God’s justice or God’s mercy?

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 03, 2024

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, I used to wonder why mercy was so much emphasized in contemporary Catholicism, especially since it seemed to be stressed most by those who were leaning as far away as they could from the clear and specific teachings of Christ and His Church and the need to adhere to them. Suddenly the emphasis was on the “deep reality” that we are all wounded and that we must all depend not so much on hard truths as on God’s mercy.

Of course I still reject the substitution of an emphasis on God’s mercy for an emphasis on God’s justice—that is, for the need to be obedient to God’s commands. I also still think the renewed emphasis on mercy has at times been used as a way of escaping the need to talk about those commands. But for all that, I possessed in my youth only a very superficial understanding of our basic human woundedness. I failed to grasp that we are all not only earthen vessels, but even cracked and broken earthen vessels. And I do think this concept is a bit easier to grasp today, if only because we live now in what many call a “therapeutic” society. We tend to take our woundedness for granted, and we are constantly in search of explanations for our difficulties and deficiencies—perhaps especially explanations which reassure us that they are “not our fault”.

Moreover, human brokenness is almost certainly more severe in a society characterized by widespread divorce and the dissolution of the family, not to mention a deep lack of public support for virtue, factors which are far more universally experienced today than they were during my boyhood in the 1950s and early 1960s. In consequence, there is very probably a far greater need for therapy today, or at least we no longer have nearly as much confidence in the make-or-break quality of the school of hard knocks. Sadly, however, an increased focus on our human woundedness does not necessarily lead us to recognize and depend on the mercy of God. Therapy, as it turns out, is not the same thing as spiritual growth.

Dependence on mercy

Indeed, the line between accepting therapy and learning to depend on God’s mercy can still be very hard to cross. And so can the line between depending on God’s mercy and seeking to conform ourselves ever more fully to God’s will. Or, to put it another way, even devout souls are far more likely to pray for God’s mercy for “sinners” or “poor sinners”—considered as a category in which we do not include ourselves, except perhaps by rote in the Our Father and the Hail Mary.

Therefore, let us begin by seeking to grasp the stupendous character of God’s mercy. Consider this extraordinarily deep passage from the Old Testament Book of Sirach (or The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach or Ecclesiasticus), written around 200 BC:

Woe to you who have lost your endurance!
 What will you do when the Lord punishes you?
Those who fear the Lord will not disobey his words,
 and those who love him will keep his ways.
Those who fear the Lord will seek his approval,
 and those who love him will be filled with the law.
Those who fear the Lord will prepare their hearts
 and will humble their souls before him.
Let us fall into the hands of the Lord
 and not into the hands of men;
for as his majesty is,
 so also is his mercy.
     [2:17-18]

Here we have a perfect statement of the proper attitude for a Christian. Fear of the Lord and obedience to His commands lie at the core of a proper response to God. But for all that, we must also prefer to fall into the hands of the Lord than into the hands of men because “as his majesty is, so also is his mercy”. The point, I think, is that we Christians are called upon to do just two things: First, to take God seriously enough so as to commit ourselves to learning his teachings and doing his will; second, to take God seriously enough so as to recognize that no matter how faithfully we take on these responsibilities, we must still rely wholly on His unfathomable mercy.

Two colossal errors

If we fail to recognize God in either His justice or His mercy, only God knows how we can be saved. The resolution of that problem is buried within the invincibility of our ignorance. But if we recognize one without the other we place ourselves in an even greater jeopardy, for the presumption must be that we know enough to grasp the whole. To be unaware of the existence of God is obviously quite different from being in a willful state of denial. But for those of us who are aware of God—and especially for those who recognize and acknowledge God’s unique Presence in the Catholic Church—it is quite another thing to treasure God’s mercy without treasuring His justice; or to treasure God’s justice without treasuring His mercy.

By this word “treasuring” I mean keeping both God’s justice and His mercy in our hearts as applicable directly and personally to ourselves. We might expect that God’s justice is in keeping with his incomparable majesty. Surely that goes almost without saying, and we may be sideline cheerleaders for the application of that majesty and justice to others. But we must also recognize that even if we ourselves are committed to God’s justice we still remain utterly reliant on God’s mercy. St. Paul points out that “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8), and this applies not just to those who lived before His crucifixion, but to every human person throughout history.

Those who have not entered the Church are certainly often unaware of the significance of their own sinfulness, but the same problem can afflict those within the fold. Among Catholics, talk of God’s mercy can sometimes be—and perhaps too often has been—a cloak for our failure to take God’s justice seriously. We may not think clearly about the difference between truth and virtue on the one hand, or falsehood and vice on the other. It is very easy to ignore the requirement imposed on all of us not only to accept Christ’s mercy but to conform ourselves to Christ’s will. For that is precisely what, through His mercy, Our Lord enables us to do.

If we tend toward scrupulosity, we may well be haunted by our sins to the point of unnecessarily fearing God’s justice. But my point here is just the opposite. I suggest that we may also in today’s Church be so busy celebrating God’s mercy as to forget that mercy itself is an extraordinarily serious gift—so serious, in fact, that the willful failure to seek to know God’s will and to reform our lives is actually a refusal of that mercy. I grant that we cannot always, even with sincere effort, be aware of all of our sins. But mercy is a recognition of our confusion and weakness, not a blank check. We dare not speak constantly of mercy without a deep commitment to learning and obeying God’s will.

Sirach affirms that as God’s majesty is, so also is His mercy. This is a stunning comparison. But it also means that as His mercy is, so also is His majesty. To presume upon that mercy is to forget that we ourselves lack majesty—for we are not God.