Grace-Filled Justice

This is what I know about Jesus: 

He was a justice-seeking, peace-driven and love-filled peasant who inspired an unbelievable movement such as the world has ever seen.

I hesitate to call this movement “radical” (as some might) for fear of it being associated with such radical groups as the Black Panthers of the 1960s or the White Supremacist groups of today. The word radical just carries way too much negative baggage to apply it to the first century movement Jesus inspired.

Nevertheless, regardless of what we call his movement it indeed subverted the social and political norms of his day and eventually led to his horrific death by Roman execution.  

Jesus was born of the peasant class. His parents were peasants as were roughly 90% of the Jewish population living under oppressive Roman occupation in Galilee and in Judea.

Of course this was nothing new for the Jews since they had already suffered demoralizing domination of other foreign powers. So if anyone should have desired to revamp the political system with revenge-seeking justice it would have been Jesus. 

Yet he refused to become a political activist. He never directly engaged the political process of his day. Remember the attempt of the religious leaders to draw him into a winless debate over paying taxes to Cesar? It didn’t work! His response was genius.

His primary challenge to anyone who would listen to him was crystal clear: 

”Follow me!”

That was it: Follow him on a life-changing, world-shaping trajectory that stood in opposition to the very “principalities and powers” that claimed dominance over so many oppressed people living in the first century—including his one nation of Israel.

Now Jesus actually had an operational plan: To reveal the very heart of God; to reveal what concerned God more than anything else; to reveal how God desired for all humans to flourish under grace. 

"Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). 

Indeed!

So to follow Jesus is to live in such ways that reflect God’s operational plan for humanity: to live justly, peacefully, and lovingly towards all.

First to live justly:

You may remember the story of the Amish children murdered in a schoolhouse located in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. The Amish of that area stunned the world by their response to the family of Charles Carl Roberts IV, the shooter who killed five Amish girls in an unexplained act of evil and senseless violence.

It is true that there was no legal justice to be had since Roberts subsequently killed himself and thus avoided the strong arm of the law. 

But justice was indeed expedited from he Amish perspective by an act of grace extended to the family of Roberts. In the context of their own unbearable pain of loss these followers of Jesus found the courage to offer a grace-filled justice that simply boggles the imagination. They were following Jesus indeed.

As Jesus hung from the cross, experiencing horrific pain and facing impending death he mustered the strength to ask God to forgive his executioners in the midst of intolerable suffering. This was a clear example of grace-filled justice.

He did not seek revenge. He did not ascribe to the world’s need for a pound of flesh. He did not even resort to the ancient rule of an-eye-for-an-eye that was so prominent in his own Jewish faith.

None of the above.

Jesus taught and lived justly in that he was always seeking for ways to restore humans to life as God intended it to be lived, in order that they may flourish under God’s unmatchable grace. He was not interested in a penal approach to justice (often referred too as “Retributive Justice”).

Jesus taught and lived a grace-filled life of justice. 

We cannot expect the world to accept this understanding of grace-filled justice. Neither should we attempt to impose such grace-filled justice upon a society that has yet to be effectively enlightened by the Gospel. 

However the Amish at Nickel Mines showed us that there is an alternative way for Christians to practice justice: We can live and interact with the world (including whatever political system in which we live) in ways that reflect the grace-filled justice of God towards all humans—even towards our enemies. 


We cannot and must not be responsible for the world’s response to God’s grace-filled justice. 

We can only witness to it and pray that it will do its work to bring healing and restoration to so many broken lives.