As Jeremiah prophesies about the coming days of grace and favor, about the arrival of a savior, he says that the people will look to God and acclaim him as “The Lord our Justice.”  As we begin our annual preparations to welcome Christ anew into our world and into our hearts, it’s good to consider the Savior’s role as the Restorer of Justice.  What does it mean to say, as the Church often does at this time of year, “Christ is Our Justice”?  On the one hand, there’s the justice that has to do directly with our salvation.  The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Christ fulfill the demands of the justice, satisfying the debt that we could never pay to God ourselves, for our sin and disobedience.  We couldn’t, but he can and he does.  It’s why we say, “He died for our sins.” 

But there’s another aspect of justice also, another dimension of what our salvation is about.  Justice is always, in a fundamental sense, about relationship.  When relationships are in good order, you’ve got justice.  A simple example would be the workplace; your relationship with your employer.  He pays you a reasonable salary and you do the work you say you’re going to do.  If either of those is missing, someone is acting unjustly, and there’s something amiss in the employer-employee relationship.  Rights and obligations.  You fulfill your obligations; others respect your rights.  That dynamic is part of every single kind of human relationship. And when relationships break or become strained, some element of justice has gotten out of alignment.  And this is the world we live in.  It’s no accident that the state of the world before original sin, when Adam and Eve were perfectly happy in the Garden, is referred to as Original Justice.  All the relationships were in order: between the two of them, between them and the world they lived in, and between them and God.  But sin clogged it all up and continues to.  Sin brings injustice into relationships.  What we have now in the fallen world is an experience of relationships which aren’t perfectly just. 

Broadly speaking, you can think of three categories of relationship that are now damaged.  Our relationship with our Creator.  Our relationships with the rest of creation, both the world and the other people who are in it.  And, not to be forgotten, my relationship with myself.  All these things are affected by original sin and by our personal sins.  Not all rights are respected; not all obligations fulfilled.  We leave undone things which we ought to do; and we do things which we ought not to do.  In other words, we sin, and our relationships all suffer.  We don’t have perfect harmony and peace among us, or even within ourselves. 

But what Christ does is to repair all of those relationship-injustices for us.  That’s a huge part of what salvation means.  Our relationships with God, with our fellow men and women, with creation, and even within ourselves, are healed and repaired and put in good order again.  Now, it’s not perfect yet: our sins still tug at us; we still experience the effects of broken relationships, and this process won’t be complete until heaven.  But it has begun.  And that is the spectacular news of the Advent season.  God’s work to restore justice has begun, meaningfully and substantially.  The work began almost immediately after the Fall of Adam and Eve, accelerated over the course of centuries, reaching a fever pitch in the days leading up to the stunning arrival of God himself into the world.  The work of restoring justice began to come to full fruition on Christmas Night, and the work continues within the Church in individual lives every single day.  Relationships are healed and repaired and set back in proper order through baptism, through the sacramental absolution of sin, through the grace of Holy Communion with Christ’s Body and Blood.  Every moment of grace is a moment in which justice is in some measure restored to our lives, through the merits and the actions of Our Savior.  May Christ our Justice bring full peace to every human heart, repairing all that is broken, and in the fullness of time, may he complete the good work of justice and salvation that he has begun in every one of our lives.