Wanna Make Things Right? Stop Prioritizing Justice

 

Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay

It seems to me that there is an intuitive sense within us fallen human beings to prioritize justice in a cold, blind sense before everything else. Yes, even before love or friendship, we aim to make sure that we are given our due and that people who have hurt us should be hurt as well, so that he or she can feel what we also felt. For instance, if we learn that a person we consider a friend is actually stabbing us in the back, the reasonable response seems to be to break the friendship apart and complain about this same friend to other people. This seems what is just in our eyes. And for us, as long as our sense of blind justice is preserved, all will be well.

But for Christ, making things right does not mean prioritizing justice in the retributive sense of the word. Rather, for Him, justice is merely secondary to gratuitous, no-holds-barred Divine Mercy. Mercy always and everywhere is primary. Only when Mercy precedes justice can things be made right. This, in fact, is what happens in the Kingdom of God, as demonstrated in the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard.

In the parable, Christ likens the Kingdom of Heaven to a house holder who went out early in the morning to find laborers who can work in his vineyard. He then found workers who agreed to be paid a denarius, which is the standard daily wage for a worker during Christ's time (Mt 20:1-2). But he didn't stop there, though. He also went out at 9 AM, at noon, at 3 PM, and 5 PM to find more workers to help in the vineyard, where those who have been working since the early morning have been there already before these batches of workers came (vv. 3, 5, 6). He told them to work at the vineyard and that he will give them "what is right" as a payment for the labor. At the end of the day, however, all of them - from the worker who worked hard since the early morning to the worker who worked only an hour because he already arrived at 5 PM (because the law commanded that, by sundown, workers should already receive thwir wages, Deuteronomy 24:14-15) - received the same amount of payment: a denarius (vv. 8-10). In other words, even the worker who worked for only an hour received the same reward as the worker who worked for the whole day.

What would you feel if you, who worked hard all day, simply received the same amount of reward as the one who merely worked an hour? I'm guessing you'd be offended. And this is exactly what the early morning workers felt. They complained at the house holder, saying that those who worked only an hour "have (been) made equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat" (v. 12). Again, these workers, just like us, want to prioritize what they think they "deserve" over anything else. Once more, that instinct of prioritizing cold, blind justice over everything else is being shown.

But remember, the house holder told the late workers that he will give them "what is right" as payment. This is "what is right" for him: that all have EQUAL ACCESS to his abundant generosity, regardless of when you started working. In response to the complaints of the early workers, he said, "Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?" (v. 15).

"Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?" This is the question that confronts fallen humanity that thinks justice is king. God has chosen to be gratiutously merciful and generous to every created being there is; everything we have - from our very existence, to the very air we breathe, and to the very clothes we wear every single day - is given to us by the Almighty Father without even passing a test first that would determine if we deserve it. He just gives, because He wants to give.

What does this teach us about the right way to live? It tells us that it is wrong to prioritize justice because we were never created and redeemed for the sake of justice in the first place. We were created and redeemed because of mercy. Both the law-abiding citizen and the law breaker have equal opportunity to access God's heavenly vineyard. Yes, you read that right: just as the late worker has been made equal to the early worker in terms of payment, so does St. Matthew, who, because he is a tax collector, is considered by his fellow Jews as a public sinner, been made equal to St. Paul - who considered himself "blameless" under the Jewish law (Philippians 3:6) - in terms of access to God's mercy and salvation. This is the good news that is, at the same time, a scandal to worldly ears.

Mercy is the basic building block of existence. And if the framework by which we live and breathe is mercy, who are we to be so harsh toward our neighbor, demanding strict, cold justice before everything else? This is perhaps why St. Matthew arranged his Gospel in a way that the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard will be in the middle of the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant and the Parable of the Wicked Tenants - parables which emphasize the Mercy of God and that Divine Justice, which punishes us if we have been unmerciful, only comes after Divine Mercy.

In sum, Christ has given us the antidote to the world's obsession with strict justice, an obsession that will only leave all of us in a hurtful state and will only make us resentful against each other. God's Mercy has taught us that, in the order of both creation and salvation, everybody counts... equally. This should be the basic disposition of our lives. And may we, by God's grace, prioritze gratuitous love over retribution and eradicate within us a self-serving sense of justice.