By Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos and Agiou Vlasiou
The Panagia, as we say in the Apolytikion of the feast of her Nativity, was deemed worthy by God to give birth to justice, which is Christ Himself. It says: “For from her has arisen the Sun of justice, Christ our God.” Christ is the Sun of justice, and the Panagia is the dawn from which Christ emerged and illumined the whole world. Christ is characterized as the “Sun of justice” because He shone upon the world and restored it to its former glory, its original beauty, delivering it from the dark gloom of ignorance.
Usually, we understand justice as the giving back of what is due, as the correction of the injustice that occurs in the world for various reasons, and as the administration of justice. But the question that arises is how one determines what is just and what justice is, because each person sees the matter from a different subjective perspective and understands justice in a different way.
God created man so that he might have true communion with Him, with his fellow human being, and with creation. However, through sin, all these relationships were disrupted, and post-Fall society was constituted by a pyramid of powers and by attempts to impose oneself upon others, based mainly on the passions. The justice of God is the reversal of this post-Fall social pyramid and the restoration of man to unity with God, with his fellow human being, and with creation, through the perspective of Grace and love, above all through a love that is cruciform and kenotic.
Source: The Theometoric Feasts. Translation by John Sanidopoulos.
