Friday, September 1, 2017

Ponder: true justice is the fruit of bounty

"A curious thing happens to the spokesman of justice in this parable.  He is accused of envy.  What a reply to one convinced that he has suffered an injustice!  Instead of hearing as he expected, that untamperable right will be restored, he must learn that his real motive for intervening was inferior!  Yet if we accept Scripture as God's holy word, we learn a strange rule about human nature: that when it becomes necessary to invoke justice, that irreproachable value and crystalline motive, almost always something is rotten in Denmark.  To often 'justice' is used as a mask for quite different things.

Human justice is highly problematical.  It is something a man should strive for but not lean upon.  Perhaps we come closest to the true sense of the New Testament if we say that genuine justice is not the beginning but the end, and the other justice so pompously displayed as the fundament of morality is a dubious thing.  True justice is the fruit of bounty, and practicable by man only after he has been initiated into the school of divine love where he has learned to see people as they really are, himself included.  Before one can be just, one must learn to love."

Romano Guardini, The Lord (1954), 261.

No comments:

Post a Comment