The Crazy Connection Between Justice & Grace

 There’s this crazy connection between justice & grace.

But to see it, you need to understand what these things are. We think we do, usually, but can you put it into words? Do you really understand what these things are, and do you understand how other people understand these things?

We see injustice all around us, in the news, we all care very much about justice, but what do we really know about it?

That’s the tricky part; there are 3 different forms of justice active in our world today. When someone calls something “justice,” we don’t all hold the same concept about what that means.

So let me quickly explain these three ideas of justice. I’ll explore them more deeply another time, but you can explore them, too. Harvard opened a free online course, their first course you can do for free, just sign up online and take the class, or you can just watch the YouTube videos. The professor is Michael Sandel, and he wrote a book called Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do, and the class and the YouTube videos are all based on his book. 

And he says there are 3 concepts of justice active in our world today. New York Pastor Tim Keller summarized them nicely, he said there’s utilitarianism, which is “the greatest good for the greatest number.” There’s the Kantian view of justice, from Emmanuel Kant, which is all about individual rights, not the greater good. And then there’s the Aristotelian view of justice, which is “you get what you deserve, and you do not get what you do not deserve.”

Now, before I go any further, it’s useful to understand that these 3 views of justice are not falsifiable. You can’t just do the math and determine, oh this one is right and the others are wrong. How you feel about any or all three of these is going to be based on your answers to questions like:

• What’s the nature of an individual’s relationship to society?
• Where does goodness come from?
• What is the purpose of a human life? Or is there a purpose to a human life?

These are not falsifiable things, or they are not testable in a way that they can be proven true or false with absolute certainty. They’re value judgments, and we judge them according to our values, or how we rank order our values in times when they seem to be in conflict. And we don’t all hold the same rank order or priority.

So we don’t all have the same views of justice and there’s no way to say, this is the right one, or that’s the right one, and that complicates all the discussions we have around justice.

For now I’m just going to talk about the Aristotelian view of justice, “you get what you deserve, and you do not get what you do not deserve,” because it’s the foundational understanding of justice that predicates civilizations throughout history and all the religions that sprung out of them. It’s called “Aristotelian” after Aristotle, who was hugely influential, and at another time I’ll tell you why, but this predates him by centuries and centuries. He was in the 300s BC but all the Western religions and cultures, all the way over to India and the ancient Vedic religions have held this concept of justice. We have this concept of Karma -- well that’s justice. That’s you getting what you deserve, it’s payback, it’s this transcendent universal way to balance the scales, and that underlies all of Western Civilization as well, with Christianity & Islam all stemming from Judaism, and that’s the foundational understanding of justice. You get what you deserve, and you do not get what you do not deserve. 

And that second part is important. You may think it sounds bad, but if I get the job, or the promotion, and I’m equal to you and did equal work, and equal quality of work, or maybe you even did better work than me, and I get the promotion, that’s not justice. That is unjust. I got what I didn’t deserve.

Or if we both misbehave and get in trouble and get caught, and we did the same things wrong, but you get punished more severely, thrown in jail and I just get a cupcake, that’s unjust. I didn’t get what I did deserve, which is retribution, or restitution, or some form of atonement for how I harmed someone or destroyed their property or something they cared about, or whatever. And I did get what I didn’t deserve, which is treatment as though I had done no wrong in the first place. That’s not just. 

And you may think, “what’s ‘deserve’ got to do with anything?” And that’s a great question, and who even decides what someone deserves in the first place? Well, we have these man-made systems of justice, and we want them to be as close to perfect as possible, but we all realize that man-made justice will never be perfect, we just try the best we can. But why is ‘deserve’ even a part of it? It’s probably hard to figure out what someone else deserves, or even yourself, and it’s probably impossible for us all to agree on what someone else deserves, but with Karma or Justice or any like, religious understanding of this stuff, we can at least understand that whatever someone deserves, whoever gets to decide that or how we hash that out or whatever, we can then apply such a ruling to whatever went down and figure out, whether someone got what they deserved or not, or if they didn’t get something they did deserve, or if not, how to go about correcting this injustice, this imbalance, and making things right. 

So for exploring this today, we don’t need to figure out what anyone deserves or doesn’t, we just need to understand the concept, and we can step back and concede, “judging what someone deserves is beyond me, that’s not my place,” but recognize the importance of administering justice. 

Because justice is important. It’s foundational to all society. When we don’t have justice, we can’t have trust, and trust is foundational to every relationship in society. We need trust, and we need justice, and civil rights activist Sonny Carson was famous for first saying, “No Justice, No Peace.” And it’s true, and that’s why we need justice, or relationships crumble and society crumbles. And that’s why justice for me but not for you, or justice for you but not for someone else, is not true justice. It’s unjust. 

Now here’s the crazy part. The crazy connection between justice and grace: grace is “you get what you do not deserve.” And mercy is “you do not get what you do deserve.” Like “oh have mercy on me!” Mercy is recognizing and admitting that you deserve to be punished, or you deserve bad consequences for your actions, but you beg for mercy, pleading that you don’t face the consequences, that really, well, you “get away with it.” And so you may be familiar with this if you’ve been around church, we have mercy and we have grace, and when we talk about them both together we just kinda call it all ‘grace.’ But they’re two distinct concepts, basically reciprocal to each other. Grace, “you get what you do not deserve,” and mercy “you do not get what you do deserve.”

And packaged together, look: they’re the opposite of justice. In fact they are violations of justice. Or like, in politics everyone loves to use this phrase, “it’s a miscarriage of justice,” and...yeah! That’s exactly what mercy and grace are. They violate justice. 

