Beyond Justice to Mercy

This morning, I decided to catch up on some blogs, when I noticed this graphic at Episcopal Cafe. In the Lectionary, I've been concentrating on the Jeremiah/Lamentations passages in my sermons, and I couldn't help thinking how scary justice is. Justice is the setting of things right, the rectifying of wrongs. And as much as justice is necessary, by itself it destroys relationships because it sets an absolutist view of fairness as a priority over and above reconciliation. The Christian message has always proclaimed that justice has been ultimately taken care of by the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ upon the cross.

Thus efforts to minimize (or worse, abandon) a theology of the cross as necessary to how we relate to God and to others leaves open the clamoring of voices who won't be silenced until some human perception of "justice desserts" has been achieved--even at the expense of those things that make life worth living. But grace, with its attending dependence upon what Jesus did at Calvary, gives us the room to start over, to not be tied to mere human standards of right and wrong, and to enjoy both the time and growing strength of the Holy Spirit to be able to make amends in a way that flows from a place of love. As the old Susan Ashton song says, "We must reach out beyond justice to mercy."