Guilt Driven Justice
If we’re honest with ourselves, many of us do acts of justice out of a sense of guilt. We see ads on TV for a compassion ministry that reaches out to kids in the third world and feel bad for them. Then we realize we’re watching that ad on our fancy LCD Televisions and we start to feel those uneasy pangs of guilt. So we silence that guilt by donating some money.
Is that really justice?
Rick McKinley recently wrote an article over at Christianity Today called Why We Do Justice that explores the interplay between justice and guilt.
Here are his own words on the subject:
It is easy to see the victims of injustice as “those” people who have a need. We have a resource. We believe that if we use our resource to meet their need, our guilt will be removed. This means we have a need too—the need to not feel guilty. Are our efforts toward justice really about loving others, or are they about alleviating our guilt? Or perhaps we are both using each other to have our own needs met.
In truth, justice isn’t about guilt. Guilt is too easy. Justice is about God and what we believe about him. If we are going to move away from guilt-driven efforts, we must root our hearts and our imaginations in the deeply significant theology at the heart of the gospel. There is a question that we have to wrestle to the ground: How are we to see the “other”?
McKinley goes on to argue that when we practice justice born out of love we find instead of blessing others, we are blessed. He tells the story of a man named Bruce who served the homeless every Saturday. Through loving and learning from the men and woman he was serving he realized all of humanity is in need of God’s grace and mercy. He started seeing them as equals rather than as “others” and found himself blessed by them.
Have you had similar experiences? Have you gone to serve someone and found yourself the recipient of the blessing? Do you think that a guilty conscience can be a good thing when it comes to justice?
hmm.this is interesting. i mean i believe that because i feel guilty i give, but it really doesn’t mean anything when I do it out of guilt. more than likely it is just for selfish reasons. It is more to better myself than to serve others and that motivation is not good.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that service motivated by guilt is worthless or selfish. Many times our motivations are mixed. And if we sat on our behinds and didn’t serve God or work for justice, we would experience guilt. It may be what God uses to get us off our behinds.
So I would say that it’s still justice.
I would agree, however, that guilt is an inferior motive to love. Guilt might get us going in the first place, and then as we mature, and as we fall in love with God and with those we serve, and we develop habits of service, love takes over.
I wonder if Phil 1:18 applies at all here: “whether in pretense or truth, Christ be proclaimed…”
Alan, I think you hit the nail on the head with this:
“that guilt is an inferior motive to love. Guilt might get us going in the first place, and then as we mature, and as we fall in love with God and with those we serve, and we develop habits of service, love takes over.”
Good thoughts!