I’ve been thinking about justice, and how we’ve come to imagine it as the infliction of suffering in response to wrong. It seems to me a deeper justice is not pain for pain, but the setting of things to rights. What is wrong, in other words, is made no longer wrong.
Justice in this view is healing, and restoration, rather than the heaping of suffering upon suffering. I wonder how our views of God might be changed, and our sermons and lectures and books and conversations, if we thought about justice that way, about God as something more than an all-powerful being with the mind of legalistic, vengeance-seeking man.
