Lamentations 3:22

I talked recently with a woman I’d worked with previously, but whom I hadn't seen for years since I’d left the Institution we both worked for.  She still worked there and was interested in what I’d been doing since leaving (as was I interested to hear from her).

She knew I’d been bullied at this place, and she knew my son had died in the middle of it all.

She was very compassionate and really listened to my sad tale of how I’d had to resign because 

I couldn't go back to such a workplace, with the added burden of grief I was carrying.

Still, she entreated me “But you should have fought back Susan;  you should have stood up for yourself”.

But I knew I couldn't. I knew it at the time, and I know it now. 

As we talked though, I became conscious of really wanting to leave the angst of the bullying, behind.  There was so much anxiety at the time;  so much resentment of the injustice of it.

But I really felt that, not only did I not want to go back there now, in my head, but that my heart (at least as far as the bullying was concerned) was healed and I could no longer “feel” the anger, helplessness anxiety and betrayal which I’d faced, alone, back then. 

I was conscious of wanting to leave it where it rested – in the past. There was no grudge carefully nursed;  no path of bitterness wreaking havoc through my peace of mind.

I think God has healed me.  He truly does enable us to overcome our circumstances.

God can really transform us with His love and compassion – as long as we keep giving over the rubbish stuff to Him. ‘Consumed” is a terrible word when it’s applied to those negative reactions which threaten our spiritual and emotional well-being – you can’t be close to God when you are consumed by anger or bitterness or self-pity.  When these things hold power over you, God presence is subsumed by them.

But having said that, if you've been hurt or wronged very badly by someone, you can’t just put it away, without working through what happened and what you feel.  Those powerfully tenacious emotions like anger and rancour don’t give up without a fight! 

But they have to be dealt with or they fester and grow.  Pretending you don’t feel them doesn't disable them either.

But God, through His transforming presence and mercy, can take them from our struggling, burdened souls and we are not consumed by them. We keep giving them up to His redemptive power and He keeps tempering them, dissolving them until their power over us is gone.

Rather, the negative destructive forces are themselves transformed in us, by God’s astonishing power to work evil things to our good, and the very circumstances and hurts which threaten to consume us, give us empathy for others who have been similarly hurt and diminished. Not only that, but this grace enables us to pray for those who have hurt us, and when this point is reached, God’s power is set to work to redeem and heal the other also.

God’s power knows no bounds when it is released by our obedient application of His precepts in our lives, even in the face of pain and suffering.

This promise of grace holds us in dignified and ever-renewing strength – that of allowing God to heal and transform us, so that we are never consumed by anything which happens to us in this life.

Amazing.

Prayers for first Nation peoples

I have started watching "The Sapphires", a delightful Australian movie about an Aboriginal Girl Singing group.  I was only 10 minutes into this movie, when it took me to another time and place in my life.....

When I was 13, my father sold his half share in the farm where we lived, and moved to the coast.  I had to leave that beloved place;  the land, the open space and the delight of the rolling hills of farming country, in the Central West of NSW, Australia

We moved to a place on the coast, and my father got a job as a labourer in an engineering/manufacturing business. 

I began school at what was to me, a huge school, teeming with strange people;  so different to the little School I'd grown up in at Eugowra;  a school where I knew all the kids by name - there were, after all, only about 300 of them, both Primary and High School grades. In this new, big High School, I was the little bush kid, with the shy demeanour (I was terrified!) and the unsophisticated ways. (I didn't even shave my legs, for goodness sake!)

So began a couple of years, where I always felt like the outsider;  the alien;  the one who was a bit different.  I tended to gravitate to other outsiders, so for the first few months, I befriended a Chinese girl who was even more different than I.

We huddled together at lunch time;  me with my sandwiches and she with her Chinese equivalent. I was teased, of course;  from the loud boy who would call out rude things to me across the playground, to the coolest boy on the bus who tried to make me his conquest (I realized later, all these boys actually fancied me - strange way to show it lads!) or to the other bully boy, who simply taunted me the whole journey.

A particularly cruel girl invited me to have lunch with her group one day, and then began to systematically ridicule everything about me, either with blistering sarcasm or outright verbal abuse.  I had neither the courage or the words to defend myself.  I was like a little rabbit, thrown into an arena of circling wolves. I simply avoided her and her gang.  I also just began to silently and wordlessly ignore her.  She eventually, bored with me,  found some other poor soul to torment.