And it’s weird cuz like, justice is good, right? And so is grace. We don’t think of them as opposites, but they absolutely are fundamental oppositions. Mercy and grace are unjust, they are violations of justice. And how can that be? If justice is so important, then how can mercy and grace be good?

And I think the answer is that, justice is cold. Justice don’t care. In the old Roman depictions of Justice as a goddess, Justice was blind. She was blindfolded. Justice isn’t supposed to know or care anything about you & your circumstance and why you shouldn’t be punished. If you did wrong, consequences follow. 

And here’s the thing, people don’t always see this: consequences follow, just in the natural world, whether we administer justice or not. Like, if nothing’s real or nothing matters and all these human abstract constructs like justice & grace are just abstract concepts and it only matters in our heads, well, in the real, hard material world, everything we do has consequences. Repercussions follow, some good, some bad -- but a lot of the bad falls on other people. We cause harm, and a lot of the time, the other people had nothing to do with it. They didn’t deserve those consequences. They didn’t deserve to have their lives wrecked or their loved ones lost or their houses collapsed or whatever. 

And so justice is all about correcting those mistakes. My house came crumbling down: who did this? Who should pay for it? I just put in all this work to fix it all up and make a nice home and now it’s gone, why should I put in all the work to restore it and put it back together? You should bust your ass to fix this, it’s your mistake. If this doesn’t get atoned for, and I start to rebuild my house, then what’s stopping you or someone else from coming along again and busting it all down? So we need justice to have a society. And to judge what is just and what is not, and to judge who should pay the restitution and do the work and fix what was broken, that’s what justice is all about. It’s all about consequence management. Consequences will happen. We do things in the real world and the world changes. We make an impact.

And so we want to administer justice. And so justice must be blind, it must be cold-hearted. Justice don’t care. And so, well, that’s not very loving. There’s no room for love in justice. Justice doesn’t let the love in. And so that’s a very cold world and it’s kind of hard to accept. 

But we need justice, we can’t toss it out, so how do you let the love in? 

And that’s mercy and grace. But look, too much grace can be a bad thing, right? What if they don’t care, they get away with it, and their heart’s not changed, and they don’t give a fuck and maybe they even go and do it again? What then? How do we rectify justice & grace, how do we “do good” and show mercy and tenderness and let the love in? 

You see those people in court who forgive the people who killed their loved ones, and it’s astonishing. And I don’t know how they do it, and well, I don’t even know if they should do it. But I don’t know how to judge that, I don’t feel right about it. I don’t feel like it’s something I can sort out. But we can’t have mercy & grace all the time, or trust would be annihilated, and we couldn’t have relationship, and we couldn’t have society. It wouldn’t work.

Justice is a lot like the value & importance of failure, in life and in business. People talk a lot about failure being super valuable because it helps you learn profound lessons, and there’s no other way to learn about them. And so it’s good, or at least there’s an important upside. And justice is like that, there’s a critically important upside. At church sometimes because grace is so amazing, we want it to be the most important thing or the only thing and we want to deny that there’s anything bad about endless grace, never any consequences. But we see that justice is important. 

And so both things are good, and both are important even though they’re opposites. It’s insane. And if you have nothing but justice, then there’s no love, but if you have nothing but grace, everything falls apart. It’s a violation of justice and we can’t have that. 

In fact, if we somehow made grace “mandatory,” like, oh, this is the proper response, this is the just consequence, this is how to honor justice, but we’re going to shelve all that and just do grace, and it’s mandatory, and you have to do it, you can’t enforce consequences to bad and reckless actions, if we made grace mandatory -- well you can’t, it doesn’t work. Justice & grace can’t be in the same place at the same time, because they are opposites. If Justice is present, if justice is served, there is no grace there. You can serve justice gently and with a smile on your face, but it’s still justice and it’s not grace. 

And if grace is given at all, then there’s no justice there. Maybe you forgive, or maybe it’s really just no big deal, or maybe someone changes and they never do the bad or reckless thing again even without any justice getting served, but still, if it’s grace, it’s not justice. They are fundamentally conceptually opposite. It’s not even, like, they cancel each other out, it’s: grace is the willful abdication of justice, and justice served is itself an absence of grace. 

I guess you could say like oil & water. They just simply can not be in the same place at the same time. 

UNLESS.

Unless the author of justice, himself, willingly made atonement for others, thereby satisfying justice, and extending grace to the guilty. It’s the only possible way. You see, there’s that old testament archetype where the sins of the Israelites are transferred onto a goat and then they chase it out into the wilderness. It’s supposed to be a method of satisfying justice without every person paying the price for all the ways they’ve harmed each other or fallen short. But even that can’t truly satisfy true justice. If a scapegoat gets what you deserve, well, that’s not justice, not even a little bit. If you wronged someone and they willingly put that on a goat, it’s still not justice -- you didn’t get what you deserve. And even if the goat voluntarily says, “yeah sure, put it on me,” well sure I guess you can, with permission. But that doesn’t make it just, right? Justice is not satisfied unless you get what you deserve. Anything else is an injustice, including grace -- and things are only grace if the “debt-holder” willingly lets it go. 

But even that’s still injustice. So it can only be, if the author of justice, the one who designed the architecture of justice itself, willingly assumes all guilt, all accountability, on behalf of the guilty, that justice can then still be served -- he’s not just the scapegoat willingly bearing the guilt but also the debt-holder and also the author of justice -- then and there, and only there, can the lines of justice & grace intersect, and be in the same place, at the same time.

And THAT's The Cross.

And THAT is the astonishing relationship between justice and grace. 

✝️