It's not fair

It's not fair that I can't sleep right now, but that's not what I want to write about. There's been a lot of coverage in the press here recently about the case of Lucie Blackman, who was murdered back in 2000. The murderer, a guy called Joji Obara, was actually acquitted of her murder, but convicted for life for manslaughter and rape of some other girls. Lucie's parents are appealing the not-guilty verdict.

I can understand why they're doing this, but I can't help wondering if it shows a failure to appreciate the nature of justice over here. In the West, it's important for "justice to be fulfilled" and for the guy to get the guilty sentence for everything he's done. It's a matter of principle. Over here, things are a lot more pragmatic, and even though the Blackman case wasn't provable to a reasonable standard, well, shikatta ga nai, the guy's been sent down for life anyway and won't be a danger to the public any more, so there's no sense trying super hard to get a conviction.

I can see the arguments on both sides. It's just that "justice" means different things in different parts of the world.

In the Biblical culture, "justice" meant hearing the cry of the oppressed and giving them a voice; it is more to do with the execution of justice than the value of it. In the parable of the persistent widow, the judge was unjust not because he made a bad judgment, but because he didn't make any judgment at all. Ps 82:3 says "Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy."

So when the Bible talks about God being merciful and just, it's not actually saying two contradictory things. It works out fine in Biblical culture. It's a bit more of a problem in our culture, because, well, "just" means giving someone what they deserve, and "merciful" means not giving someone what they deserve. If you're merciful, you're unjust; if you're just, you're unmerciful. For us to say that God is merciful and just is a problem.

There have been various attempts to hack around this problem, the most persistent one being the whole substitutionary atonement thing. I call it a hack, and I'm surprised that it has been as persistent as it has given that there's so much wrong with it. It's based on the principle that God cannot simply forgive - despite the fact that this is very much what Jesus appeared to go around doing - but that His "justice must be fulfilled" - despite the fact that God is not a Westerner, and this concept doesn't apply in much of the earth. And despite the fact that even those Christians who espouse the concept would encourage people to forgive each other without their "justice being fulfilled". Because actually that's what forgiveness is - a foregoing of justice.

But the biggest problem with it is that it assumes that justice is a transferable commodity. For this justice to be fulfilled, God needed to punish somebody - anybody, just not me! So the story goes that Jesus stands up and says "punish me instead". Look, I can see that letting the guilty one go free is unjust - it's merciful, that's the point - but you don't restore that justice by punishing the innocent. Actually, that doubles the injustice.

A just (by Western standards) judge would tell Jesus to sit down, this doesn't concern him, and punish the guilty. But God is not, by Western standards, just. He is merciful. That mercy is Good News for sinners, which is what Christianity is all about, and that, my friends, is why substitutionary atonement, with its misplaced emphasis on a very Western understanding of "justice", is not the Gospel.

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