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Daily Scripture

In You, O Lord, Justice and Mercy Meet

Today’s gospel reading triggered off in my memory the number of times I have jumped the gun by passing judgment on someone before knowing all the facts — the soft data as well as the hard data. It’s clear to me now that prejudice and bias covered up by pride have a great deal to do with this jump; our comrades can do no wrong; our foes can do no right! Of course, it’s easy to meet out mercy to those we like and easier to meet out justice to those we don’t like.

The words of Isaiah introduce the theme of mercy and pave the way for the encounter of Jesus with the adulterous woman recorded in the gospel of John. The people of Israel had prostituted themselves if not in truth, at least metaphorically. God had espoused himself to them, for better or worse for richer or poorer forever. It was an irrevocable covenant that remains to this day. The people of Israel to whom Isaiah addressed these words abandoned their God and aligned themselves with foreign powers for political and economic gain. In effect, they entered an adulterous alliance and were literally carried away to a foreign land by their greed and lust for power.

In the name of their God, a disciple of Isaiah writing in his name and style reminds them of the great exodus when God led the people out of Egypt through the Red Sea into the Land of Canaan, the land they called home for centuries. In words similar to these, the prophet declares, “You think that was great? Forget about it; you ain’t seen noth’in yet! I’m about to do something even more spectacular. I’ll pave a way through the wilderness and bring you home again. I will forgive your unfaithfulness and forget your affair. Your misery will meet mercy and you will be saved.”

It has been said that pride is the worst of all sins because it distorts the truth of who we are. In fact, pride is a lie. But more than this it is a distortion of who God is. Recall that the sin of Adam and Eve was not that they wanted to be like God but that they did not recognize that they were already like God — made in God’s image and likeness.

There was another encounter taking place in John’s story beyond that of the meeting between Jesus and the woman. It was between Jesus and the woman’s accusers. In was in this encounter that justice was enjoined to the ‘trial’. “Let the one who is without sin be the first to cast the stone!” Their pride blinded them to their own sins. Jesus exposed their hypocrisy as his mercy engulfed the sinful woman.

Was he being soft on sin? Hardly. “Go now”, he said to the woman “and avoid this sin.” Might we not rightly assume that this initiative of mercy effected a dramatic change in her life? God’s saving grace was fully manifested in Jesus. Oddly enough, the same mercy resulted in the hardening of her accusers. They drifted away one by one from the eldest to the youngest but they sought another opportunity to trick him into mercy mending.

John’s story about the woman caught in the act of adultery revealed the depth to which Jesus extended himself to the sinner. “In you, O Lord, justice and mercy meet! [Psalm 85] or in the words of St. Augustine, “Misery meets mercy” in the person of Jesus.

Lent is about opening ourselves up to the saving grace of God but repentance is not something we do. It is allowing the forgiving power of God to touch our life, indeed, to engulf us and point us in a new direction. It’s about God empowering us to goodness and about our initiating a new pattern of life.

Lent is also about dropping stones and the acceptance of the humanity of others, despite their sins and failures. It is about entrusting others and ourselves to the tender mercy of God. More than that, it is about allowing ourselves to become conduits of God’s mercy and saving grace—helping others to find their way out of the wilderness of failure, sin and rejection.

“To err is human; to forgive is divine.”

At the same time, to forgive is not so much an act of the will as a disposition of the heart and in many situations, the conclusion of a very long process. We dare not be presumptuous or simplistic about it.

Forgiveness does not absolve the sinner from taking responsibility for the sin or from its consequences. Thus the mantra, “There is no forgiveness without justice, no justice without truth, no truth without full accountability.”

Here is the story that a rabbi colleague shared with me many years ago. A man went into the temple for the observance of Yom Kippur, which is the Jewish observance of atonement. As he entered the Temple, he noticed all his sins were listed on the board at the entrance. He tried to erase them but he was unable to do so. Then he went inside to participate in the penitential service. As he left the temple, he attempted once more to erase his sins but again was unable to do so. He departed and set about making amends for his sins and then returned to the temple. Lo and behold, his sins had disappeared.

