Snow now
covers the mountains around me, my Christmas tree gleams and sparkles, and
eleven stockings hang expectantly up my staircase. I’ve been knitting and
sewing and shopping, trying to find fun and suitable gifts for everyone. I try
my best to be fair, but that’s a tall order. Despite old lump-of-coal
traditions, I believe Christmas is a time to commemorate God’s gifts to us.
In fact, twice
each year we celebrate the overwhelming fairness of God – at Christmas when we
remember His grace in sending His son into this fallen and hopeless world and
at Easter when we celebrate the resurrection and its signal that all our debt
has been paid. Such amazing
justice – by one man all sin came into the world, and by one man all sin can be
forgiven. It doesn’t get much fairer than that.
(Though we
must also remember that what happened to Jesus Christ on that fateful Passover
was not fair; He was perfect, yet He went to the cross and took the punishment
that was ours – the greatest unfairness ever buying the greatest grace ever –
an odd and amazing balance.)
Fairness is
a balancing act; we must weigh evidence, measure effort, make ourselves aware
of mitigating circumstances, and erase all of our pre-conceived notions. Look
at Lady Justice holding her scales high, insisting on perfect equilibrium. Of
course, for God, perfect justice is possible because, in His omniscience, He
has all the facts – He knows what happened in Benghazi; He knows how the Koch
brothers and Warren Buffet acquired their wealth. He is as aware of motivations
as He is of actions. We don’t have that luxury, so our fairness is never
perfect.
And lately
it’s been quite clear to me that we suffer from a national confusion about what
fairness entails even in its simplest form. Amidst all the holiday excitement
there lurks in my soul a terminal annoyance with the infantile drum beat about
the successful and their “fair share.”
What does it mean to be fair?
Fairness is
not equality. Fairness has nothing
to do with amounts. Only 5-year-olds think that. Picture a fat, trembling lower
lip and crocodile tears, “Johnny got 5 and I only got 3. That’s not fair.” It’s
not equal. It may be fair. Maybe
Johnny worked longer or harder or is older. Fairness is connected to balance –
we want to balance the work with the wage agreed upon, the crime with the
appropriate punishment, the reward with the results. Equality is just a mathematical term and is, in its literal sense,
only about numbers and things that can be counted – money, percentages, lollipops.
When we conflate the two ideas we rob justice of its soul, reducing it to some
merely material substance that can be stacked up and tallied. We use the term fairness sloppily when we make it about
equality: we use the term equality dishonestly
when we make it about race or gender or wealth.