But there was one group of girls I was truly scared of.  They were the girls from the Aboriginal settlement.  They lived outside the main town, in a designated Aboriginal village.  This was the 60's and such a place would no longer be segregated in this way, today.  I understand so much more now, of the plight of indigenous peoples of my beautiful country, but in the 60's the white Australia policy was still in people's minds, mine included.  .

If you happened to look over at these girls, at lunch time, to where they sat together, they would shout "whatta YOU lookin' at white bitch?!".  This would often be accompanied by curses and threats. You would never make eye contact with these girls and they always hung out in groups.  They would threaten, with very real intent, to come and punch your face in.

I had had no contact with Koori people at Eugowra, except for shadowy figures in the Salvation Army girls home at Canowindra (another small town some 50ks away), where I often went to Sunday School. These were the stolen children, so powerfully told of in "The Sapphires".  I was ignorant

If only then, I had understood more fully how awful it is to be an alien;  an outsider;  someone looked down upon.  I was, after all, white, "normal looking" and not really that different to most of my peers. I was only dorky;  these girls were outcasts. I realize now, they had probably suffered all sorts of bullying and also, I shudder to think, abuse, violence and who knows what else.  They were threatening, because they needed to be, to self-protect.

If only I had been courageous and simply talked to them.  But I was too scared;  to out of my comfort zone. And even in the middle 60's, there was a great divide between black and white.  We patronised our indigenous people;  we tried to provide for them in our own flawed way.  In the end,  from the stolen generation, and the racism,  the worst we did was try to make them white;  tried to envelop them in our culture;  tried to obliterate theirs.  We segregated them and made them dependent on the welfare system. We took their culture and then wondered why they couldn't instantly become part of ours.

"The Sapphires" movie made me think of  those girls this morning because so much of the movie resonated with what these girls must have experienced. I found myself thinking of them and realizing, after all this time,  how school must have been for them.  If it was scary and uncomfortable for me, a little white girl, how much worse must it have been for them;  alienated, disrespected; made invisible;  picked on; looked down on.  And all in their own country;  the country of their birth-right;  the country which had nourished the soul of their people for thousands of years.  Worse than that even, these girls were what was called "half-castes" (appalling word). They were, perhaps, the result of the coupling of white/black people;  often, I believe at the hands of sexual grooming and outright rape, from degenerate male members of the so-called "civilized" culture).

I prayed for these girls this morning. I have no idea what happened to any of them, but I'm guessing many are lost now, either to death, or alcohol abuse or unwholesome lifestyles.

"Lord of all peoples, I intercede for these women, today;  at this moment.  You know who they are.  Bless them with peace today;  bless them with healing;  give them the help and courage they need to build stable and meaningful lives.

Heal their childhood experiences, as you have healed mine. Bless their parents, their sisters, their brothers, their children. Forgive us, the European interlopers, who so sought to envelop their culture in our own.  Thank you for the grace their people often show, in forgiving us.

Begin in these woman, and those like them, a spark of healing;  raise them up to be leaders of their people.  Begin with them, and bring the redemption and renewal of soul, body, mind and spirit of all the people in our land. Whatever spark of your Spirit might be in them, fan that spark to life;  whatever spirit of overcoming and victory might be still alive in them, breathe your love and steadfast presence on that spark and bring it to life, so that they will live with love and victory, overcoming the scars of their experiences in life.

Heal the hurts which have become bitterness;  ours as well as theirs.  Forgive us when our ignorance turns to prejudice.

I intercede for these girls, now my age, who so long ago and with such frightened vehemence, tried to exist in a world so foreign and disapproving;  I pray for others like me, the little white girl from the bush, who took years to realize that their taunts were the shields against their hurt and rejection. In Jesus Name, who understands what it is to be an outcast and rejected, I ask all these things.  Amen."

Ephesians 1:11-23

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ephesians%201:11-23&version=NIV

The thought that always comes to mind when I read these is that they describe a Supreme deity;  a sovereign deity.  Is God sovereign? 

Verse 11 says “we have obtained an inheritance; we are predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to His will”.  These verses relate to salvation – inheritance, and we won’t go down the predestination path today.

