SOAP Notes

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February 12, 2008
Lev. 18-19; Psalm 13; Acts 19

S: Leviticus 19:14-15
You shall not curse a deaf man, nor place a stumbling block before the blind, but you shall revere your God; I am the LORD. You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great, but you are to judge your neighbor fairly.

O: These are two of a group of various laws discussing how to correctly deal with others.

A: In my first read-through, my eye keyed in on verse 14, to the point that I completely missed 15 until going back to re-read 14. The verses are not particularly related and do not particularly follow the same theme. Regardless, I cannot separate them in their significance to me tonight.

With regard to verse 14, I noticed it because it makes me think of how I mock people. There are many times that I’ve aired a foolish line knowing that someone would buy into it, and taking advantage of that for my own amusement. There are many times that I’ve pointed out the problems that a person has in spite of themselves, declaring their weaknesses and calling out their problems. This is, of course, to build myself up while making them small. And since, many of those times, they are defenseless, it is unfair and it is unkind and it is wrong.

Verse 15 also addresses a sort of fairness. Where verse 14 discusses not taking advantage of people and not exploiting weakness, verse 15 discusses the exercise of judgment between people. So while it is still a discourse on the general virtue of justice, it expounds on a different mode of that virtue.

And I’m challenged by verse 15 in a different way. We are taught today to equivocate in so many ways. We are taught to apply a skewed compass in deference to the individual. We are taught to weigh matters on a relativist scale, to steer away from absolutes and to instead respect the person in who’s shoes we aren’t standing. While verse 15 doesn’t warn against considering different viewpoints in exercising judgment, it does make clear that we are to apply a standard, the same standard, to everyone, and to provide the same definition of justice to everybody, despite their relative position.

I wonder at why these are the verses that speak to me. Is it because I’m unfair? Certainly, to some extent. But I think part of it relates to what I do for a living. I’m a person who’s supposed to bank in fairness. I work in an adversarial “justice” system which, theoretically, is designed to apply rules equitably to all parties, and the fundamental prism through which I generally view things is that of fairness. I’m trained to think of fairness and to dissect the facts and the law to find it. And, yet, I find that I consistently, frustratingly fail to achieve it in my own life.

As mentioned, I’m not fair to disadvantaged people. I take advantage of them, I exploit them, and I harm them for reasons that ultimately relate to what best pleases me in the moment. But, worse, I don’t make fair judgments between sides when called to do so. I defer to friends, I turn my back on unpleasant people without considering their side, I over-analyze relative viewpoints to the exclusion of standards. In so many ways, I fail in finding, and applying, justice.

I want to be a fair person. I want to be a person that people trust as exercising sober and wise judgment and in telling things as they are. I’m not that person yet, but in simply applying some simple standards to my own behavior, I’ll grow into that person.

P: Lord, help me to be fair. Help me to understand justice, and to be a person who is trusted to live a principled life and to act in a principled way in weighing opposing sides and in finding the truth. Amen.