Love and Justice
Read Time: 5.5 Minutes
Was it in ‘obedience’ that Jesus accepted His torture and death — as if shredding His flesh and suffering the most excruciating death possible could be pleasing and necessary to God?*
Or, was it a matter of fidelity to redemptive love and of holding the truth that love is stronger than pain and death — as His hands were splayed on the cross, stretching to embrace the world.
So much of Scripture is devoted to God’s heart as always soft, always wanting to forgive us, always desiring relationship, undeserving as we are. **
Was it God’s will that Jesus die — or God’s will that Jesus love?
Jesus showed us that there is so much more to God’s love than there is to God’s justice.
“God’s justice” is ‘redeeming’ justice; human justice, the only justice we can honestly understand, is ‘punitive’ justice — and the difference between the two is “as far as the east is from the west”.
For all our talk of God’s compassion and mercy, of love unearned and forgiveness undeserved, we so often we see God as an unrelenting judge.
It’s natural to try to make ourselves worthy, but in trying, we distance ourselves from the very thing that makes us worthy — God’s welcoming arms of mercy. God, the “Prodigal Father” — who waits, longing for his child to return, then runs to meet and embrace him, doesn’t let him finish his “act of contrition” speech, restores him to full family rights, and celebrates his return.
As the old saying goes, and the “Parable of the ‘Prodigal Father’” illustrates, “God doesn’t love me because I am worthy, I am worthy because God loves me”.
The point is that it’s not about anything we can possibly do; it’s a matter of being who we are called to be — and allow the “doing” to flow from that.
There is a Jewish Midrash about our souls, that having seen and lived with God, we knew the secrets of God, and so we loved God — but at our birth, an Angel touches our lip just below our nose to blank our memory and silence us.
Why!?
…because we must discover love as a human being.
Next time you’re in thought and put your finger to that little cleft in your upper lip, recall Teilhard de Chardin’s words: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience”. Recall that we are here to learn how to choose love in faith, and to let that shape our next decision. Recall that the Angel’s touch to our lip made us forget, but does not dictate our choices.
Life is about growing an ever deeper appreciation of love. Everything can be our teacher, even the sadness of grief, even the absence of love, even to know love’s opposite: hate, rage and violence.
How much more dear to us does an expression of love become in our pain?
These are the opportunities to choose and cherish love all the more.
God’s plan is that we discover and choose love on this human plane because love, if not chosen, is not love at all.
Jesus chose love. From the woman caught in adultery to the one five-times divorced and living common-law; from the soldiers that scourged his flesh to Pilate that washed his hands of him; from the cheating money changers whose tables he up-ended to the Pharisees who laid heavy burdens but offered not a finger to lift them — Jesus had words for them, but he condemned no one.
Jesus calls us to do better; Jesus does not condemn us when we fail.
Jesus always sees through eyes of love; Jesus always invites to relationship. It is through relationship that we change and grow in our ability to love — and to allow ourselves to be loved.
Jesus’ capacity to love is bounded only by the universe that He created to be loved.
Jesus’ capacity to see the good in everyone, and welcome us into his goodness, invites us to grow in his boundless love, and to share that love.
….Would we want our God to be any smaller than that?
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NOTES:
*Ratzinger, Joseph, (1970). “Introduction to Christianity”, Herder and Herder New York.
.Nihil obstat: John M. T. Barrow, S.T.D, L.S.S., Censor.
.Imprimatur: Patrick Casey, Vicar General Westminster: 31 July 1969.
Fr. Ratzinger (1969) wrote:
“To many Christian’s, and especially to those who only know the faith from a fair distance, it looks as if the cross is to be understood as part of a mechanism of injured and restored right…in which the infinitely offended righteousness of God was propitiated again by means of an infinite expiation… a balance between debit and credit. The “infinite expiation” on which God seems to insist thus moves into a doubly sinister light… we visualize a God whose unrelenting righteousness demanded a human sacrifice, the sacrifice of His own Son, and one turns away in horror from a righteousness whose sinister wrath makes the message of love incredible. This picture is as false as it is widespread. pp.213-214
“…the element of pain is a secondary one… The governing principle of the sacrifice is not destruction, but love.” p.220
“…the cross is not a matter of an accumulation of physical pain, as if redemptive value…involves the largest possible amount of physical torture. Why should God take pleasure in the suffering of his creature, indeed his own Son, or even see it in the currency with which reconciliation has to be purchased…” p.221
“…an unworthy concept of God to imagine…a God who demands the slaughter of His son to pacify His wrath. To such a question… indeed God must not be thought of in this way” p.222
** On God’s forgiveness:
https://www.cbcew.org.uk/home/our-work/catechesis/confession/forgiveness/bible-passages-about-gods-mercy-and-forgiveness/