Valson Thampu

The strength of Christianity, wrote Erasmus with evident sarcasm, is that ‘no one understands it’. It is hard to disagree with Erasmus. ‘Not knowing’, as Jesus forewarned from the Cross, is an issue of particular poignancy in religion. Much of what we do, or fail to do, bespeak ignorance.

The case of God’s justice, which we are mandated to practise, is a case in point. ‘Seek first the Kingdom of God and his justice,’ (Mtt.6:33) Jesus taught, ‘and all these things will be given you.’ This means clearly that the religiosity of expectations must be replaced with the discipline of seeking God’s justice. But how are we to seek it, unless we have at least a rudimentary notion of what it is?

We know, or think we know, man’s justice. The Crucifixion of Jesus is a measure of man’s incapacity for justice. The Son of Man did not receive justice from the hand of man. Perhaps, he still doesn’t. That is because man’s justice is skewed by partisan interests. Partialities make us blind in relation to justice. Partiality innate in our nature. And when partiality is primed with pride or animosity, justice does not stand a ghost of a chance. This issue is becoming increasingly sinister in the Indian context; the reason why it is relevant to cultivate some clarity about it.

Justice guided by man-made laws is centred on equivalence. Punishment must be proportionate to offence. Equivalence aims at preservation. It ensures that aggressors do not gain from the injustice they practise, and are consequently dis-incentivised. It prescribes, further, that victims, or their relatives, are compensated proportionately. Either way, preservation is the shaping purpose of this mode of justice. But, seeking perfection (Mtt. 5: 48), not ensuring preservation, is the spiritual goal. The scope of man’s justice falls short of what perfection envisages.

Consider Jesus’s doctrine of ‘the other cheek’ (Mtt. 5:41-43). It is far beyond the scope of worldly law to require such a response. Or, to walk two miles with the one, who ‘forces’ you to walk one. Or, to give to the one who asks you for your tunic, your cloak also. Everything here depends on the intent with which one responds. If we do out of fear as Jesus mandates, or to avoid nuisance, our responses have no reference to God’s justice. But suppose we ‘turn the other cheek’ realizing that that is the best way –in the end, the only way- to eradicate aggression from human intercourses? Or, ‘walk the second mile’ in order to lead the aggressor into the realm of friendship? Or, give our ‘cloak also’, when only the tunic is asked for, in order to break the fetters of the ownership mentality and to create a caring culture of oneness with the poor?

None of the above can be made a legal requirement. They exist, if at all, in the sphere of extreme generosity or beneficence. So, what is Jesus doing here? Is he not shifting what belonged till then to the bracket of generosity to that of an enlarged idea of justice?

So, the hallmark of God’s justice is that it exceeds the scope of legalistic justice. The position that law enjoys in worldly justice is occupied by love in God’s justice. And that involves a paradigm-shift. Not many of us realize that the ‘liberation’ that Jesus promises is also liberation from our subjection to the limits of law. St Paul understood this, but didn’t, for whatever reason, make its meaning as hermeneutically explicit as he could have.

In this light, we tend to be split-personalities. In our concourses with fellow human beings, we rely entirely on law. In how God treats us, we invoke, and expect, God’s enlarged paradigm of love-centric justice. That is why we are comforted that ‘God is love’. If God is love, we are entitled to limitless mercy and an inspired mode of justice. That works eminently to our advantage. We can have the best of both worlds. But, there is a catch here. We are required to do to others as we would that they should do to us. So, we are entitled to only that yardstick of justice by which we measure justice to others.

So exalted are the implications of God’s justice that its practice would entail, at times, the abrogation of man’s justice. Judged by the latter, Mary, the Mother of Jesus, incurred the prospect of death by stoning. Had not Joseph exceeded the justice of man and embraced the Justice of God, the salvific history of humankind would have read differently. Jesus violated the Jewish ceremonial law in healing the woman with a menstrual disorder and the leper. In both instances, physical contact should have been scrupulously avoided. Had Jesus chosen to be ‘law-abiding’, rather than ‘love-abiding’, the healing of the two would have fallen short of wholeness.

Increasingly, individuals are finding it difficult to believe that Jesus’s death of atonement on the Cross can avail anyone other than himself. One reason for this is that most people today find it difficult to exceed the remit of man’s law. They find the scope of God’s law outlandish. This portends to be the case increasingly for the reason that less and less people know God’s justice by personal experience: either as its practitioners or as its beneficiaries. It is not surprising if cynicism increases in relation to hypotheses and prospects the reality of which no one has any practical or personal experience.

The Church is envisaged to be a sphere in which God’s justice is incarnated. It will be a pity if, instead, the Church remains bound by man-made laws that limit the scope of justice to a mere equivalence between offence and punishment, hurt and recompense.