Activist and author Shane Claiborne examines the tension between justice and grace:
Violence is contagious. Violence begets violence.… Pick up the sword and die by the sword. You kill us and we’ll kill you. There is a contagion of violence in the world; it’s spreading like a disease.
But grace is also contagious. An act of kindness inspires another act of kindness…. A single act of forgiveness can feel like it heals the world. Grace begets grace. Love rubs off on those who are loved…. There’s nowhere you can see the battle of grace and disgrace waged more vehemently than in the criminal justice system. When it comes to words like “justice,” people can say the same thing and mean something completely different.
Capital punishment offers us one version of justice. There is a sensibility to it: evil should not go without consequence. And there is a theology behind it: “An eye for an eye … a tooth for a tooth” [Leviticus 24:20].
Yet grace offers us another version of justice. Grace makes room … for justice that is restorative, and dedicated to healing the wounds of injustice. But the grace thing is hard work. It takes faith—because it dares us to believe that not only can victims be healed, but so can the victimizers. It is not always easy to believe that love is more powerful than hatred, life more powerful than death, and that people can be better than the worst thing they’ve done.
These two versions of justice compete for our allegiance. One leads to death. The other can lead to life, and to healing and redemption and other beautiful things. [1]
Mennonite pastor Melissa Florer-Bixler connects forgiveness and restorative justice:
We are told that we choose whose world we want to live in. We’ll choose wealth or God. We’ll choose violence or God. We’ll choose nationalism or God. We’ll choose racial hierarchy or God. Each case is an example of a different and incompatible operational system. One of those systems, if we live by it, binds us in endless struggle and violence that leads to our own destruction, as well as the destruction of others….
We are asked to choose which world we want to live in—a world of retributive justice or a world of forgiveness. [Theologian] Karl Barth, reflecting on forgiveness, writes, “Living by forgiveness is never by any means passivity, but Christian living in full activity.” Barth writes that, when we finally come before God, we will not be asked to give an account of our piety or morality. Instead, we will be asked, “Did you live by grace, or did you set up gods for yourself and perhaps want to become one yourself?” [2]
We can’t operate in both orders. And when the world of revenge enters the renewed creation, the order built on good news, it poisons the possibility of mutuality, transformation, and reconciliation. The way out of the endless loop of retribution is to recognize that forgiveness of individuals is interwoven with the social order of God’s reign. [3]
References:
[1] Shane Claiborne, Executing Grace: How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It’s Killing Us (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2016), 5, 7.
[2] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G. T. Thomson (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 152.
[3] Melissa Florer-Bixler, How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace (Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 2021), 73, 75–76.
Image credit and inspiration: Riho Kitagawa, Kintsugi pottery (detail), 2021, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Kintsugi is the artform of repairing a break with gold; we allow the pottery to move forward in grace and beauty, not by discarding or erasing, but by transforming the break into art.
Story from Our Community:
For me, mysticism manifests in everyday interactions with others. By fully participating in the endless opportunities to love and forgive others—and myself—I am really saying “yes” to the depth of my life. I see life as both a pilgrimage and privilege with guidance and comfort from the Holy Spirit along the way.
—John M
