Theology Today - Vol 36, No. 4 - January 1980 - ARTICLE

498 - Peace: The Fruit of Justice

"Until the Spirit is poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness becomes a fruitful field, and the fruitful field is deemed a forest. Then justice will dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness abide in the fruitful field. And the fruit of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, undisturbed security forever."
-Isaiah 32:15-17

Peace: The Fruit of Justice
By Philip Potter

THIS IS ONE of the many prophetic statements of the vision of a new world of people and of nature. It is relevant for us today. The key words here are righteousness, justice, peace, and undisturbed security.

Familiar words, all too familiar. But in their Hebrew forms, they are packed with meaning. Righteousness, tsedeq, comes from a Semitic word which means to be straight, firm, steel-like, as opposed to evil, rasha, to be loose or slack, to ignore or forget. To be just is to be straight, right, attentive, being and acting according to one's inner being, having integrity of character. For example, the Arabic equivalent of tsedeq is used to describe a date which is fully mature, which tastes as it ought to taste. This is precisely what God has been. God is revealed as utterly true and utterly faithful because God promises good to the Covenant people. God has been concerned about their highest interests and concerned that the divine image in them should be realized. God therefore demands that the people should be righteous, have integrity of being before God and in their dealings with each other as sharing a common humanity. As John Skinner says, for the prophets, righteousness "includes a large hearted construction of the claims of humanity; it is … the humanitarian virtue par excellence." Therefore, to be righteous is to be fully human, firm, strong, integrated into God's purpose of good for others and for the whole of creation. Justice (mishpat) comes from the verb to judge, and has the sense of behaving according to God's declared righteous will, practicing fair dealing. Justice is the

Dr. Philip Potter is General Secretary of the World Council of Churches. Prior to assuming this post in 1972, he served as secretary and executive secretary of the Youth Department of the World Council of Churches, as a pastor in Haiti, and as overseas secretary of the Student Christian Movement. This article was originally an address to a meeting of the Peace Fellowships of the United Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church in the U.S., held in Kansas City in May 1979 in conjunction with the two denominations' General Assemblies.

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day-to-day conduct of one who is righteous. It is righteousness in action.

Peace, shalom, means entirety, totality, wholeness; it is the undisturbed freedom of life and movement, the unchecked growth and expansion of the self; it is the state prevailing in those who are united in acting together for the common good; it represents the Hebrew conception of history as harmonious community. It does not mean just absence of conflict and war, but rather the state in which all human beings and all things are able to be and fulfill themselves unchecked and undisturbed.

Security, betach, means being able to trust one another, to abandon oneself to mutual confidence. Related to it in the text is the word quietness, shaqet, which means being undisturbed, unchecked.

What the prophet is saying is that in the chaos of injustice, conflict and war, God pours out his life-giving and power-enabling Spirit, as God did at creation. There, at the beginning, in the chaos God created order and in the void God created form and substance through the Spirit. What God created God called good. Above all God created man and woman in the divine image to deal with creation in a spirit of good and to replenish the earth for good. Now there is chaos, the evil which humanity has brought on the earth. Things have become slack and loose. There is no firmness, no sense of wholeness, no trust or security among people. Creation itself is out of joint, despoiled and in danger of being destroyed. In this situation God sends the Spirit to bring righteousness, justice, peace, and undisturbed security among men and women and in creation itself which becomes fruitful. It is all God's work, not ours. This is basic for our endeavors for justice and peace. We can never achieve them ourselves. We can only receive them from God as a gift according to God's design. But what is God's gift is also our work as those made in the image of God.

The prophet says at the beginning of this chapter 32:

Behold, a king shall reign in righteousness, and his rulers rule with justice, and a man shall be a refuge from the wind and a shelter from the tempest, like streams of water in a dry ground, like the shade of a great rock in a weary land (Isa. 32:1-2).

