The eCrozier

“That’s not fair!” I said that a lot as a child when my older sister got to do something I didn’t get to do. It just didn’t seem right to me. My parents should have treated my sister and me the same. I heard the same things coming out of my own children’s mouths when they were young. Kelly and I would let one of our children do something and not the other two. That was “unfair!” It seems we’re all born with a built-in fairness barometer that determines from our perspective when life’s circumstances don’t go our way or appear to be fair to us.

We take this idea of fairness with us into adulthood. When we see someone cut in line outside a movie theatre, get preferential treatment at a busy restaurant, or get a social or economic benefit we think we deserve (or, possibly we think the other person does not deserve), we declare those situations to be “unfair.” Examples of this are programs like the SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (better known as “food stamps”), animal grazingrights on government-owned lands, college admission standards, etc. We see some benefit or privilege going to someone else and we ask: “where’s mine? It’s not fair that they get that.”But fairness as a concept is sometimes trapped in the eyes of the beholder. It is often highly contextual and many times we do not know all the mitigating factors. Still, our fairness barometers go off because we presume that everyone should be treated equally all the time.

Fairness is not a Christian theological concept. In fact, our Christian faith is grounded on the central proposition that we are not treated fairly by God. Fairness would presume that we get what we deserve for our sins. It is out of God’s complete mercy that we don’t get what we deserve and are forgiven through the mediation of Jesus on the cross. So, we thank God that God is unfair, giving us a “benefit” that we have neither earned nor deserved. Grace, which is central to the Christian proclamation, is ultimate unfair deal.

This grace then should be incarnated in how we live with others. It should shape our leadership in the Church as well as how we make choices and act in relationship to others in the world. St Benedict in his Rule states that the abbot (the monastery’s leader) should treat all his monks differently, which may at times appear to be unfair. As Benedict writes: “One he must treat with mild goodness, another with reprimands, yet another with the power of persuasion, and thereby accommodate himself according to everyone’s nature and capacity of understanding, and thus adapt himself to the other, that he not hurt the flock entrusted to him.”

Notice how Benedict presumes the abbot is the one who must adapt in his relationships rather than the abbot assuming all those around him must adapt to him. Grace-filled living in the world is then about us adapting and changing our behavior toward others and not expecting them out of some cosmic or internal barometer of fairness to adapt to us. Put differently, grace insists that we be the “adults in the room,” that we not get sucked into insisting on fairness above all else, but rather recognize the deeper action of grace, which trumps fairness always.