“Be Merciful Just As
Your Father Is Merciful”( Lk 6:36).
Dear Sisters
and Brothers in Christ,
Facing
injustices, people in our today’s society do their best to demand that justice
be done. But what type of justice do
they want to ask for? Very often, we
understand justice as the synonym with revenge or vindication. We mean
punishment for the perpetrator and restoration of the victim’s rights. In other words, we only practice retributive
or punitive justice.
For
this reason, lawmakers create more severe legal measures, and government
authorities build more harsh prisons, thinking that by so doing they can get
rid of crimes and make this world a paradise.
Realities
have taught us painful lessons.
Most
severe punishments such as death penalty sometimes can curb evildoings but the
killing of the evildoer by itself proves to be a failure in terms of being a
remedy for social illness and a healing for both the criminal and the victim. Not mentioning evil and corrupt human legal
systems that only provide justice to the rich and the powerful and deprive the
poor and the voiceless their due rights to equal and just treatment.
In
fact, when we deal with people, we should not mistake for doing business with
mere objects like machine and animals this person-to-person relation. A human
person, no matter who he or she may be, has a name, a family background, a
story to tell. They are like an iceberg
of which we only see the tip. We all fall
short of knowing about the truth hidden under the appearance. Finally, a human person is a mystery so
profound, so great that only God who has made him can understand fully and
correctly.
The
Holy Bible teaches us that God created the human person after His image. Saint John the Apostle whom Jesus loved
teaches us that God is love. So, as
people often say, “Like father like son.
We are God’s children. We bear in
our hearts the image of God, our Father in heaven, Who is love.
God
is holy, He does not like sin. But God
loves sinners and forgives sinners when they repent of their sins and go back
to God. God as the supreme judge of
humanity, Who loves justice and will not leave any wrongdoing unpunished. But God is first and above all a merciful
Father, slow to anger and rich in forgiveness.
To save us sinners from death God sent Jesus, His Beloved Son to die on
the cross. The suffering and death of
Jesus is the proof of God’s merciful justice.
In other words, human justice is vindictive, meant for taking revenge on
the criminal. Divine justice, on the
contrary, is educative and reformative, meant for the education of the
wrongdoer, for teaching them the way to truth and for the reform of the
criminal, for giving the sinner a second chance, an opportunity, to stand up
and get out of the darkness of evil and embrace the light of the day of
salvation.
Aware
of the reality that we were sinners, deserving death penalty by God, the most
holy and just judge. But we were
forgiven our sins because of God’s merciful love. We all owe God’s forgiveness for which we can
only make a return by being merciful to those who do wrong to us. Let us leave the task of judging and
punishing to God, and practice forgiveness without reserve, so that we may be
as merciful as God, our Father in heaven Who is merciful. Amen.
Fr. Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Nhut, O.P.
The Holy Spirit Choir
