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Chapter 2

Justice vs. Mercy

American culture is bipolar when it comes to punishment. On the one hand, we hate the idea of doling out punishments. On the other, we are the most punitive nation in the world.

In 2008, when the body of a two-year-old Orlando girl was found with duct tape over her mouth in the woods near her family’s home, and evidence of chloroform and human decomposition were found in the trunk of her mother’s car, no one was brought to justice. Though the mother, Casey Anthony, had searched the Internet for “neck breaking” and “how to chloroform,” she received nothing but a hand slap from the court. In a different case, the 1994 Menendez trial, two brothers murdered their parents with shotguns, but the original jury ended up undecided after the defense argued that the brothers had no moral responsibility for the murders because of their abusive upbringing. However, such leniency should not be surprising in a culture that doles out trophies for everyone and punishes teachers for giving failing grades to students. Yet somehow our culture not only despises but also embraces the handing out of just deserts.

Packed Prisons

While we can’t stand the thought of a student failing a class, we love to put people in prison—and for a long time, too. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. Many states have mandatory sentencing rules that force judges to give years-long sentences for certain offenses, without wiggle room for mitigating circumstances. While most countries imprison fewer than two hundred people per one hundred thousand residents, the United States imprisons over seven hundred, more than three times as many! So we seem to like a stiff dose of justice when a person has been officially convicted of a crime, but a blanket of wishywashy clemency for most behavior.

Part of our cultural bias might be rooted in our out-of-sight-out-of-mind mentality. Most of us don’t visit the local courthouse (let alone prison!) to watch justice being dispensed. Such an experience might make us feel uneasy when we watch the consequences of a person’s actions tear his or her life apart. If other people, whom we pay and to whom we give strict rules, take care of the decisions and actions involved in criminal justice, then we don’t have to worry about it. We can go about our business and keep “troublemakers” out of view. If we were tasked with the job of the prosecutor, judge, or jury, our feelings might be different. Jury service, which we usually see as an arduous annoyance, is one of the few times we actually get to participate in the process. It might even modify our perspective.

Abstract rules such as mandatory sentencing requirements or laws that prohibit certain behaviors are comforting because they are detached from the actual human beings whose lives will be affected. Once we get our hands dirty in the execution of justice, it’s hard to be so coldly rational. So we vacillate between justice and mercy. We might incarcerate almost one percent of our citizens, but at least we pay their cable TV bills.⁷ Mercy is easier to dispense because it seems to require nothing of us, but we’ll see that this is not really the case.

The problem with the American approach to punishment is that it doesn’t work. The prison system might punish a person for criminal behavior, but, generally, it doesn’t change people. Politicians talk about the issue of “repeat offenders,” recidivism, and the lack of “rehabilitation.” There’s something missing in our approach to justice and mercy. We like to exact serious penalties, and yet those exactions don’t have the results we hope for. Putting someone in one of our prisons for years is no guarantee that he or she will be a new person upon release.

The problem with the American approach to punishment is that it doesn’t work. The prison system might punish a person for criminal behavior, but, generally, it doesn’t change people.

Our hearts might lean toward mercy, toward being soft and gentle, toward kid-glove treatment. Whether it be grade inflation, trophies for everyone, or an overly comfortable prison environment, we are somewhat allergic to punishment. I’ve wondered why this might be the case, and I think part of it is that when we look inside our own hearts, we realize that we too deserve punishment for our own sins and failings. To be overly eager in handing out judgment could backfire. We ourselves could fall victim to the punitive policies that we create.

The Need for Punishment

However, sometimes judgment must fall quickly and harshly. The most dramatic example from our culture is the Nuremberg trials. After the horrors of the Holocaust and German aggression, the Allied powers which won World War II sat down to the messy business of holding those responsible to account. Twenty-four Nazi leaders were tried, and most were convicted and punished. Fifteen years later, one of the leading Nazis responsible for the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, was captured in Argentina by a team of Israeli agents and brought back to Israel for a publicly televised trial. While no amount of trials could undo the damage wrought by the Third Reich, the public could feel in the trials a great sense of relief at the fact that justice was being served. Evil acts and serious wrongdoing were being examined in the light of day and responded to with stringent punishment. Swift and certain justice was handed down, and the malevolent Nazi project was being brought to an appropriately ignominious close.