I believe God certainly had a broad and definite plan for our salvation.  He willed it,  he brought it about .  So, if he had such a purpose and will in this regard, surely it would stand to reason, He does so too, in relation to what happens to us in other ways too.  The important words here are “purpose and His will”.  He works all things according to his will.  He doesn’t cause bad things to happen, but He manages it, allows it, and uses it to reveal himself to us.  Romans 8:28 declares this …. All things work together for good, for those who love him and are called to his purpose. So this passage paints a picture of a Supreme Loving Being. In these verses, we find the following:

·        Verse 11 describes God as having the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will.  Accomplishes all things;  he decides it and he does it.  All things, not just the nice stuff, but all things, according to his purpose and will.

·        immeasurable power,  verse 19;  immeasurable;  unable to be measured.  That’s the power of God.  These are dimensions which are off our scale

 

·        he raises from the dead, verse 20.  He used physical death for His purpose ie to raise us to a life far above anything we know here. And if he can raise from the dead, then he must have supreme power over everything.

·        He is seated in heaven, above every other authority;  above every other name or dominion.  Unassailable;  power over all below;  power over all that exists;  power over all that ever was and ever will be.

·        He is above every other name in this age and the next

·        He has all things under his feet.

·        Right at the end of the passage, Paul brings this picture of Supremacy full circle.  The One whose purpose is to save us, fills the earth and heaven, is also the One who can, as in Vs 22, be in His church, his body;  us;  not just in community, but dwells personally in us in all his fullness, through the HS.

So we have a picture of a supreme God, Father, son and HS.  And the hard question is “If he is supreme and loving, why does he allow awful terrible, unthinkable things to happen, especially to the very young, the innocent, the vulnerable.  Why does He allow people to be bullied, abused, oppressed;  why does he allow people to suffer?

It seems to me that the terrible things that can happen to us fall into two categories;  firstly, the things that just happen to us, out of the blue, from a seemingly random, unknown source, and secondly, the things that others do to us, which cause us pain or hurt. 

Last year, one of my daughter’s friends was killed in a car accident at.  She was a lovely young Christian woman, just 21;  married just over 12 months. A huge B-double rammed into her as she turned off the road.  On the same highway, there are people transporting drugs;  there are mafia bikie gangs;  there are crooks and pedophiles travelling on that road;  we can’t understand why this young life was taken in an instant.  Why not one of those others? This is one of those things which just seem to happen;  a freak accident that makes no sense.  We find it hard to believe in a Sovereign God who allows this sort of thing to happen.  I don’t think God causes this sort of tragedy, and  I can’t believe God deliberately sends us awful things, for our own good;  that would make him some kind of cosmic sadist.  And I guess, in the face of this type of suffering,  his sovereignty seems a fettered, beaten thing, just mopping up tragedy after the event, by bringing good out of it.  I have no answer for that, except to say that if God’s power was always used to prevent awful stuff, we would already be living in a sort of heaven.

 The second type of suffering is of the type done to us deliberately, by someone else.  Of the two, I’ve found this type harder to cope with.  The random stuff;  the stuff that seems to be nobody’s fault is less personal in a sense, and it’s easier to put it down to some mystery that God has under his care. But deliberate hurt and betrayal at the hands of someone else, is very hard to understand and come to terms with.

I’m sure, for instance, God could have made sure that one of the very many attempts to kill Hitler, succeeded. We could argue that killing him would be descending to the same level as he was.  But there’s also no denying that if one of these attempts had succeeded, especially early in the 1930’s, millions of innocent people would not have died;  war may have been avoided altogether. 

It was really uncanny how many times Hitler escaped assassination.  Perhaps the most concerted was in 1944, when a man named Claus von Stauffenberg made several attempts.  He was backed by a group of about 9000 Nazi resistance fighters.  All his attempts failed for one reason or the other;  there were other people who tried to kill Hitler too, but no-one succeeded.  Some escapes were really uncanny quirks of fate;  On one occasion, a bomb planted in a conference room went off minutes after Hitler had left the room, and he was unharmed.  On another, a bomb was placed in the lectern where he was speaking.  But he, uncharacteristically, cut his speech short and the bomb missed it’s mark.  Perhaps the quirkiest was when a bomb placed in a briefcase under the table where he was seated, went off, but Hitler was unhurt, because one of the people also seated at the table unwittingly pushed the briefcase behind a leg of the table.  The bomb went off, but the stoutness of the oak table protected him from the blast.  Others at the table were killed, but Hitler was unscathed.

