Love is the only real justice--never was there a more revolutionary
ethic! If Christianity is to be judged by its institutions, it must be
reluctantly confessed that twenty centuries of Christian teaching have
almost wholly failed to make this strange ethic acceptable to mankind.
The elder brother still makes broad his phylacteries in the home, in
the Church, and on the seat of justice. The elder brother's sense of
offended respectability still masquerades as virtue. Who forgives as
this father forgave, with such completeness that he who has wrought the
wrong is encouraged to forget that the wrong was ever wrought? Where
is the loving and tolerant spirit of the father less visible than in
the Church, which crucifies men for a word, and makes a difference of
opinion the ground for deadly enmity? Of what administration of law
can we say that its chief object is not the punishment of the
wrong-doer, but his reclamation? No existing society is organized on
these principles, and the only defense the apologists of a bastard
Christianity make is that it is totally impossible to apply the
principles of Jesus to the administration of society. That is, at all
events, an intelligible defense, but is it a legitimate one? Was Jesus
merely a romantic dreamer, with entirely romantic views of love and
justice? Was He a moral anarchist, whose teachings, if interpreted in
laws, would destroy the basis of society? A strange thing indeed in
human history if One who has been loved as no other was ever loved by
multitudes of men and women through the ages, should prove after all to
be an impracticable dreamer or a moral anarchist!
But if Jesus was a dreamer, He dreamed true, and the very reason why He
is loved with such wide and deep devotion is that men do dimly, but
instinctively, perceive that His life presents the only perfect pattern
of life as it should be. Life, as it exists, is clearly not ordered on
a social system which any wise or good man can approve. Hence the wise
and good man is perpetually urged to the enquiry whether Jesus may not
after all have been right?
Jesus certainly acts as one who is right. He acts always with the
assured air of one for whom all debate is closed and henceforth
impossible. He knows His way, and the great moral dilemmas of life
yield instantly to His touch. He penetrates to their roots and makes
us feel that He has touched the essential element in them. The dreamer
vindicates himself by making it manifest that he sees deeper into the
problem than the moralist, and that his is after all the better
morality because it is of higher social value, and makes more directly
for social reconciliation.
Let us take, for example, the judgment of Jesus upon the woman who was
a sinner in the house of Simon the Pharisee. The social dilemma of the
fallen woman is much more difficult of solution than that of the
prodigal son. We expect a certain power of moral convalescence in
youth which has been betrayed through folly. Sooner or later the manly
nature kindles with resentment at its own weakness. Moreover, social
law allows a certain opportunity of recuperation to man which it denies
to woman. The sin of the woman seems less pardonable, not because it
is worse in itself, but because it outrages a higher convention. Hence
the strict moralist who might make some allowance for the hot blood of
youth, makes none for woman when she is betrayed through the affections.
But this is the very point on which Jesus fixes as essential. "_The
woman loved much, therefore let her many sins be forgiven_," He says.
And a true reading of the story would seem to show that in uttering
this sublime verdict Jesus is not thinking of the woman's sudden and
pure love for Him; He is rather reviewing the entire nature of her
life. She had loved much--that is her history in a sentence. Cruelty
and unkindness, malice and bitterness, had no part in her misdoing.
She had been undone through the very sweetness of her nature, as
multitudes of women are. That which was her noblest attribute--her
power of affection--had been the minister of her ruin through lack of
wisdom and restraint. By love she had fallen, by love also she shall
be redeemed. Her sins were indeed many, but behind all her sins there
was an essential though perverted magnanimity of nature, and for the
sake of an essential good in her, which lay like a shining pearl at the
root of her debasement, she shall be forgiven.
Again a strange verdict, and one that must have seemed to the Pharisees
entirely immoral. "What becomes of justice?" is their whispered
comment. Jesus asserts His sense of justice by an exposition of the
character of Simon. Simon is destitute of love, of magnanimity, even
of courtesy. In his hard and formal nature there has been no room for
emotion; passion of any kind and he are strangers. Which nature is
radically the better, his or "this woman's"? Which presents the more
hopeful field to the moralist? The soil of Simon's heart is thin and
meagre; but in "this woman's" heart is a soil overgrown with weeds
indeed, but delicately tempered, rich and deep, in which the roots of
the fair tree of life may find abundant room and nourishment.
Therefore she shall be forgiven for her possibilities, and such
forgiveness is justice. To ignore these possibilities, to allow what
she has been utterly to overshadow the lovely vision of what she may
be, when once the soil is clear of weeds, and the real magnanimity of
her temperament is directed into noble uses, would be the most odious
form of injustice.
Such is the justice of Jesus, but, alas, after two thousand years we
still stand astonished at it, more than half doubtful of its validity,
and, if truth be told, secretly dismayed at its boldness. It is
romantic justice, we say, but is it practicable justice? We might at
least remember that what we call practicable justice has never yet
attained the gracious results of Christ's romantic justice. Simon the
Pharisee knows no more how to deal with "this woman" than the elder
brother knew how to deal with the prodigal. Such sense of justice as
they possessed would have infallibly driven the penitent boy back to
the comradeship of harlots, and have refused the penitent harlot the
barest chance of reformation. Is not this enough to make the least
discerning of us all suspect that Pharisees and elder brothers, for all
their immaculate respectability of life, are by no means qualified to
pass judgment on these tragedies of life with which they have no
acquaintance, and cannot have an understanding sympathy? Does not the
entire failure of legal justice with all its apparatus of punishment
and repression, to give the sinner a vital impulse to withdraw from his
sin, drive us to the conclusion, or at least to the hope, that there
must be some better method of dealing with sinners than is sanctioned
by conventional justice? There is another method--it is Christ's
method. And the thing to be observed is that whereas conventional
justice must certainly have failed in either of these crucial
instances, the romantic justice of Jesus--if we must so call
it--completely succeeded. The woman who was a sinner sinned no more,
and the penitent son henceforth lived a new life of purity and
obedience. In each case love is justified, and proves itself the
highest justice.