This story is akin to the teaching of Jesus, “When you are bringing your gift to the altar and recall that your brother or sister has something against you, go first to be reconciled and then return with your gift.”

The Scriptures set the tone not only for our Lenten journey but also for our life long journey. Our destiny is not Jerusalem the earthly city but Jerusalem the heavenly city. Mercy is our mission but we must first pass through the gateway of justice and truth. In you O Lord, justice and mercy meet and when they do, reconciliation is complete.

Benedict's Encyclical on Love

Saturday March 11, 2006

Courtesy of Joseph Hassan, I came across this thought-provoking commentary on the first encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI. I thought our visitors might find it intereseting.

Separating Charity and Justice
By ROSEMARY RADFORD RUETHER

Commentators miss the point with Benedict’s encyclical on love.

I have read or heard on the radio a number of reviews of Benedict XVI’s recent encyclical on love. These seem to take two forms. One is the effort to find some hidden code language that indicates the pope’s continued repressiveness toward sexuality. The other is to exclaim with delight at the discovery of a “kinder, gentler” pope who seeks to reconcile young people to his tender embrace. I suggest that both of these takes on the encyclical are mostly irrelevant and miss some important messages.

Although the pope undoubtedly hasn’t changed his mind on questions of homosexuality, sex outside marriage, abortion, birth control and the like, he has chosen not to discuss these in this letter. More important, he wrote this letter because he has a theologian’s vision of a message of divine gratuitous love and our response to it that he wants to reaffirm as the heart of his own faith and vision. The second part of the encyclical is a discussion of the works of love or caritas as the specific work of the church, with particular attention to the relation of church and state. This part of the letter has generally been passed over by reviewers as uninteresting. I personally found it the more important part of the message.

Benedict wants to define the charitable work of the church in a way that does not neglect the work of justice and simply maintain the social status quo, in contrast to traditional Marxist charges. Here one senses the agenda of a Professor Ratzinger still sparring with radical Marxist students at the University of Tübingen who so offended him in the ’60s and are credited with driving the once-liberal scholar to the right. Perhaps there is still a fight with liberation theologians lurking here. For Professor Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, the Marxist challenge is now largely over, and it is time to clarify the difference between the roles of church and state, love and justice.

The pope’s view of church and state reflects what in Latin America is called a “new Christendom” view. The roles of church and state are interconnected but should be carefully separated. The church (that is, clergy) should keep clear of direct involvement in the state. The clergy’s sphere is salvation, but the clergy should prepare the conscience of the laity to be the extension of the teaching of the church in society. The state and secular society is the realm of the laity, which the church influences indirectly. The church points upward to heaven. The state’s role is maintenance of order with the help of the social teachings of the church.

Benedict still operates with this dual framework of church and state, but he has transformed the terms in an important way. The role of the state is defined as that of justice. In a striking phrase, he declared, “Justice is both the aim and the intrinsic criterion of the state.” In a world where the role of the state is war abroad and police repression of dissent at home to make the world safe for American corporations, this phrase has prophetic potential.

It is not the job of the church to take over the state’s work of justice. But this does not mean that the church cannot have a vision of justice and peace that it proclaims, by which it critiques the injustice of the state and inspires its people (the laity) to actively participate in creating more just societies. Indeed, this is an important role of the church.

At the same time, Benedict says that there will always remain areas of human vulnerability and hurt that go beyond what even a “perfectly just” (if such a thing were possible) state could achieve. It is the work of the church to be the sphere where these works of love take place. But the church should work with other religious and nonreligious communities in the work of charity. The encyclical says that charity should not be a tool of proselytism. We have come a long way from the old Catholic Christendom of the 19th century and before.

We need to know more about what relationship and what limits the pope actually envisions when he seeks to separate the works of love and the works of justice in this way. What are churchmen allowed to do in the works of justice and what is declared off-limits? One longs for a good open debate between Benedict and Leonardo Boff on this point. Here is where the conversation between Rome and Latin American liberation theologians, so cruelly shut off by repressive measures in the ’90s, needs to be opened up in the context of a 21st-century world more impoverished and violence-ridden than ever.