“The justice of God has been manifested through faith in Jesus Christ” (Rom 3, 21-22). Justice is the dominant theme of this year’s Lenten message of the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI.

Justice is one of the leading and most contested topics nowadays. Within the Christian perspective, justice is not “to render to every man his due”, as the third century Roman jurist Ulpian proposed it to be. The Judeo-Christian tradition asserts that justice embraces a vertical and horizontal exodus of the self towards the other. In fact, the Hebrew word for justice, sedaqah, essentially means, in Pope Benedict’s explanation, “on the one hand full acceptance of the will of the God of Israel; on the other hand, equity in relation to one’s neighbour (cf. Ex 20, 12-17), especially the poor, the stranger, the orphan and the widow (cf. Dt 10, 18-19). But the two meanings are linked because giving to the poor for the Israelite is none other than restoring what is owed to God, who had pity on the misery of His people”. Thus, within this biblical mindset, to enter into God’s justice suggests being of service to those who are suffering any kind of injustice.

In his loving mercy, God has already been just to us. When he saw the fragmentation and death that we brought upon us due to our obstinate and thwarted ethos of self-sufficiency and self-closure he sent his Son Jesus to redeem us. “God has paid for us the price of the exchange in His Son, a price that is truly exorbitant.” Hence, during this year’s Lent we are called to espouse God’s justice. But how are we to do that?

In the mass of imposition of ashes in Ash Wednesday, the liturgy provides us with a powerful formula: “Repent and believe in the Gospel”. Repenting and believing is equivalent to converting. The latter entails an exodus from sin and a profound journeying in grace. In his weekly audience of February 17, the Bishop of Rome gave an ample exposition of the reality of conversion. For Pope Benedict, “to be converted means to change direction along the way of life – not for a slight adjustment, but a true and total change of direction. Conversion is to go against the current, where the ‘current’ is a superficial lifestyle, inconsistent and illusory, which often draws us, controls us and makes us slaves of evil, or in any case prisoners of moral mediocrity. With conversion, instead, one aims to the lofty measure of Christian life; we are entrusted to the living and personal Gospel, which is Christ Jesus. His person is the final goal and the profound meaning of conversion; he is the way which we are called to follow in life, allowing ourselves to be illumined by his light and sustained by his strength that moves our steps. In this way conversion manifests its most splendid and fascinating face: It is not a simple moral decision to rectify our conduct of life, but it is a decision of faith, which involves us wholly in profound communion with the living and concrete person of Jesus”.

The papal lenten message of this year greatly inspires us in how to convert to God’s justice in order to live profoundly our christian calling. “Conversion to Christ, believing in the Gospel, ultimately means this: to exit the illusion of self-sufficiency in order to discover and accept one’s own need – the need of others and God, the need of His forgiveness and His friendship”. A disposed reception of the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist has the power to instill in each one of us the much needed virtue of humility, so as to “accept that I need Another to free me from “what is mine,” to give me gratuitously “what is His... Thanks to Christ’s action, we may enter into the ‘greatest’ justice, which is that of love (cf. Rm 13, 8-10), the justice that recognises itself in every case more a debtor than a creditor, because it has received more than could ever have been expected.”

It is when we undergo God’s justice that we are in a splendid position to bring about an effective change in our society. A change characterized by according to every citizen his/her proper human dignity in and through an attitude of justice empowered by christian love.

Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap

San Gwann