A Reflection for Tuesday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
Kindness and truth shall meet;
justice and peace shall kiss.
Around ten years ago, after Michael Brown was shot on Canfield Drive in Ferguson, I started going to protests for racial justice. It was there that I first heard—and chanted—“No justice, no peace.” The phrase was rife with different meanings that would cycle through my mind as I chanted: It meant that justice was a prerequisite for peace; it meant, more threateningly, that if justice were not served, we would not be “peaceful,” meaning complacent; and that, in fact, any appearance of peace is false while injustice persists. I also found hope in its homophonic counterpart: “Know justice, know peace.” When we finally have the one, we will have the other.
It’s a phrase I think of often when I hear Psalm 85, which is included in today’s readings: “Kindness and truth shall meet; justice and peace shall kiss.”
At the first session of the synod on synodality last year, one of the most intense conversations focused on the question of the relationship between love and truth—a question that brought the inclusion of LGBT Catholics to the forefront of the conversation. How should the church, delegates were asked, balance the challenge of preaching the church’s teaching (“truth”) on same-sex relationships with pastoral welcoming (“love”)?
The proper answer, of course, is that the two coexist in what Henri de Lubac would call a “paradox of faith”—two things that seem to be opposed, but that in the Christian worldview, in fact support one another like two playing cards balanced against each other. The balance is delicate, difficult to find and easy to upset, but it is possible.
The other classic example of such a paradox in the Christian life is the relationship between justice and mercy—seemingly opposed, but able to be balanced perfectly, if only by God.
Today’s readings are all about peace, concluding with a forceful Gospel warning us to be ready for God’s return. Reflecting on them, I began to feel that there might be a synthesis between the paradoxical relationship of justice with mercy and the mutually embracing relationship of justice and peace. Perhaps we will finally know peace when we learn how to balance justice with mercy, neither lacking one nor the other.