I find this baffling;  that this evil man escaped death so many times, yet this lovely young Christian woman, was killed in a freak accident on the highway. Where is God in these matters? 

Why is it that sometimes evil people can go on and on with their plans, seemingly unaffected by the sovereignty of God?  I have no answer except that God cannot make someone behave with compassion and peace if they have made up their minds not to.

During the reign of Hitler, there were two brothers.  One was Hitler’s right hand man, responsible for setting up the concentration camps;  responsible for killing millions of Jews.  His name was Herman Goering.  Herman had a brother called Albert,  and Albert was responsible for saving many Jewish people.  He hated what the Nazi’s were doing to his countrymen.  He and his brother were close, despite their differences in politics and ideals.  Herman liked to show of his power to Albert and so Albert was able to use his brother’s influence and name, to free many Jewish people.  One of these was Franz Lehar.  He wrote “The Merry Widow”(that lovely operetta)  Another was the wonderful singer Joseph Schmidt.  If you haven’t heard of Joseph Schmidt, he was the Austrian equivalent of Peter Dawson.

We are given the power to overcome evil with good.  We are given a choice as to how we will behave.  God will not interfere with that free will.  God is sovereign, but he would not intervene in Herman Goering’s life, or Hitler’s life, even though it would have saved much suffering by innocent people. 

It must seem to us at times, as though God isn’t supreme. And it seems sometimes that evil people always win.  But it’s not the case.  Seasons of evil always come to an end. Consider these words from Ps 73

³For I was envious of the arrogant; I saw the prosperity of the wicked. ⁴For they have no pain; their bodies are sound and sleek. ⁵They are not in trouble as others are; they are not plagued like other people. ⁶Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them like a garment. ⁷Their eyes swell out with fatness; their hearts overflow with follies. ⁸They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. ⁹They set their mouths against heaven, and their tongues range over the earth. ¹⁰Therefore the people turn and praise them, and find no fault in them. ¹¹And they say, “How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?” ¹²Such are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches. ¹³All in vain I have kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. ¹⁴For all day long I have been plagued, and am punished every morning. ¹⁵If I had said, “I will talk on in this way,” I would have been untrue to the circle of your children. ¹⁶But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, ¹⁷until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I perceived their end. ¹⁸Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin. ¹⁹How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors!

I’ll tell you what I believe.  I believe God is sovereign.  I believe that everything is ultimately under His control, even the freak accidents and the illnesses. I think that nothing happens to us, without his saying it’s OK, or not OK.  And if it’s not OK, it doesn’t happen to us. .  I think the world, spiritual and physical, is a broken place;  almost perfect, but subject to imperfection all the time;  full of good people and bad people;  flawed and faulty, who set up flawed and faulty systems and who are at the mercy of their ambitious human nature.   The world is full of people who chose to be evil or selfish or ignorant or uncaring.  The world is also full of people who chose to be a positive force;  who are willing to help and care for others.  There are extreme examples at both ends of the spectrum, and then there’s us common, ordinary folk, who are in the middle. And even the physical world is subject to this fallen state.  Accidents happen; illnesses strike us down seemingly willy-nilly.

This can seem a short, trite answer to this most anguished question..  It’s a fairly unsatisfactory answer when we are faced with our own personal tragedy. 

But for me at least, it is, after the strident, shrieking voice of grief has calmed a little, the answer which makes sense.  God, even through accident and illness knows how many days we have, before we’ve even lived one of them.  We don’t understand it, but then God is God and we are frail humanity.  Of course we don’t understand it.  Because it’s not for us to decide these things.  God judges our hearts and numbers our days. We, his creation, cannot rule over such matters. He is the Alpha and Omega;  he has control over life and death.  We can trust him with this purpose.

When people hurt or bully us, we want God to be an avenging force, stepping in to give us victory over those who seek to destroy us.  We want God to spare us from hurt and suffering.  We want God to cause them to fall into their own traps. 

