On Friday there was a fist-fight in the middle of the dining room. For the amount of people we serve violence is actually quite rare. But somebody had gotten ripped off, and the victim's friend saw the thief in the dining room. There was none of the usual verbal jousting - one man simply launched into the other and a little street justice was handed down.
Of course, none of it was justice at all. The guy who got ripped off is still ripped off. The pain and fear and anger he might be experiencing is just as palpable, just as real. The guy who bore the brunt of the 'justice' is now angry also and almost certainly looking for someone to vent that anger on. What has actually been created is not justice but a spiral of violence that has no way of ending - no way, that is, unless someone, until one of us, says 'No More'.
Can there be justice without retribution? Perhaps if we want to create justice, real justice, not just something that looks like justice or seems like justice but something that really and truly is justice, then we might consider finding those who are a victims of injustice and loving them. Perhaps we might find ways to restore what has been taken from them, to return to them not just the physical things they have lost but the manifest peace, comfort and security that injustice denies, that injustice destroys, that injustice replaces with fear, with want and with the undeniable anguish of the soul. We say love conquers all and we quote the scripture that says this very thing with scarcely a thought for what it means in the dust and grime of the streets we walk every day, with scarcely a thought for the simple reality that justice isn't justice at all until it seeks out those for whom it is denied. It isn't a concept, it isn't a metaphysical construct, it isn't child of the law and the labour of the courts, it's the way we must live, seeking to lift up those who cannot themselves rise, seeking to love those who despair of ever knowing freedom. Justice is love, seeking to be born into the world and it seems to me that the very act of seeking out those for whom justice is denied is an essential characteristic of justice. Justice searches for those who do not know her and it searches for them through us.
This is what God did in Christ, at the cross, where God's 'justice' became indistinguishable from his love, where Christ's love was given it's ultimate expression in self-sacrifice. This is what it means to be who Christ is. It means we go looking for those who are suffering the weight of injustice, it means that we offer a justice indistinguishable from love and that a love for both vicitm and perpetrator. We're not very good at the self-sacrifice part but, honestly, we're not very good at the 'seeking-out' part, either.