The Gazette 1980

GAZETTE

DECEMBER 1980

evidence available is inadequate or misleading or even dishonest and because of our own lack of wisdom, insight and knowledge. As we celebrate the Eucharist we are in the presence of Jesus Christ, 'the one ordained by God to be the judge of the living and the dead'. To him we bring our efforts to administer justice with humility but also with hope and determination because the Justice of God is not just a humbling term of comparison, it is also the goal to which we try approximate. "We see the Justice of God as the goal of our actions when we are clearly conscious that our treatment is not God's. It may have seemed somewhat inappropriate to read at this Mass a Gospel passage in which Jesus says: 'Judge not, and you will not be judged yourselves'. Yet all Christians need to be reminded that there is a judgment which belongs to God alone. The people engaged in litigation may at times appear to be behaving unreasonably, or selfishly or stubbornly; the people who stand in the dock in our courts may appear hopeless and lacking in dignity, they may have acted with violence and dishonesty. But they, like us, have been called by God; they, like us, may have received the pledge of eternal life in the Eucharist; they, like us, await the ultimate judgment. It is not for any human being to seek to root out the cockle from the wheat. The Christian may not despair of anyone. "In the life of every Christian the effort to respect the dignity of others is required. It is an effort that is all the more necessary if one frequently meets those who are easily regarded as failures. All of those with whom we come in contact, not just clients and colleagues but those who are guilty of terrible crimes, all are people with whom we hope to share in the eternal kingdom. Their inner struggles and difficulties we may never know. Our aim should be that, in their contact with us, they may recognise our awareness of the dignity to which they have been called. They may indeed be responding to that call better than we know. It is a salutary thought that it was to the guardians and interpreters of the law that Jesus said that the most despised in society would enter the kingdom before them. "We see the Justice of God as the goal of our actions when we recognise that no legal system can exhaust our obligations to individuals or to society. To be a servant of the law is a noble contribution to the establishing of justice, but. fo- Christians, all laws are 'summed up in ihis single co r 1 .dment: You must love your neibhbour as yourself "We are called by today's Gospel to be generous without hope of reward, to give, even when it seems unreasonable: 'to the man who takes your cloak from you, do not refuse your tunic'. Even in the necessarily formal context of court proceedings, and in our many other contacts, professional and non-professional, and our general social involvements, members of the legal profession, and all those who follow Christ, may show that his justice is much more than a matter of standing on rights, of passing judgment and of imposing punishment — important though all these may be. Divine Justice is God's constant, faithful readiness to be true to his promises of eternal love and peace. In the absence of this readiness to love generously and unwaveringly, human justice is in danger of losing its heart. Pope Paul VI put it with his usual perceptiveness:

"The hard saying here is that justice establishes and enforces the exact area of somebody's rights. That is its admirable and essential task. Love wants to go further than the enforceable minimum and is even ready to give up its own rights for the sake of the neighbour, for love 'seeketh not her own'. Through love, the goal and objective of justice which is to order the rights, the duties of individuals and communities, for the good of the whole and of each member, is reached — but it is also surpassed. That, I suppose is the 'gap-area' as between Christian ethics and moral theology on the one hand and the concept and practical principles of jurisprudence on the other. Yet the gap is not a no-man's land, since it is an area occupied by the human person whose rights, obligations, duties and responsibilities are the concern of both disciplines, although in different ways. The overlap is there. "Is one justified in drawing a conclusion that here may be seen the difference, real if not stated, which is or should be discernible in the legal systems of professedly Christian countries as opposed to other codes of law? Are we able to see justice as love's guarantor and law as love's protector? To expound such a proposition may be — though for all I know it may not be — a legal heresy! It is surely Christian orthodoxy. Responsibility is both social and personal and, once again, the overlap between individual and society points to a shared area of concern — the nature and destiny of the whole man in community. " 'Has not man a hard service upon the earth?' asks the Book of Job. Whatever religion and law can do to transpose this, so that it becomes the service of perfect freedom, is a truly pastoral function. It can be shared at different levels by both: 'Help one another to carry these heavy loads, and in this way you will fulfil the law of Christ'. VOTIVE MASS At St Michan's, Halston St, the Rev Donal Murray said: "We are here at the beginning of the Law Year to worship God. We do so because we recognise that words like 'law' and 'justice' ought to be spoken with a certain humility and reverence. These words are reminders that there is a Law and a Justice by which we will all be judged, counsel and criminal, judge and accused, solicitor and litigant — and priest. We are here as people who are conscious that 'we shall all stand before the judgment seat of God'. The words 'law' and 'justice', as Pope John Paul II expressed it, 'recall the model of a higher justice, the Justice of God, which is set as the goal and as an inescapable term of comparison' for every human system of law. "There is a Justice which does not suffer from our limitations. This Justice, as Isaiah foretold, is exercised by the Messiah. On him rests the spirit of wisdom, insight, counsel, power, knowledge and the fear of the Lord. Jesus Christ, full of these gifts of the Holy Spirit, or, as one might call them, the qualities of true justice, judges the world with integrity and with equity. "Our first duty is to acknowledge that the justice which we administer falls short of that inescapable term of comparison. It does so because the laws which we apply may be less than perfect, because the society in which we live has many injustices, open and hidden, because the

225