I was reminded this morning, from an unlikely source, why I first chose to go on the World Race.
Not being a very frequent movie watcher, it was with a marked sense of surprise that this morning found me popping a DVD into my laptop and getting cozy in one of our living room recliners. The movie was Titus, a retelling of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, which I had borrowed the day before from my oldest sister. While it is unusual for me to watch movies at all (especially alone on a Saturday morning), it is even more unusual for them to make such a strong impression on me. However, Titus snuck past my defenses, and hit home in a way that movies rarely do.
This play tells the story of a victorious Roman general, Titus Andronicus, who returns to Rome only to experience profound betrayal at the hands of the new emperor whose rule he recently helped to establish. In one of the most vivid portrayals of injustice that I have seen, the majority of the Andronici family is murdered, tortured, banished, raped, or disfigured under the authority of the emperor and his vindictive wife. In scene after scene of mounting misuse, my heart broke for Titus and revolted against the royal family at whose hand he suffered so Jobially. Exceeding both A Clockwork Orange and Jango Unchained (my previous top two) in disturbing content, several of the scenes in Titus brought me close to nausea, and even closer to tears. To put it simply, this was a very difficult movie to watch in more ways than one, and I would not recommend it to very many people.
However, with that being said, I am very glad to have watched it. Through the palpable injustice which underlies so much of Titus, I am reminded of why I first chose to go on the World Race. When I watch the Andronici family be torn apart by a heartless ruler, I am reminded that my own political safety is a surprising anomaly, not the historical norm. When I see Titus' sons murdered, and his daughter raped and disfigured, the throbbing knot in my stomach reminds me that those same scenes are replayed throughout the world untold times each day. When I feel myself tempted to tears at this fictional account, I remember how intricately within my heart God has wound a hatred and rejection of injustice — a hatred which he intends to motivate me to passionately fight for the cause of justice in the real world.
Yet…in the face of all that is wrong — of oppressive governments and corrupt legal systems, of misuse, abuse, and exploitation — I find myself echoing Titus' final, despairing cry:
Terras Astraea reliquit [The goddess of justice has left the earth]:
Be you remember'd, Marcus, she's gone, she's fled.
Go sound the ocean, and cast your nets;
Happily you may catch her in the sea;
Yet there's as little justice as at land:
And, sith there's no justice in earth nor hell,
We will solicit heaven and move the gods
To send down Justice for to wreak our wrongs.
But even as I utter them, these words catch in my mouth and falter, and in their place goose bumps spread across my body with the realization that the God of Justice has not left the earth, but come to it — that it is not I who solicit justice, but Justice Incarnate who first solicited me — that redemption is no longer something to be hoped for, but something to be remembered.
Only in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ do I find a suitable response to the reality of injustice. It is not into the clouds of abstraction, but precisely into this great void of injustice that we hear the echoes of Him who says both, "It is finished," and "Behold, I am making all things new." The first, uttered in a moment of agony and seeming defeat; the latter, decreed royally at the end of all time. Yet when understood in conjunction, these two statements provide us with an "inaugurated eschatology" which drives those "who believe…in God making a whole new world in which everything will be set right at last, [to be] unstoppably motivated to work for that new world in the present" (N.T. Wright). It is precisely because of the historical nature and the eschatological implications of Jesus' death and resurrection, that I may have the reason, hope, and certainty necessary to work for the realization of the redemption of this world through resisting injustice.
And it is only thus that I can read Isaiah 1:17 ("Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause) not merely as an exhortation, but as something so much more powerful — an invitation.
I would like to end with the following extended quote from a book titled Theology of Hope by Jürgen Mortmann (I'm sorry if this is a really long, boring quote, but I think it's so fascinating and relevant…But don't feel bad if you stop reading at this point):
If hope draws faith into the realm of thought and of life, then it can no longer consider itself to be an eschatalogical hope as distinct from minor hopes that are directed towards attainable goals and visible changes in human life, niether can it as a result dissasociate itself from such hopes by relegating them to a different sphere while considering its own future to be supra-worldly and purely spiritual in character. The Christian hope is directed towards a novum ultimum, towards a new creation of all things by the God of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It thereby opens a future outlook that embraces all things, including also death, and into this it can and must alsop take the limited hopes of a renewal of life, stimulating them, relativizing them, giving them direction.
It will destroy the presumption in these hopes of better human freedom, of successful life, of justice and dignity for our fellow men, of control of the possibilities of nature, because it does not find in these movements the salvation it awaits, because it refuses to let the entertaining and realizing of utopian ideas of this kind reconcile it with existence. It will thus outstrip these future visions of a better, more humane, more peaceable world — because of its own ‘better promises’ (Heb. 8.6), because it knows that nothing can be ‘very good’ until ‘all things are become new’. But it will not be in the name of ‘calm despair’ that it seeks to destroy the presumption in these movements of hope, for such kinds of presumption still contain more of true hope than does skeptical realism, and more truth as well. There is no help against presumption to be found in the despair that says, ‘It will always be the same in the end’, but only in a persevering, rectifying hope that finds articulated expression in thought and action. Realism, still less cynicism, was never a good ally of Christian faith. But if the Christian hope destroys the presumption in futuristic movements, then it does so not for its own sake, but in order to destroy in these hopes the seeds of resignation, which emerge at the latest with the ideological reign of terror in the utopias in which the hoped-for reconciliation with existence becomes an enforced reconciliation. This, however, brings the movements of historic change within the range of the novum ultimum of hope. They are taken up into the Christian hope and carried further. They become precursory, and therewith provisional, movements. Their goals lose the utopian fixity and become provisional, penultimate, and hence flexible goals.
Over against impulses of this kind that seek to give direction to the history of mankind, Christian hope cannot cling rigidly to the past and the given and ally itself with the utopia of the status quo. Rather, it is itself summoned and empowered to creative transformation of reality, for it has hope for the whole of reality. Finally, the believing hope will itself provide inexhaustible resources for the creative, inventive imagination of love. It constantly provokes and produces thinking of an anticipatory kind in love to man and the world, in order to give shape to the newly dawning possibilities in the light of the promised future, in order as far as possible to create here the best that is possible, because what is promised is within the bounds of possibility. Thus it will constantly arouse the ‘passion for the possible’, inventiveness and elasticity in self-transformation, in breaking with the old and coming to terms with the new.
