Bringing our fugitive justice home
Pope Benedict’s message for Lent is already out. It’s entitled, “The justice of God has been manifested through faith in Jesus Christ.”
My dear friends, it’s worth the read, and the corresponding reflection. Hopefully it can provoke deep changes in us. I think it’s really meant for that purpose. The process may be long and painful, but, heck, we truly need it.
For long, our concept and practice of justice has been like the prodigal son. It got its rich inheritance from its father, left him to be on its own, enjoyed a period of profligacy, and now is in serious trouble. It has to come home. We have to bring it home, to God, its source and end.
Our human justice is actually a kind of fugitive justice. It has flown the nest. So far it is surviving by dint of a series of disguises and masks that skillfully blend the true and the false, the good and the evil. But it is alienating itself from its nature. It cannot remain that way forever.
It, for example, has made practicality as its end-all, often deriving its strength from what is culturally prevalent or currently popular. It can never manage to render universal, lasting justice, and lends itself easily to favor the strong, the majority, the better endowed, the better placed and the plainly lucky.
It’s a justice that does not go all the way. It gets stuck somewhere, often in a dead-end, sweetening the situation with all sorts of human flavorings. But the human heart will always ask for more and sooner or later will find a way to get what it really yearns.
The main virtue of Pope Benedict’s message is that it has dared to remind us of this very basic, religious character of justice. Such grounding is often taken for granted by us nowadays to the extent that we make our own selves, and not God anymore, as the source and object of justice.
Our legal system, for example, is getting to be more and more enmeshed in what is called as legal positivism, an ideology that precisely sees law merely as a human invention. Faith and religion have no place in it at all, thus confining itself into a purely man-made world.
This ideology detaches law from morality and is responsible for the legalization of divorce and abortion, for example.
I’m happy to note that the Pope is bringing this crucial aspect of justice to public attention, letting it step out from strictly ecclesiastical or academic circles to impact on the real world of men in our actual, not theoretical, situations.
In that message, he makes a scholarly discussion of the true nature and foundation of justice that ought to be known by all in appropriate ways and dosages. Let’s hope more people in their varying capabilities will help to translate this truth into more concrete terms, providing the practical linkages.
In so many words, the Pope explains that if justice is giving to another his due, then human justice cannot perfectly fulfill it since man in the end needs God more than just things, and God can only be given by God himself through us.
Justice, by definition, is first of all a gift which we try to live as faithfully as possible, always relying on our relation with God first before we make use of our human efforts. It knows how to pray and use spiritual means. It blends easily with mercy.
Yes, for ages we have made this consideration as too good to be true, very improbable, too quixotic to be feasible. It’s true that there are intangible and mysterious aspects that will always elude our human formulation of justice, but our justice system should respect them, not negate them.
This is the challenge that we have—how to cultivate a culture of human justice that is respectful always of its divine origin and purpose, while its feet, so to speak, are firmly rooted on the ground, on the here and now.
We just cannot allow ourselves to simply drift along the mindless inertia of the current understanding of justice, tone-deaf to its authentic meaning. We have to do something to correct the situation. It’s a formidable task, all right, but not impossible.
The little thing we do in this regard, often regarded as insignificant, will always have cosmic effects. For this, in the end, is the system that works for and in us, whether we like or not, whether we are aware of it or not.
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@gmail.com)
