Apostles for Today
Prayer and Reflection
July 2016
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Mercy and
Justice,
Critical
Consciousness of Our Time
The
relationship between justice and mercy is an age-old issue which has marked the
unfolding of Western civilization from the beginning. It has duly come to the
fore every time that thought has tried to put order between what tend toward
being polar opposites, such as between personal freedom and social order,
between guilt and punishment, between recovery and redemption.
The
conviction at which the Church has arrived during its two thousand years of
history along with biblical revelation, is that broken order and harmony are
restored only through linking together justice and mercy.
Justice and mercy are not words that can be
substituted one for the other, and nor do they indicate perspectives opposed to
each other. In his fundamental encyclical “Dives
in Misericordia”, John Paul II said: “ ...
experience shows that other negative forces have gained the upper hand
over justice, such as spite, hatred and even cruelty” (n. 12) . In fact, human
justice is always fragile and imperfect, subject as it is to limitations and
personal or group conditioning, and therefore must include and, in a sense, be
supported by, mercy, which is the inner form of love. Indeed, as John Paul II
further clarifies, it becomes "becomes more evident that love is
transformed into mercy when it is necessary to go beyond the precise norm of
justice - precise and often too narrow” (n. 5).
“Love does not delight in
evil but rejoices in the truth,” admonishes St.
Paul (1 Cor 13: 6). True mercy, in fact, demands first of all justice, the
necessary basis of social life, where the order of the Good, of goodness,
should reign. Those who wish to be merciful must first of all be just and must
hear, echoing within themselves, that “hunger and thirst for justice” of which
Jesus speaks in the Sermon on the Mount. Mercy must produce first justice, if
it wants to fulfil its true course. For this reason, mercy is not opposed to
nor does it make excuses for justice, but includes it as its main expression
and as its essential force. Therefore, mercy inspires and commands justice, it
gives it heart and light because it
surpasses for the better its rigid, formal distinctions.
This perspective finds its highest expression in the
teachings and the very life of Christ. In many places in the Gospel, the Lord,
while showing what we would today call “respect for the institutions” and for
the laws of his day, at the same time points the way to a higher justice which
goes beyond the merely narrow and psychological, and so transfigures it. And he
does so to his final breath.
Tortured, insulted and crucified by the very
representatives of the law, only the “thief”, a criminal entreats him. But it
is be precisely the “thief” - perhaps even a murderer - who for his gesture of
humility and repentance, will be the first to gain Paradise. The carrying out
of what Jesus himself had foretold to a caste which through pride considered
itself honest and observant of the law - and formally it was:
And
yet, “The tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God
ahead of you” (Matthew 21:31).
Benedict XVI takes a similar line in his first
encyclical “Deus Caritas Est”, in
which he significantly entitled a chapter precisely “Justice and charity”. “The
just ordering of society and the State” - he cautions - “is a central
responsibility of politics. As Augustine once said, a State which is not
governed according to justice would be just a bunch of thieves” - the Pope
notes (at n. 28). For which, however, it must never be forgotten that “love - caritas -
will always prove necessary, even in the most just society. There is no
ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of
love”.
The
common belief, according to which finally just structures would make any
impulse of mercy superfluous, conceals, for the Pope, “a materialist conception
of [the human person]: the mistaken notion that [human beings] can live ‘by
bread alone’ (Mt 4:4; cf. Dt 8:3) - a conviction that demeans
[us] and ultimately disregards all that is specifically human”.
Justice
and mercy either walk hand in hand, one preparing the way for the other, or
both limp, fumbling along in the dark. This is encapsulated very well in two
Gospel parables.
The first is the parable
of the unforgiving servant (Mt 18:23) in which the king discovers a servant
who owes him ten thousand talents but, because of his pleas, does not carry out
his original intention of selling him, his wife and their children, along with
all his possessions, in order to pay off the debt. Just after this, the servant
meets another just like him who owes him a hundred denarii. He grabs him and
starts choking him, demanding that he pay his debt. The unforgiving servant
does not want to hear the pleas of his fellow servant and throws him into
prison until he can pay. His behaviour is, from the point of view of strict
justice, irreproachable: the cancellation of his debt does not lead to an
obligation on his part to do the same. What does condemn him, however, is the
generous mercy shown towards him which he was unable to make his own: mercy
accomplishes what justice never could, and leaves a mark that no decision of
justice could ever leave. The unforgiving servant chooses to slip into legalism
and falls, however, in his turn into the net of justice: he who was merciful
towards him was “beyond good and evil”, but the servant has chosen to cross
back over this boundary.
The
second parable is that of the workers in
the vineyard (Mt 20:1-16). What law, what principle of justice, could ever
stipulate that different jobs, of different duration, effort and intensity, be
paid equally? And what judge could ever argue with those early morning workers
who, believing themselves to have been treated unfairly, murmured against the
master: “These
last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne
the burden of the day and the scorching heat”!
Still,
the owner of the vineyard knows how to call into question the very concept of
human justice, based on an ordered scale of values and
merit. Mercy, however, does not presuppose merit: it surpasses it; escapes its
logic, like every true greatness of heart. The unpredictable gratuitousness of mercy completely turns the limited vision of
human mentality on its head and becomes a stumbling block even to the
principles of justice.
God's justice
does not conflict, in reality, with human justice (each worker in the parable
receives the agreed remuneration), but transcends it, completing and
transforming it with love. For the jurist who pursues justice daily, an
awareness of this excess becomes an intense and indispensable hope.
Cristina Mastrorosati
CCL
Ostia - Italy
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Segretariato Generale, Unione dell’Apostolato
Cattolico
Piazza San Vincenzo Pallotti 204, 00187 Roma, Italia uac@uniopal.org
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