Let justice roll down like a river

I'll start with one of my favourite biblical doctrines, that of justice. This concept is really quite nuanced, meaning many different, almost opposite things depending upon the type of justice in view.

The concept of justice that likely springs to mind first is associated with courts, police, and prisons. The street in my town that goes past the local police station and ends at the provincial court building is called Justice Way. This notion of justice has to do with just desserts, redress, punishment, and so on. It is called retributive justice. God's sense of retributive justice was satisfied by Christ's death, taking as Jesus did the punishment for our wrongdoings as fallen creatures. Nothing more is needed to pay, as it were, for any wrong of which we are guilty.

A second kind of justice is referred to as restorative justice. This is an approach to justice that focuses on the needs of victims and offenders, instead of satisfying abstract legal principles or punishing the offender. Traditional criminal justice seeks answers to three questions: what laws have been broken? who did it? and what do the offender(s) deserve? Restorative justice instead asks: who has been harmed? what are their needs? whose obligations are these? (Source: Wikipedia)

In the city next door to mine, Langley BC, a very successful restorative justice organization has run for decades. Called VORP (victim offender reconciliation program), it works with the courts to encourage another approach than the typical retributive one as follows:

* encouraging an offender to acknowledge the harm they have done to victims and the community, and to take responsibility for the consequences of their behaviour;
* taking account of the steps offenders have taken, or propose to take, to make reparations to the victim and/or community; and
* facilitating victim-offender reconciliation where victims so request, or are willing to participate in such programs.

For an interview with VORP's founder, David Gustafson, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GLsyk8cLY8.

Christ having satisfied God's sense of outraged justice at human failure, God can with full consistency swing into reconciliation mode. Because God is God, he even took the initial steps to effect this new and improved relationship.

Once a month we celebrate the Lord's Supper (or Communion). I plan these meetings and have used an overarching theme taken from St. Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 5:19: God was using Christ to restore his relationship with humanity. He didn't hold people's faults against them, and he has given us this message of restored relationships to tell others. Because the effects of Christ's death are timeless, reconciliation with God didn't start at the empty tomb. It applied to Abraham, Moses, Mary and Joseph, and to all of us since Christ's death alike.

The third relevant facet of justice is typically called distributive justice, an important concept in ethical theory. Distributive justice deals with the distribution of benefits and burdens in fair proportions. In capitalistic thinking, those who take risks, work hard, invest shrewdly, create wealth and jobs, or facilitate the sale of oceans of beer (i.e., professional athletes) are seen as more worthy of large rewards than others. Marxist thinking saw things differently, as I'm sure you know: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. There are many positions in between.

But what of biblical teaching? Let's deal with that next.