A GOD OF JUSTICE?

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I guess you might say I'm stuck. I'm re-reading for the fourth time The Divine Dance by Richard Rohr in which he makes a case for, among dozens of other things, an all-merciful God who is not into "retributive justice," who does not exact from us punishment for every sin of ours, nor demand that His Son pay the price for the sins of the world. 

I say I'm stuck, because I'd love to share Rohr's case with you in a blog post, but he takes 170 pages to build the context in which he makes his case. So I'll content myself with presenting a couple of snippets to intrigue you.

In a section entitled "What about the Wrath of God?" he tackles the common belief that God is capable of anger, vengeance and retribution. He points out that the bible, which is full of such language, is itself a gradual progression forward. "You see the narrative arc moving toward an ever-more-developed theology of grace, until Jesus becomes grace personified. But it's a concept that the psyche is never fully ready for." 

We resist it, and see this resistance even in the New Testament, where even John's statements about God's unconditional love are interspersed with many lines that seem to imply conditional love: "If you obey my commandments" is either said directly or implied many times. Fr. Rohr writes, "The biblical text mirrors both the growth and the resistance of the soul. It falls into the mystery, and then it says 'That just can't be true'."

The Prodigal Son - Rembrandt

The Bible moves inexorably toward inclusivity, mercy, unconditional love, and forgiveness. Why not interpret the scripture the way Jesus did? "Jesus ignores, denies, or openly opposes his own Scriptures whenever they are imperialistic, punitive, exclusionary, or tribal." (Rohr, 176)

For example, Jesus does exactly this in Luke 4:18-19, when he reads from the scroll Isaiah the words "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor..." and ending with "to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." He leaves off "and the day of vengeance of our God" which is in the original passage (Is. 61:1-2). Then, rather than proclaim foreigners as the enemies and objects of God's vengeance, Jesus praises faithful foreigners from Zarephath and Syria, while criticizing the attitudes of his fellow Jews, the "chosen People." The people become so angry at his selective reading that they try to throw him off a cliff.

My take on this is that we, as rational creatures, want a God who is

comprehensible, who responds and acts the way you and I would. When someone hurts me, I want to hit back, and when someone cheats me or lies about me, I get angry and what to get back at them. A God who acts that way is understandable, predictable, reasonable, and so we have this God pretty much under control. 

But, when Grace shows up, logic breaks down; if, for example, God forgives everyone everything, this behavior offends my sense of retributive justice, it makes no sense. To say that "God loves you just the way you are right now, and there's nothing you could do that would make God stop loving you" offends my sense of retributive justice. That behavior is incomprehensible to me, it makes no sense; consequently, if God is beyond the reach of my intellect, then God becomes, pardon the expression, a Mystery. But I want to hold on forever to my comfortable, rational, predictable God, who loves and hates, rewards and punishes, plays favorites, and does all those things that every human does.

As we prepare to enter deeply into the mystery of Christ's self-sacrifice on the cross, I suggest that you forget the theology of retribution that says that the Father demanded the sacrifice of Christ to atone for the sins of the world so that justice would be served; when gazing on the cross, think instead of God who, out of sheer love, became one of us so as to share our humanity and willingly took on himself the evil of the world, and even death itself so as to conquer them and free all of us from sin and death through the mystery of Divine self-giving love. "God so loved the world..."