WE PRAISE our God as a God of justice, but our world is dominated by unjust acts. Around us, we see the innocent murdered, the poor despised, and those who speak for peace and truth silenced and deprived.
Two weeks ago, in a square in Lviv, the silent witness of hundreds of empty prams spoke of the children already killed in Putin’s war. There are more empty prams now. In Russia, two simple words — “no war” — lose you your job and your liberty. At borders where the women and children of Ukraine seek safety with strangers, traffickers wait to entrap them for profit.
The dominance of untruths and the ruthlessness of human politics is before us with particular force this Holy Week, overshadowed as it is by the cruel, costly, and geopolitically disastrous war in Ukraine.
But it was not any less ruthless last year, or last century, or even last millennium. World events instigated by the powerful roll over ordinary people, damaging many well outside the immediate political arena of conflict.
Nor are we in the West free from helpless complicity in those world events. Our part in global civil society is shadowed by calculation about which regimes are and are not acceptable, and those calculations are fuelled by self-interest. The outpouring of sympathy for this latest wave of suffering is driven, partially at least, by our fear at the direct threat of cataclysmic global war.
We recognise the political necessity for adopting a policy of least harms, which, in refusing “escalation”, protects our children and cities at the expense of Ukraine’s. The grain that cannot be planted in Ukraine this spring will cause the death by hunger of children in Yemen, and increase the undeserved suffering of the poor by a significant amount worldwide.
And Yemen is hungry, devastated, and dependent on that foreign grain partly because the UK quietly sells billions of pounds’ worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, which bombs Yemen’s children and blockades its grain supplies. But that doesn’t make it to our national media much.
HUMAN perceptions of justice are often themselves calculations about equity, about fairness. Trespasses upon the liberty and well-being of another should be met with retribution we call “judgment”.
The system, as we administer it to one another, is full of holes, some of them to do with gaps in the power wielded — the International Criminal Court is unlikely to be able to bring Putin to “justice” — and some of them to do with the venality of all our human systems, which all tend to favour justice for some over justice for others, depending on the power and influence of those accused — as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe can attest authoritatively.
The bewildered words of the psalmist speak with particular force to our human hearts, flawed but desperate for some divine justice to bring order to our human mess: “Has God’s loving mercy clean gone for ever? Has his promise come to an end for evermore? . . . And I said, my grief is this: that the right hand of the Most High has lost its strength.”
AlamyA Civilian car riddled with bullets and shrapnel in Irpin, north of Kyiv
In the world of Roman-occupied Galilee, Jesus walked, taught, and healed. That was a world where people looked actively for the visible signs of God’s justice. They saw, or thought they saw, visible signs of divine favour for the righteous, punishment for the wicked.
As Jesus showed them the things of God — in speech and in miraculous sign, in healing and in proclamation — men and women turned to him and asked him to show them how God’s justice could operated among human lives dominated by political violence and random chance.
They wanted things to make sense. They wanted to be told that, when they saw suffering, God was behind what had happened, somehow. Surely everyone got what they deserved? Some people had been judicially murdered by the Roman governor Pilate — had they offended God, too? Others had died during the accidental collapse of a building — what sin had they committed?
Show us the shape of God’s justice, they urged Jesus. How is it playing out among us? Surely it could never look like the undeserved suffering and death of a good man? How could that be justice?
ALTHOUGH . . . not everyone thought that. In the last week of Jesus’s life, a prudent man of real but limited power pondered a policy of least harms. His name was Caiaphas. He weighed up the harm caused by the death of Jesus, innocent but inflammatory in his rhetoric in a tense political climate, against the wider harms which might rebound on an occupied population were there to be an uprising.
Then he made his choice, explaining it to his colleagues: “It is expedient that one man should die for the people.” He could not know the divine heft of his words, or how many people might be redeemed by the death of that one man.
GOD’s response to the cruelty of this world was to make himself subject to it: to enter into the experience of undeserved suffering in his own person. Jesus, as he sought to respond to questions of deserved and undeserved suffering in the Gospel of Luke, could not yet show them that answer.
That had to wait for the political machine to lose patience with his truth-telling and roll over to crush him, unable to believe his assertion: “My kingdom is not of this world.” All he could do, at that point, was to ask his listeners to think again about the stories they tell themselves about what justice looks like.
For God is not fair, not the way humans are fair. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” says the Lord.
And the reason? The reason is called mercy. Mercy breaks the connection between act and consequence: it cancels debts, offers gifts to the empty-handed, restores innocence to the guilty. Mercy averts punishment and affirms the bonds of love as the only bonds that hold us – bonds made by God and binding humanity in mutual dependence.
Where mercy rules, justice is redundant, because the guilty are freed. “Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price” — be fed and cared for when you don’t deserve it and can’t pay for it.
AND that is just not fair. In our human world, our human way of thinking, mercy allows the guilty to get away with everything. When the righteous and the unrighteous subsist together in the world, when the sun shines on the worst evildoer as brightly as on suffering innocents, what chance is there for the tit-for-tat justice we set up in the hope of redressing an impossible balance?
What good to us is a God who is as weak as the most helpless newborn under fire in Mariupol, or suffering a criminal’s death far away and long ago? When will we see the meek inherit the earth? “Thy will be done”, we pray, “on earth as it is in heaven.” How long, O Lord, how long?
AlamyRescuers carry an elderly woman as the Russian attack on Irpin recedes at the start of this month
Jesus’s words to those who ask the question challenge us to reconsider our tendency to divide humanity into the deserving and the undeserving. Do you think you are innocent, he asks, just because you haven’t been judicially murdered or hurt by the random accidents of this world? Think again.
No one is in a position to stand on their dignity here. No one can claim innocence for the world’s ills. We are all caught up in the web of guilt that hurts others, both deliberately and undeliberately, through collusion, through acts of malice, or simply through the hopelessly compromised business of living within the many injustices of human civil society.
Your rights, Jesus says, are not the point. It’s not justice you need: it’s mercy. “My kingdom is not of this world.”
WE INVENTED the just-war theory because Jesus’s answer doesn’t solve this world’s problems. Pacifists get killed, and sometimes the vulnerable need weapons even more than they need sympathy.
As Thomas More observed five hundred years ago in his book Utopia, to act in the world, to try to influence the powerful towards justice, is to become tainted with the compromise and ill-doing your acting will bring with it — and so to be in desperate need of mercy.
The best we can hope for — as Christians who wish to do good, either politically or in charity — is that our efforts to act ethically, doomed as they are, will meet with a recognising mercy from our God who knew suffering from the inside, and prayed for forgiveness for his own, deeply rational, murderers.
Lord, have mercy. That is our constant prayer, and its name — the name Jesus gives it — is repentance. All the word means is turning, turning towards God and saying: please take it away, this unwanted collusion with the violences and cruelties of this world; take it away, the willed and the unwilled, the deliberate and the unnoticed, the sins of omission and commission. We are too small to carry the sins of the world. Please take them on our behalf: please give us mercy instead.
And he took them. And he takes them. And they lie, the great dark bundle of them, at the foot of his cross, where an innocent man suffers for the guilt of our whole dark, sorrowful, bewildered world.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon us.
The Revd Dr Jessica Martin is a Residentiary Canon of Ely Cathedral.