Justice, Mercy, Einstein--February 1, 2022
"For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment." [James 2:13]
For an awful lot of my lifetime, I've been under the impression that judgment and mercy were opposites. Like matter and anti-matter, I thought that both law and grace were important and powerful realities, but that they would annihilate each other if they dared to touch.
"Judgment," I was always told, was about punishing bad behavior out of the need to restore balance to some cosmic scales of justice somewhere, requiring a payment of an eye for an eye and a wound for a wound. "Grace," on the other hand, I figured, was the opposite--a sort of reckless or mushy disregard for justice that let crooks get off scot-free and allows evil to go unchecked. And therefore, to my mind, these qualities were mutually exclusive. You couldn't have both at the same time--either there was righteous judgment or there was amazing grace, but never both. "Justice" was the strict schoolteacher with the ruler to slap your knuckles for talking out of turn, and "mercy" was an overindulgent grandparent spoiling the kids with candy to ruin their suppers. You had to pick sides and leave the unchosen virtue behind.
Both of those, James would tell us, are wrong. They are caricatures, to say the least, which means that they are exaggerations to the point of distortion. But if all we've ever known are those skewed misunderstandings of "judgment" and "mercy" that turn justice and grace into opposites, then James' statement here in today's verse will sound like nonsense.
Making things worse, at first James sounds like he is reinforcing that terrible split between judgment and mercy; it sounds like he's threatening us with merciless judgment as punishment--and for the crime of being merciless, at that! And then at the end, when he says, "mercy triumphs over judgment," it sounds once again like this is some kind of contest, where either justice or grace can come out on top, and that you get one at the expense of the other.
But maybe we can set our preconceptions aside and consider the possibility that both justice (and the related idea of judgment) and mercy (and its synonym grace) are two sides of the same coin, and that both of these are dimensions of the goodness of God.
The ancient prophets of Israel and Judah, after all, certainly saw justice and mercy as compatible. Micah famously declared that what God really required of people was "to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8). He didn't assume you could only get justice or mercy, but never both; he takes it as a given that both are possible. The same goes for prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and even the commandments of the Torah--they all call for the people of God to be people of both justice and mercy. In fact, sometimes the provisions of the Law that we might think of as "charity" were understood as matters of justice in the Mosaic covenant. Things like forgiveness of debts, restoration of land lost to foreclosure, provision for the poor, refuge for those fleeing violence, and welcome for foreigners were all understood in the Torah to be matters of justice.
Jesus, too, sees "justice" and "mercy" as intertwined--they are both the "weightier matters" that he wishes for the Respectable Religious Leaders of his day to focus on, rather than trivial ones. His story that we call the "Good Samaritan" about a foreigner who offers help to a man left for dead by robbers is all offered as an explanation of how to keep the Law's direction about caring for neighbors--it is about justice, in other words, as much as it is about "showing mercy." Even his parable about workers who are all paid the same at the end of the day, no matter how long they have worked, turns out to be about "what is just" (see the landowner's wording in Matthew 20), and not merely about "showing charity." His other parables, like the rich man and Lazarus, and the Great Judgment (that we sometimes call "The Sheep and the Goats") with its haunting refrain, "As you did it to the least of these, you did it to me," show the same--for Jesus, whatever "justice" means cannot be separated in the end from whatever "mercy" really is.
Frederick Buechner was onto something, then, when he wrote, "Justice also does not preclude mercy. It makes mercy possible. Justice is the pitch of the roof and the structure of the walls. Mercy is the patter of rain on the roof and the life sheltered by the walls. Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things." Or perhaps we could say that when someone is being stepped on, oppressed, or taken advantage of, it is a matter of justice (not merely "being charitable") to stop the aggressor and restore the person who has been harmed. But mercy opens the door for those who have been stepped on not to seek revenge but instead to reconcile and make new, good, mutual relationships with those who had been oppressors. Maybe, as Buechner writes elsewhere, "The worst sentence Love can pass is that we behold the suffering that Love has endured for our sake, and that is also our acquittal. The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one."
It sounds like judgment to hear that God will pull down the powerful from their thrones, and it sounds like a matter of justice that the lowly will be lifted up. But it is also mercy to discover that the formerly lowly ones are not installed as new dictators to start the same old cycle of oppression all over again, but rather that God is creating a whole new order of things where, like a dance in endless circles, we take turns serving and being served, washing feet and having our feet washed as well. Like Einstein discovering that light is both a particle and a wave, the voices of Scripture show us that justice and mercy are ultimately of one piece in the goodness of God. Call it a sort of Theology of Relativity, I suppose, but God's justice and God's grace are inseparable.
Somehow, James assures us, the justice of God and the mercy of God are intertwined--even if from our vantage point now, they may seem opposed or incompatible. God will not let crookedness or oppression get the last word over the victims of the world--that is a commitment of God's justice. Neither will God let that same crookedness or oppression be the last word about the victimizers of history, either--that is the promise of God's mercy. Both are about God, rather than human actions, getting the last word. And maybe that is really where our hope lies--that God who is both just and gracious, will always get the last word over us.
We don't have to pick and choose one or the other, mercy OR justice, grace OR righteousness. They embrace in the character of God, and they are both at the heart of the way of life we are invited to step into--the life we call the Reign of God.
O God, shape us by both your justice and your mercy, and allow us to walk humbly with you all our days.
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