A Christian View of Justice

Abstract

It should be of supreme interest to anyone who is trying to come to a true Christian understanding of justice to discover as far as possible the attitude of Jesus to matters of justice. There are a number of gospel passages which suggest that he was not at all interested in the concept of justice as fairness. In his teaching there are strong indications that, with God, people do not get what they deserve, that one’s recompense does not bear any relation to one’s effort or merit. It is indicated moreover that such a rejection of justice as fairness should be adopted by men in their dealings with one another because that is the way God deals with men. I am not putting it this way merely to shock. I think that a critique of justice as strict fairness is explicit in the teachings of Jesus and that we must pay attention to it if we are to arrive at the notion of justice which his teachings do uphold, in continuity with the rest of Scripture.Some of the sayings which suggest Jesus’s indifference to strict fairness are these: The parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16a); The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15: 11-32); the refusal of Jesus to divide the inheritance between two brothers (Luke 12:13-15); the sayings in the sermon on the mount, Matt. 5:44 (par. Luke 6:32-36), about loving your enemies, “so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven, for he makes his sun to rise on the good and the evil and sends rain on the just and the unjust.”