When Life’s not Fair, What to Do?

“That’s not fair!!” cries the brother as the sister seems to get away with something that he could not.  What’s the parental response?  At best it’s simply to say, “Life’s not fair.”  And it’s true.  It’s not.

There are incongruities, inconsistencies, and imbalances in life that certainly seem unfair.  Too much rain and flooding over there, not enough rain and drought over here.  Bad people seem to have all the luck while good people get trounced.  Or the guilty go free and the innocent are found guilty.  Lopsided, contorted, twisted, uneven and imbalanced, that’s life.  Life is not fair.  What to do?

Remember the Biblical injunction, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth….”?  (See Exodus 21:24.)  The point was not to emphasize retaliation but to restrain it.  Because, when it comes to demanding payback for harm done to us, we tend to multiply exponentially: You take my arm; in retaliation I want your arm and your two legs as well.  We tend to be that way.  It’s no wonder that God says, “Vengeance is mine.”  (See Romans 12:19.)

So, Biblically speaking, we humans are unjust by nature.  Though we have the natural instinct to demand justice for ourselves, we don’t seem to have the natural instinct for giving it to others—it is learned behavior that must be studied and developed.  If you don’t believe this, the next time your child behaves unjustly toward his/her sibling, don’t bother stepping-in to correct or teach the child, just say to yourself, “Don’t worry, he will become fair and just on his own without my having to teach him a thing about it.”  Right!!

Minimally, the least we could do in this unjust world is to avoid adding to life’s inequities and try bringing justice where we can, when we can.  But to do even that, we should probably understand the basic nature of justice itself: understand its source, its character, and its purpose.

Let’s begin with its purpose.  What is the point of justice?  What is justice trying to “get at”?  The purpose of justice is to keep us true to the value of human worth, to keep us respectful of human dignity.  All humans are to be respected, valued, and honored for who and what they are as fellow Humans Beings.  Hence, Human Beings are not to be hurt, harmed, trashed, degraded and dumped, or otherwise de-humanized by any means without consequence.  Ergo, anything that we do to another human-being that gratuitously devalues, hurts, degrades, or otherwise harms, is unjust.  Such injustice must be made right, be corrected because of the victim’s value and worth as a fellow human being.

If the purpose of justice is to keep sacrosanct human dignity and value, what is its nature or character?  That is, what are the necessary ingredients that go into the making of a just cause or act?  In short, when we act, work, play, relate, negotiate, or connect with others in any form, what do we hope to receive from each other?  What we want from each other is truth, integrity, honesty, transparency, equality, respect, dignity, and reciprocated personal value and trust.

Relationships are hindered at best, broken and destroyed at worse, without these basic relational ingredients.  Without these things, we feel cheated and ill-treated or unjustly used.  Hence, the essential nature of justice has to do with relational dynamics as described by such words as respect, honor, dignity, integrity, honesty, faithfulness, truth, trust, loyalty, and love.  That is to say: When these things are happening, justice is happening.

So, what is the source of justice, its foundation?  Ask yourself: Why should we value any Human Being?  Think about it.  Our worth can’t come from Nature itself, not really.  And it really can’t come from our own selves.  We can’t validate ourselves by self-proclamation; as if to simply claim it automatically makes it so.  It doesn’t work that way.  For, what do we do when other humans counter our claim and pronounce us to be scum, trash, and less than human—as has so often been done by one group of humans to another group of humans throughout human history?

Hence, our real value has to come from someone greater than ourselves.  That is, it must find its source in God, the God who created all humans in His image.  It’s God who asserts our dignity and gives us our value and is therefore the measure of all that is just and right in human relational dynamics.

It goes without saying that our own human attempt at applying justice among ourselves leaves much to be desired.  Human justice is quite inept, imperfect and full of flaws.  In that sense, actual justice is only relative here on earth.  Without the hope of a Final Day-of-Reckoning before God, we are much to be pitied.  For, we’ll never get real justice, only approximate justice.  Our only hope is that God will bring us ultimate true justice, in the end.  However, such a promise from God should be both comforting and foreboding at the same time.  Imagine getting what you really and truly deserve for the things you’ve done wrong in life.

Nevertheless God’s justice is best, for it will have the necessary breadth and depth to it that we humans don’t have.  As humans we often fail to “see the forest for the trees.”  We get lost in the details and forget to look at the larger picture.  But we can trust in God’s greater perspective.  For example, real justice takes into account differences and unique or special considerations; it does not equate equality with sameness—as in “one size fits all.”  This requires a breadth and depth of information that only God can have.  Humans manipulate, deceive, cover-up, dissuade.  Thankfully God sees through us, and knows our hearts, looking at what truly is, with integrity and truth, revealing the human soul with true openness and transparency.  This is what we should all want, if only it were not also so dreadful to think about in the facing of it.