It’s Not Fair

In the popular comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” which featured six-year-old Calvin and his tiger sidekick Hobbes, Calvin at one point complains to his dad about having to go to bed. “Why can’t I stay up late?” he says, “You guys can! IT’S NOT FAIR!” Calvin’s dad responds, “The world isn’t fair, Calvin.” To this a downcast Calvin says, “I know. But why isn’t it ever unfair in my favor.”

Our first reading today from the book of Ezekiel, written hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, covers similar ground. “You say, ‘The LORD's way is not fair!’, the prophet Ezekiel writes. “Hear now, house of Israel: Is it my way that is unfair, or rather, are not your ways unfair?”

As the new house of Israel, we are challenged in this passage to examine our own dispositions toward fairness. While we do need to have a grasp of fairness in order to get to justice, it is dangerous to look at our lives chiefly through a fair/unfair lens.

Some researchers claim that in recent years an epidemic of immaturity has taken root in our country. Whereas in the past more people rooted their sense of who they are in things beyond themselves, such as in God or family, today many people fix their self-identity in how they feel about themselves. And how they feel about themselves is often linked to what they do or what they own or how they look.

While this doesn’t mean that we can’t take satisfaction in such things, that thinking as a primary orientation is a trap that turns us away from the truth of our self-worth, which isn’t dependent one whit on how we feel about ourselves or on what we have accomplished. Linking our sense of who we are to just our own selves pushes us inward and keeps us off a longer and harder path that leads to maturity and to an understanding that we’re not the center of the universe.

It is also a trap that can edge us away from the good, because if the heart of my identity is attached to how I look or to what I own or have accomplished, then I will inevitably measure myself against others in unhealthy ways. I open myself to damaging thoughts of envy or anger.  If our sense of who we are as humans derives from within rather than from God, then it’s understandable that we’ll see many things in life as unfair. It couldn’t be otherwise, as deriving our identity from our own selves and accomplishments separates us from Christ.

How do we move away from such immaturity and encounter God? Psalm 25 from today’s liturgy tells us how:

Your ways, O LORD, make known to me;

teach me your paths,

guide me in your truth and teach me,

for you are God my savior.

God’s ways are far from our ways. The tax collectors and prostitutes we heard about in today’s Gospel recognized that. If we don’t also recognize this, we’ll be as oblivious as Calvin to real fairness, which isn’t about sameness or deservedness. After all, was it fair that Christ was nailed to a cross and died for us?

--Jim Healy

Send Us Forth are reflections written by St. Matthew parishioners and friends.