We Christians spend a
lot of time talking about justice and working toward justice. Yet, if I were to ask most westerners what “justice”
in the Biblical sense meant I imagine many might reflect our societies’ picture
of criminal justice or perhaps just limit it to someone who gets their just
desserts. Such a portrait of justice will
look like fire and brimstone and vengeful-retribution against the guilty. Not only is this wrong, but I think it is important
we get this right if we are going to be a community that works toward peace not
least of all through justice.
The retributive model of justice that the US holds (as-well-as
that imposed on Biblical text) actually comes from the Greco-Roman justice. This
justice is represented by the Justitia statue.
It is a statue of a woman who while blindfolded holds the balancing
scales of justice in one hand and a sword in the other. She is supposed to represent an objective
ruler who does not judge based on fear or favor, but rather seeks to weigh
evidence thereby justly taking sides and using the authority of the sword to
retributively give someone the due punishment for their offense.
Why would we let someone detached from the situation decide
our fate you may ask (well you should have), because we have exchanged actual
care for the victims with a new centerpiece.
As Howard Zehr points out, the ideology supporting criminal justice
believes that crime is a violation of the State and its laws (the new
centerpiece) and that violation creates guilt. Subsequently, justice demands
that the state determine who is guilty and then impose painful punishment so
that they get what they deserve.[1] Zehr
says this in turn creates three main questions for dealing with crime:
1.
What laws have been broken?
2.
Who did it?
3.
What do they deserve?[2]
This is an inflexible
system that we believe offenders must go through so that justice can be determined
and served through inflicting pain as punishment.
Now
this is not to say that criminal justice is useless and we do not need it. Zehr also makes the point (although I don’t remember
where), when no one wants to be honest and truth need be brought to light
criminal justice is very good at getting to the bottom of the issue. While it
perhaps should not be the central form of justice, legal professionals who know
how to do this are needed and helpful.
But, this should never be allowed to create focus more concerned with “rules”
that have been broken than people involved.
Before
looking at Biblical justice it first helps to understand Biblical laws. We tend to reduce the laws to a lot of static
“Thou shalt nots” that God uses for earning salvation and maximizing his authority
and making his followers moral superiors over everyone else. To add to the
problem, these laws are also inconsistent throughout its development in the
Pentateuch, so God’s static laws seem untrustworthy. What gives?
I
believe Jesus summed it up when he said God made the Sabbath for humankind not
humankind for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27).
This applies to all of the laws because the laws were always meant to
stand in service of creation and not the other way around. To utilize Terence Fretheim’s work, the law
was a gracious gift that intersects with lives being lived in the Biblical
stories and thus each law is meeting specific creational and human needs,
namely life (Deut. 6:24).[3] It is
precisely because of this that the law can never be a static thing, but it must
be as dynamic as the organic life it supports and serves, meaning that it is
always open-ended.
What
does the law’s open-ended development through the Bible mean? In its simplest terms, as people change so do
their circumstances and their needs. Subsequently, it becomes a testimony of
unrest in the law for it to be flexible enough for continual revision so to “link
law with life in new times and in new places.”[4] From the Christian standpoint Jesus both
revises and improves on Jewish law every time he says “you have heard it said…
But I say…” (See Matthew 5-6 or 19:7-8) or pay attention to all the times Jesus
violates purity codes for the sake of mercy.
So,
I am going to end this part with this, if Biblical laws are standing in support
of people (not for lording over one another) then justice seeks to make it right
when they have been broken. When the law
that serves the person has been broken the central violation is of a person not
just some law.
[1] Howard Zehr. The Little Book of Restorative Justice (Intercourse, PA: Good Books
2002), 21.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Terence Fretheim. God and World in the Old Testament: A
Relational Theology of Creation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2005), 149.
[4] ibid, 153.
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