Justice is a word that gets used a lot, but isn’t always thought about. It is good to remember that justice is not an abstract ideal, but rather one of the virtues which we are meant to practice daily. Properly speaking, in fact, justice is defined as giving each person what is their due. Everyone is entitled to life, and so taking an innocent person’s life is always unjust, for example. That seems reasonably obvious and has some equally obvious implications for how we treat one another. What can be less obvious in how this applies to our relationship with God.
St Thomas Aquinas said that there is a part of the virtue of justice that applies to God: religion. Religion, properly understood, is us giving to God what is His due. We can understand that easily enough in the context of worship; but St James, in our second reading this week, shows us some other aspects that we, in company with the Pharisees in the Gospel, can easily forget.
True religion, he says, involves keeping ourselves uncontaminated by the world. This is not a case of withdrawing from the world into a little enclave of our own. It is our call to recognise that God is to be the centre of our lives. When we hear the world saying “this is the most important thing” or “you should obsess about this”, whether it be possessions or experiences or status, we should not let that dictate to us or control us. What is proper for us is that we respond to God, who made us in His image and likeness, and loves us completely, by ensuring that our relationship with Him is the most important thing in our lives.
The temptation, however, is to think, like the Pharisees, that this means concentrating on prayers and rituals. These are important, but they are only part of the story. St James points out the other part: coming to the aid of widows and orphans, by extension, all those in need. God, after all, does not need anything from us. So He gives us those who are in need, our brothers and sisters. As Jesus told us, if we do it for them, we do it for Him.
Just as we shouldn’t regard going to Mass as an obligation, but rather a wonderful opportunity to come together with our brothers and sisters to say ‘thank you’ to God. So also we should not regard those in need as an inconvenience, or a burden, but rather our chance to give to God what we owe, to be in the truest sense religious.
Fr Chris Denham
