Justice, Yes, But Also Forgiveness

The sound of careers--lives, really--crashing to the ground echoes out of my television every time I turn on the nightly news. One more movie star, artist, athlete, journalist, or politician is brought to trial in the courtroom of public opinion, and a guilty verdict is all but guaranteed. It doesn't matter if the statutes of limitations has passed by 20 years. It doesn't matter that whatever incident has placed them in this position wasn't even illegal. The only thing that matters is that someone has messed up, and justice must be served.

Justice is good. Justice is important to God. It's important in keeping a society safe, intact, and healthy. No one wants to live in a world without justice. But no one wants to live in a world without forgiveness either.

One of the most important parts of being human is our ability to be vulnerable and tell the truth about ourselves. We've all messed up. We all did something colossally stupid at some point in our lives. Our imperfections, mistakes, and failures unite us as human beings. No one's doing this life thing perfectly. We're all tripping all over ourselves, if not today then yesterday, and if not yesterday then tomorrow. Wisdom is hard won. The Bible says all we have to do is ask for wisdom and God will give it, but it doesn't usually come in a beautiful package wrapped in a bow. His gift of wisdom often comes on the other side of a mess we've made. Growth through mistakes is another uniting human force.

My concern, as I watch the evening news and hear the crumbling, is that people are going to stop telling the hard truth about themselves. We'll be denied their stories of growth and transformation because they're too afraid to admit they were flawed in the first place. 

My concern is that no decent, respectable person will ever run for public office again because of something foolish they did at 19.

My concern is that we're headed toward a world where justice is everything, and forgiveness is seen as weakness.

We need both. People need to be held accountable for their actions. We all need to know that what we do and say matters and has consequences. We need to become wise enough to recognize when "I'm so sorry" is the only acceptable thing to say. But we also need to forgive. We need to live graciously, understanding that people make mistakes, and that those mistakes don't necessarily represent the sum total of a person's life. A consistent pattern of bad behavior is one thing. A foolish, ill-timed comment is another. I made two yesterday. What about you? And aren't you thankful that your life didn't come crashing down as a result? What about a horrible act of bad judgment that hurt another person? Yes, I've done that as well. Thankfully, the acts have gotten less horrible, the judgment less bad, and the hurt less severe over the years, but if anyone wants to dig around my high school past, they'll find plenty to condemn me with. It may not be recorded on fuzzy 1980's video or plastered on my yearbook pages (especially since I was the yearbook editor), but that doesn't mean it's not there.

Oh, but the grace of God. The forgiveness of God and other people. These have transformed me. This is my story. If you want to know who I am today, who I really am, you're going to need to hear about who I used to be, and how grace changed me. How it's still changing me.

Can we be a society that upholds justice while leaving plenty of room for grace and forgiveness? I pray that we can.