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GAZETTE
DECEMBER 1980
"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
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:
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