What is God's gift is humanity's task. The king and the rulers are representatives of what everyone should be-righteous and just, having integrity and dealing rightly with others according to God's will and action. The prophet provides a beautiful image of what this means. In the storms which arise in the desert, it is good to have a rock which can provide refuge from the wind and shelter from the storm. Moreover, the rock prevents the ground from becoming dried out and so arrests the drift of the soil into the desert. What the prophet is saying is that a righteous, just person is one who is of rocklike character, who prevents the drift into chaos and disaster, who provides shelter and becomes a

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source of growth for others. Note how justice is related to fruitful soil and the right use of creation. A just society depends on just persons of rocklike integrity. No less is required of us.

In our discussion on war and peace, on militarism, the arms race and disarmament, we often spend a great deal of energy analyzing the various situations and making proposals about what needs to be done. We have not sufficiently emphasised the absolute importance of personal involvement and responsibility. That has been the genius of bodies like the Peace Fellowships and the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. We have become so overwhelmed by systems, structures, powers, the faceless men and women, and the frightening dimensions of the conflicts in our world, that we are inclined to lose a sense of our personal and corporate responsibility. This is what the prophet is saying to us. God's design and promise demand that we are each and all engaged in God's work of justice and peace. At the Special Session of the U.N. General Assembly on Disarmament in 1978, I said:

Disarmament is not the affair of statesmen and experts only, but of every man and woman of every nation. We are dealing here with the issues of life and death for humankind. They are not technical, but human and therefore political issues. This means that every effort must be made to dispel the ignorance, complacency, and fear which prevail. Political decisions can only be made when people are fully aware of the facts and are enabled to discern the options before them. This is a necessary function which non-governmental organizations can perform. The churches have a very distinctive role to play because they have the criterion of faith in the God of hope whose purpose is that all should be responsible for each other in justice and peace. Therefore they will continue to rouse the conscience of people and encourage them to demonstrate by attitude, word, and act that peace and justice are not ideals to be cherished but realities to be achieved. The arms race is the decision and creation of human beings. Disarmament must also be willed and won by human beings.

What kind of persons are we called to be who work for peace as the achieved work of justice? Put in another way, what are the human causes and cure of injustice and conflicts? This is precisely what the prophet seeks to face in this chapter. He says that when each person practices justice and is rocklike in integrity of character:

Then the eyes of those who see will not be closed, and the ears of those who hear will listen. The anxious heart will understand and know, and the tongue of the stammerers will speak readily and distinctly (Isa. 32:3-4).

What the prophet is saying is that in the struggle for justice and peace, one of the big stumbling blocks is when people refuse to see the issues and to hear about the realities around them. He puts it more precisely when he appeals to the women as representative of this tragic human habit:

Rise up, you women who are at ease, hear my voice; you complacent young women, give ear to my speech. In little more than a year you will shudder, you

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complacent women; for the vintage will fail, the fruit harvest will not come. Tremble, you women who are at ease, shudder, you complacent ones; strip, and make yourselves bare, and gird sackcloth upon your loins (Isa. 32:9-1 1).

What the prophet is describing so graphically has been the experience of our lifetime. In spite of World War I and the depression of the early 1930s, the Western world remained at ease and complacent, seeing and yet refusing to see, hearing and yet refusing to listen. The result was World War II and the holocaust. The biggest danger of our consumer societies, both economically and in terms of the mass media, is that we just accept things as they are, that we refuse to probe deeper into things and so work for change. This is particularly the case at present with regard to the arms race. The tendency is to feel that nothing can be done about it, and all we can do is to wait for the holocaust which will engulf us all. In the meantime, we will take our ease and be complacent, though deep down there is a sense of fatalism, fear, and despair. In other societies, tyrants and militarists make sure that people neither see nor hear and are left with their anxious hearts and stammering tongues, unable to understand and know and speak up.

The challenge to us who are bearers of justice and peace is to seek the power of the Spirit to enable people to see, speak, and listen in love. For it is precisely this which marks us out as human beings made in the image of God. When people cannot or will not speak or listen, then they lose their humanity-and that is the absence of justice and peace and security. As Rosenstock-Huessy taught us, "God is the power who makes us speak." We experience God and therefore come into the sphere of justice and peace when we can reach beyond ourselves in solidarity with others, rather than sit at ease and in complacency, and when we can speak the word which needs to be said and listen to what is being spoken to us. It is in such speaking and listening that we can move into the future, God's future of justice and peace.

