Rough justice or none at all!
Here’s
Harriet, she’s a single mother and a cocaine addict and she abuses her
children severely and often. Here’s Henry, he’s ill and mentally
challenged. He carries an iron bar and has taken to beating people with
it.
What
are we to do with them? We may not be sure but we are sure that we
should do something to protect the defenceless and innocent and it
doesn’t matter that Henry and Harriet are not in (complete) control of
their actions. Harriet’s horrific background and Henry’s mental
disability matter—of course—but these things have to be put aside until
we deal with the very real threat these two people are to others.
“The
standards of the law are standards of general application. The law
takes no account of the infinite varieties of temperament, intellect,
and education, which make the internal character of a given act so
different in different men. It does not attempt to see men as God sees
them, for more than one sufficient reason. In the first place, the impossibility
of nicely measuring a man’s powers and limitations is far clearer than
that of ascertaining his knowledge of law…When men live in society, a
certain average of conduct, a sacrifice of individual peculiarities
going beyond a certain point, is necessary to the general welfare. If,
for instance, a man is born hasty and awkward, is always having
accidents and hurting himself or his neighbors, no doubt his congenital
defects will be allowed for in the courts of Heaven, but his slips are
no less troublesome to his neighbors than if they sprang from guilty
neglect. His neighbors accordingly require him, at his proper peril, to
come up to their standard, and the courts which they establish decline
to take his personal equation into account.” Oliver Wendell Holmes said
that.
There
must come a point when we render judgment because however disabled a
transgressor is we simply can’t allow him to hurt his neighbor at will.
At one level our response against sin (or crime) must ignore what
motivates or what shaped the sinner/criminal. We have to develop, as
Walter Moberly would put it, “a certain myopia” and get on with dealing
with the case. He who knows all
and knows how to judge all does not hold us responsible because we are
not him and he expects us to judge within our limitations.
Explain it how we will, or for as long as we might, there are in fact those who are predators that hunt the defenseless. What the predator might have been or what he might be under other circumstances who can say? The man/woman before us is the one we
have to deal with and not the one who might have been or might later
be. When we deal severely (as we sometimes must) with transgressors we
recognize our limits but we can do no other than to think that
dispensing a rough sort of justice is better than dispensing no justice
at all. And if we're sensitive to the fact that we too are under the
Holy Father who judges all persons and takes into account all the factors that conspire to make a life then we’ll bear Matthew 7:1-5 in mind.
Aren’t we pleased that Christ is a great
Savior?! The more complex and convoluted the entire human situation
becomes to our eyes the more wondrous he has to be in order to save any of us. “For such a high priest is suited to our needs,” the Hebrew writer said. Pascal had good reason to say, “It
is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own
wretchedness as it is to know his own wretchedness without knowing the
Redeemer who can free him from it.”
But in saying Jesus Christ has to be great to save “any” of us I'm not suggesting we’re all equally bogged down in sins (plural) for manifestly we’re not. Or that we were
all equally bogged down in sins (plural) because I know my record is in
every way more littered with failures and positive trespasses than many
I know. But whatever our individual differences are they came to us
because we are part of a single human family. Neither sin nor
righteousness began with me—they continue
with me and whatever differences there are in the number of our sins or
the grossness of our particular sins we’ve all been involved in the
same uprising against God at some point and bear the sign of rebel on
our forehead.
But
I suspect if we had a richer biblical anthropology and a richer sense
of human solidarity and if we were more enlightened about our limits as
judges we could live more contentedly with “rough justice” and think we
were being treated as well as is possible. Maybe resentment would be
less of a hazard and we’d “do our time” with a freer heart.
I'm
certain that if our human judges do their needed duty without arrogance
and with some residue of good will toward us that we'd "take what's
coming to us" in a better spirit. Then, again, even our judges have been
shaped by that universal uprising against the Holy Father. Knowing what
it was going to lead to in 70 AD, from the cross Jesus looked at his
nation and said to his Holy Father, "They don't know what they're
doing." Luke 23:14.
Only a God can judge well—only a God like Jesus Christ can judge well. Until the day he does that and rights all wrongs [Acts 17:31] we'll have to bear with rough justice or none at all.
