Our Haldimand Baha’i community mourns the passing yesterday of its Oldest Member, Barbara Phillips. The funeral will be Saturday, the funeral home thing Friday night. In 1911 the Master started off a letter to the organizer of the Mohonk Arbitration Conferences (which He later was to attend personally) – who also was named Phillips -- in these words: “He is God! O Thou Perfect Man!” To my mind, the reason the Master called this peace worker Phillips perfect was not that he had a shiny personality or any of the other things we mark as signs of perfection, it was because he devoted all of his efforts every day over many decades to the single minded goal of establishing peace and justice in the world. Now we have a world criminal court to show for it, one denied and opposed, traitorously, by the very nation that bred that perfect man. To my mind the Phillips I knew, Barbara Phillips, was perfect too. Her hands were not pretty, not what we would call perfect, but they were living signs of the perfection only utter dedication can attain. Wracked and twisted with arthritis caused by decades of meticulous work framing the photos and pictures at the World Centre, she showed those hands to all, like a general would a chest full of medals, proudly. And well she might; now generations of pilgrims visiting those spots will see only beauty in those framed images, not the blood and pain that made them possible. I am proud to say that I knew one of the perfect beings adorned with the medals of perfection, whom God raised up and who suffered to make the holiest place on earth as beautiful as possible.
I Will Make Justice the Line
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Yesterday we looked over Baha'u'llah's brief discussion of justice in Tabernacle, a justice which centers in and arises from unity. Justice is not a theory but rather the most concrete reality possible, an individual who arises on behalf of God, works only for Him, whose integrity remains there to the end. The forces of injustice seek to atomize this resolution. They exert external power by denying that rising above selfish, base ends is possible. Their goal is denial of God. Our passage culminates in a beatitude portraying the highest reward of justice, the good pleasure of God:
"Blessed are they that have arisen to serve God, who speak forth wholly for His sake, and who return unto Him." (Tabernacle 2.37)
A just person talks and consults for the sake of God, for no lesser purpose. Justice, then, is not only action and service, it is also verbal expression. Those "who speak forth wholly for His sake" are blessed because the object is not just self-expression, nor is it knee-jerk support of a group. The speech of the just mirrors the divine, the Unity above all unities that loves justice best, that in a deep sense *is* justice, "Yahweh, our justice." (Jer 23:6) So here we view a God of consultation bent upon doing right to every soul. A just person sets up the ways and means by which this can be accomplished, as Baha'u'llah states at the beginning of our passage:
"Justice, which consisteth in rendering each his due, dependeth upon and is conditioned by two words: reward and punishment. From the standpoint of justice, every soul should receive the reward of his actions, inasmuch as the peace and prosperity of the world depend thereon..."
Peace and prosperity do not depend upon blindly worshipping at the alter of the god of greed, as materialists and capitalists would have us believe. Peace and prosperity are the after-effects of justice, of the ever-expanding and improving incentives and sanctions that just people erect. Does that mean a counter-swing to the socialist left, back to more government rules and regulations? Not necessarily. The statist way of imposing justice is purely negative, it forces and imposes punishments. By and large, it ignores and excludes the more pervasive human motivator, the hope of rewards and incentives.
So God seems to be advocating here something wholly new, the application of reward and punishment together, in a single process. This has always been understood to be the ideal. Shakespeare's Portia put it in terms of spices in cooking, "earthly power doth show likest God's when mercy seasons justice." Thus just redistribution must come of the entire body politic, not just legislation. It must be a combination of legal measures establishing structural equity and increased concern and benevolence among many, diverse world citizens. This was understood as long ago as Aristotle, who talked about the strengthening of the social fabric when the rich voluntarily give of their wealth to the poor. Only then do the underprivileged feel gratitude and offer loyalty for the aid. Sharing forced by taxation and regulation is mere entitlement. Only free donation given out of love are worthy of being called a gift.
Let there be no mistake, the hope of reward is potent and easily underestimated. One of the bad things that has come out of the spread of the Internet is a rapidly accelerating spread of gambling among young people. In Canada, when there was a hockey strike a couple of years ago televised poker unexpectedly leaped into the void and now an estimated thirty to forty percent of our young men are avid gamblers. This is a frighteningly high percentage that will probably take at least a generation to recover from. Meanwhile, the intelligent, planned application of rewards in behalf of justice continues to be ignored. The only innovation that comes to mind that positively takes advantage of our love of rewards is the so-called pollution stock market. This is a complex but creative application of incentives where companies can trade restrictions on air pollution as credits among themselves.
Much more than this can and must be done soon if we are to survive, must less live up to the justice that is the "best beloved of all things" in the sight of God. But it was prophesied of old that we would make it, in the time of the end. But we can only do so by renewing our covenant with our Creator.
"Why, hear the word of Yahweh, you scoffers, that rule this people that is in Jerusalem: Because you have said, `We have made a covenant with death, and with Sheol are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come to us; for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves:' therefore thus says the Lord Yahweh, `Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner -[stone] of sure foundation: he who believes shall not be in haste. I will make justice the line, and righteousness the plummet; and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding-place.'" (Isa 28:14-17, WEB)
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