This can be perceived in the current talk of national security. It has been exalted into a dogma which is employed to justify arms build-ups, military take-overs, the suppression of civilian political institutions and the violation of human rights. In the defense of "law and order" sinister instruments of torture, police and prison hardware, and sophisticated means of intelligence gathering have been produced. Moreover, in the name of national security, the mass media and educational institutions are frequently misused to foster a psychosis of fear and mistrust and to prevent any other way of looking at the resolution of conflicts than in military terms. Indeed, national security becomes a means of muzzling and blinding people.

As I said to the U.N. General Assembly in 1978, "we must challenge the idol of a distorted concept of national security which is directed to encouraging fear and mistrust resulting in greater insecurity. The only security worthy of its name lies in enabling people to participate fully in

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the life of their nation and to establish relations of trust between peoples of different nations. It is only when there is a real dialogue-a sharing of life with life in mutual trust and respect-that there can be true security." That is the sense of righteousness and justice which results in unrestricted, undisturbed security.

The prophet goes on to say that the person who becomes righteous and just and who is enabled to see, speak, and listen displays a clear-eyed discernment of the real nature of people and things. Once more the prophet puts the issue very realistically. He says:

The fool will no more be called noble, nor the knave said to be honourable. For the fool speaks folly, and his mind plots iniquity; to practise ungodliness, to utter error concerning the Lord. He starves the hungry of food, and refuses drink to the thirsty. The knaveries of the knave are evil; he devises wicked plans to ruin the poor with lying words, and deny justice to the needy. But the person who is noble devises noble things, and by noble things stands firm (Isa. 32: 5-8).

One of the most astonishing things about our unstable and unjust world is the way in which realities are covered up and false estimates and values are made about them. The powerful cover up their folly and villainy by high-sounding names and postures. Things are not called by their proper names. For example, the ideologies of capitalism and communism are used as slogans to hide various forms of national self-interest. Whenever and wherever people revolt against oppression-whether racial, economic, or political-the slogans are immediately invoked. The Americans and Westerners accuse them of being communists and that becomes an excuse for supporting tyrants and knaves. The Russians and socialist states call them running dogs of capitalist imperialism and so justify their brutal suppression of peoples or imprisonment of persons.

Furthermore, there is the conventional wisdom of the various ideologies which leave no room for examination or change. One glaring example of this is South Africa which claims to be defending Christian values and civilization and the sacred system of free enterprise by practicing apartheid and ruthlessly oppressing the black people. Western investments and arms sales help to maintain the racist system, and the rationale which is given is that these steps defend capitalist free enterprise against the encroachment of communist collectivism.

In this situation words and values lose their meaning and people are so confused that they are no longer able to discern the issues. And so, injustice and armed conflict, as well as senseless violence, result.

The prophet is calling on us to have the moral insight and courage to expose this folly and villainy which "ruin the poor with lies and deny justice to the needy." To be just and to seek peace is to be noble, i.e., open-hearted, open-handed, magnanimous, firm, having integrity, calling things by their proper names, and treating human beings humanly, not ignoring or separating ourselves from them.

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Victor Hugo wrote: "There are no weeds in society, only bad cultivators." The vision of a just society is the challenge to be just persons, to let ourselves be guided and governed, enlivened and empowered by the Spirit of God. Jesus, the embodiment of justice and peace, told us: "Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the children of God." In seeking to make peace we are placing ourselves in the way of God's will and so are fulfilling God's design that we become truly human and just and be God's children by sharing this life with our brothers and sisters. For as the apostle Paul says in Romans 8:19: "The whole creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God."

I have used Isaiah 32 as a guide in talking about peace, harmonious community, and security, as the achieved work of righteousness and justice because it is so relevant to the deepest issues concerning justice and peace. I want to end with the last verse of that chapter, as well as a paraphrase of it by a nineteenth century commentator: "Happy are you who sow beside all waters, who let the feet of the ox and the ass range free" (Isa. 32:20). "Happy are they who go steadily on, doing the work committed to them by God, alike in storm and in sunshine, confiding in the righteousness of God." That is the way of justice and peace.