But the reality is, He often doesn’t, in any tangible way.  The limitations of our earth-life are sometimes painful and perplexing and damaging to us. Life can be messy, illogical, difficult, challenging, scary, depressing, fragile, unpredictable.  The only way we can get through it with joy, is by inviting Jesus to walk the journey with us. God allows evil to touch us but He never leaves us to cope with it on our own.  God’s power is to be found amidst our suffering;  comforting, triumphant and restorative. He has his own purposes, but He always has our spiritual well-being in mind, despite the pain sometimes of our physical, mental and emotional circumstances

May God himself attend us, as we wrestle with the hard questions of life.  Amen

Injustice and bullying

In the movies, justice pretty much always wins out in the end;  the man always gets his girl;  the baddie gets his come-uppance and it nearly always ends happily ever after.. In my experience, this almost never happens in real life;  very often, it’s injustice which triumphs.  What do we do when injustice happens to us personally.

 

God gives us guidelines on how to behave when injustice happens to us. 

Some years ago, I was bullied in my workplace.  In fact, I hate to admit it, but I've been bullied in just about every place I've ever worked. I suppose I feel it makes me some kind of tragic wuss. The meek are indeed blessed. But they are also easily bullied.  What we do and how we behave in the face of injustice will probably depend on our personality, our value system and whether we have some kind of backup.  I didn’t have any backup;  I was on my own.  The  thing I found with workplace bullying,is that people are very often cowards, when faced with injustice inflicted on someone else. They will not speak out;  they will pretend it doesn’t exist; they don’t want to get involved; they will just keep their heads down.  Another aspect of injustice, is that the perpetrator will always pick on someone already vulnerable.  When this happened to me, I chose to flee, because I had no backup;  because I had several other awful things happening in my life at the time;  because I’m not a fighter and because the people bullying me loved a good fight and I knew I couldn’t win. So I left that workplace.

But the fleeing or the fighting aside, we still have to deal with this injustice in our own souls and hearts and minds.  Unless we deal with it, we can become angry and begin to carry a grudge.    Fight or flee; whatever the outcome,  ultimately we have to let go of the resentment and hurt it has caused, if we are to live victoriously, lovingly.  Resentment held, will pollute the rest of our lives. But how do we deal with it?

We must, in our own time confront what has happened to us.  Meet it head on.   We have to embark on a journey of coping which will end when we accept what has happened to us and lay it to rest.  It’s painful doing this. But never confronting the hurt, or pretending it didn’t happen, keeps it alive, because it festers away inside.   If we run from the awful feelings, anxiety can set in.

We can cry out to God about the injustice of it; God is big;  he can accept us however angry we are;  however victimised or hard-done-by we feel.  When our emotions are plundered and battered by suffering, he can meet us at the foot of the cross, and take it from us.  Conjure up a mind picture of yourself taking the pain of injustice, and giving it up to him.  He is well acquainted with suffering, and will not turn away.

On a practical level, we can talk to others, either friends, family, trained counsellors.  We can confess our failure to God too, because there will be times, in this grappling with injustice, when we behave and think in ways which are less than noble.

Be careful though; dwelling on injustice, without attempt at healing, bringing it to the surface of our minds, constantly nursing it without the light of Christ’s mercy to heal and banish it, breeds resentment, thoughts of reprisal, and prejudice.  We have to deal with whatever injustice has befallen us, then pack it away in the tin trunks of our hearts, and go on. We have to allow God to heal us;  to surrender to his way of doing things;  to be obedient to his Word, ie bless those who hurt us; pray for those who spitefully use us. Pay back evil, with good.  I didn't say it was easy! This is especially important with people who are close to us.  When I was bullied at work, after the process of fleeing and crying and healing and taking up my life again, I could leave those people in the past.  But it’s different when the people we feel have wronged us, are those of our families or friends.  And the sting of injustice felt in families, can often be traced to some sleight over material things, or money.

