car looms up behind me and flashes its lights, I also make a noise, but it’s not a satisfied grunt.
A longing for justice
We are typically and very humanly inconsistent about it, but we have a powerful hunger for justice. I’ve given some trivial examples above, but there are plenty of non-trivial ones to go around: the grieving families of crime victims giving their statements to the media outside court, angrily denouncing a light sentence as ‘justice denied’; the civilian victims of an unjust war, with their houses in ruins and their dead children freshly buried, crying out for justice and revenge against the tyrants who have destroyed their lives.
We are like this as humans. We have a profound sense that certain things should be the case. And when those things are not the case, we know that it’s not right or just or fair, and that there should be some kind of accountability. We can feel it passionately, with a kind of hot, pure anger that, in some circumstances, is the only right emotion. Who hears of child abuse or sex trafficking without feeling a kind of rage at the corruption that targets the vulnerable?
And yet, at the same time, we are often self-centred and inconsistent about it. Sometimes, we rush to judgment with selfish anger and get it wrong. Very often, we want justice to apply to thee, but not to me.
It’s interesting that we are so passionate about justice, and so outraged when something is ‘not fair’, especially when it is not fair to us. If this is a god-less, accidental world, with no created standards of right and wrong, where did we get the idea that there is some kind of universal court of rightness or ‘justice’ that applies to everybody? It is hard to see how this kind of justice has any rational basis in a purely material, accidental universe. In fact, if evolutionary development entirely explains how things have come to be the way they are, then when Person A cruelly takes advantage of Person B, what’s to complain about? Surely that’s just the survival of the fittest.
The kind of justice we take for granted in Western society is (once again) a very biblical idea. It has its roots in the justice of God.
The Christian Gospel
Tony Payne, Matthias Media, 2023, $9.95 Available from Matthias Media