When I was a little girl, in a small rural town, we used to visit my mother’s sister and brother in another small rural town half an hour away.    In my aunty and uncle’s little weatherboard cottage , there was a beautiful red cedar dresser.  It had belonged to my grandmother, and had been passed to her son (my mum’s brother).  It was huge;  it took up almost the entire wall of their little front room, and reached almost to the ceiling.  It was ornate;  the patina of it’s ruby lustre was just lovely.  It was a thing of elegance and beauty.  On one occasion, on the way home, my mother said “I wonder what will happen to that dresser when my brother dies?” He was 21 years older than her.  He eventually died, and the dresser stayed in his house until his wife also died.  But then it transpired that the dresser had been given to a family friend.  My mother was dismayed at the thought of this beautiful possession not coming back to the family.  She felt it should have come to her, or at least her sister.  She grieved over that dresser, but not a word was said to the friends;  she simply accepted that this was how it had been disposed of, and she didn’t let it cause fights or words between the family or the friend. She did not let money or mere chattels come between relationships.  It wasn’t spoken of again. Graciousness is a good stratagem in soothing the sting of injustice.

And that brings me to the next coping skill.  We must forgive those who visit injustice upon us. To forgive is the very bedrock of Christian faith.

Some of you may remember the case of John Button. In 1963, at the age of 19, he had an argument with his girlfriend, Rosemary.  She got out of the car they were in, and walked off in anger.  When John Button caught up with her a little while later, he found her, in the darkness, lying dead on the road.  He was convicted of her murder and spent 5 years in gaol. A year after his conviction, the real killer, a serial murderer, confessed to her killing, but he was not believed, even though he stated this many times, including a written confession, just before he was hanged for the murder of other people. John Button spent another 5 years on parole, and it took 37 more years before his conviction was quashed.

But Rosemary’s mother could not forgive him.  For years after, even in the face of the other man’s confession, she continued to blame John Button, saying “he took my daughter out, and he didn’t bring her home. It’s his fault she’s dead”.  She clung to that emotional decision, until her death. Her unwillingness to forgive was heaping more injustice on John Button, and it imprisoned her too.  It added to the pain they had both suffered.

When people have hurt us, we cannot really forgive in our own strength.  That’s why God tells us to pray for them. We may not always be able to do this with conviction and a heartfelt surge of goodwill towards them, but we can say to God “I don’t want to pray for this person but I do, because you’ve commanded me to”. And the way I do it is this;  I distance myself from the emotional side of things, step away, and I pray just with my mind.  Our hearts and emotions have to be a bit suspended from the hurt of it. But when we can say this, something close to miraculous begins to happen. It may take a while;  it may take some painful searching and honest reflection, especially if the injustice is very big and has impacted us terribly.  It may take years. There will be times of anger and railing against the injustice of it, but God will create in us something we can’t do for ourselves. He will give us victory over the hurt and the injustice;  our forgiveness will dissolve rancour;  our resentment will be replaced by goodwill;  for angst we will be given peace. Over time - and remember that once God has begun a good work in us, he will bring it to completion…the final healing may not come until we are resurrected with him in heaven, but the promise is that he will do it;   over time, constantly bringing these terrible injustices to His light shining from the cross, allows us to forgive.  And as this transformation occurs, you will be changed, as the bible says, from glory to glory.  You will have taken into your heart, the very divinity of God’s character;  the wonderful wings of His overcoming Spirit.  Why do you think those verses about praying for people who use and abuse us are in the Bible? Is it to make life hard for us?  No, it’s because God knows if we cling to our injustices, we become slaves to them. They become like big river stones in our pockets, weighing down our spirit-life.  He knows that injustice and forgiveness have to be bed fellows.  He knows that the sister of forgiveness ,is graciousness, and that the one who overlooks a transgression seeks love. He knows that for justice to prevail in our lives, even if we’ve experienced the gravest of inequality or prejudice, we must forgive the perpetrator.

Because on that glorious resurrection day, the Christ won’t ask us “how did you treat the dresser in your life?” or  “How much was that dresser worth?” He will ask us “how did you treat the person who denied you the dresser?  Did you forgive that person who used or abused you?  Were you noble and loving in the face of injustice?  Did you speak out for others who suffered injustice? These are the things which are important to God.  These are the things which will clothe us through eternity.  God’s kingdom is not about stuff, or how much of it we accumulate in our life;  it’s not about status or whether we get back in kind what we give, or about always winning or coming out on top in an argument.  It’s about servanthood and self-sacrifice;  it’s about love and forgiveness, in the face of injustice.  That’s how justice prevails.  And God, who is just, will give us our reward in heaven.