While we might want to speculate about the details of our origins or the path of human evolution, there is no doubt that we human beings are stained by sin. The tale of Adam and Eve conveys this fact in storybook language, but all we need to do is look inside our own hearts to know that its message is true. No amount of paleontological digging or DNA sequencing will prove otherwise. We could not handle the gift of our own existence.

While we might not like dealing with the trouble of punishment on a daily basis, we actually find solace in the punishment of wrongdoers when it comes to dramatic cases. Serious wrongs deserve serious righting, and that means serious punishment. Violent acts, especially against the vulnerable, justly prompt moral outrage, and moral outrage can only be satisfied by just punishment. Tragically, we can’t undo the evils caused by evildoers, but at least we can hold perpetrators to account. Their freedom can be taken away by prison, and in extreme cases—which are, in Pope St. John Paul II’s words, “very rare, if not practically nonexistent”—their lives can be taken away by capital punishment.⁸ While we might like to be lenient, the Nuremberg trials illustrate the moral necessity of justice and punishment. We cannot be lenient forever.

Ancient Sins

Now while our intuition can clue us in to the importance of dealing out punishment to mass murderers or child abusers, the first injustice and the first punishment in human history demands more subtle investigation. Adam and Eve found themselves as God’s first human children, enjoying the pleasures of the Garden of Eden and communion with God and one another. But when the serpent introduces discord into the Garden with his smooth and deliciously deceptive words, the couple falls from grace. God had given them only one prohibition—not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil—and that is the exact point on which the serpent tempts them, presenting the false hope of becoming equal with God by eating the fruit. Adam and Eve simply violate God’s simple command and eat the fruit. Immediately, their mistake is apparent to them: their eyes were opened (Gn 3:7). While the nature of their error is shrouded in the symbolic language of Genesis, they find themselves truly separated from God by their own error: the original sin. Their harmony with God, their moral integrity, even their loving unity with each other were brought crashing down by their sin. Original justice devolves into original sin. Original harmony dissolves into original discord. Their disobedience impacts all humanity for all time, leaving us with a broken world, fallen away from God and in need of redemption. While we might want to speculate about the details of our origins or the path of human evolution, there is no doubt that we human beings are stained by sin. The tale of Adam and Eve conveys this fact in storybook language, but all we need to do is look inside our own hearts to know that its message is true. No amount of paleontological digging or DNA sequencing will prove otherwise. We could not handle the gift of our own existence.

God does not ignore the original sin but responds to it with justice, and yes, with punishment. God confronts Adam and Eve, asking, “What is this you have done?” (Gn 3:13). It is a question that expresses moral outrage,⁹ like our, “What were you thinking?” Adam famously passes the buck to Eve, and she passes it to the serpent. No one wants to take responsibility. That is exactly why punishment must exist, to enforce moral responsibility. If an adult abuses a child, a court might not be able to restore emotional and psychological health to the child, but at least it can punish the adult offender for abdicating his or her responsibility to protect rather than exploit youths. When God responds to the serpent and Adam and Eve, he hands a curse to each—that is, a punishment for violating his law, for disrupting the order of creation, for bringing discord into the harmonious world he created (Gn 3:14-19). These curses, or punishments, are morally necessary to right the wrong done in the Garden. Pain in childbirth, toilsome work, and death come upon humanity at this moment. St. Paul teaches, “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23), and Adam and Eve, by virtue of their sin, are paid the wage of death. In fact, all human beings inherit the consequences of their original sin.¹⁰ Death was not part of God’s original plan. We were supposed to be “immune” from it, but the original sin brought the consequence of death for all of us.¹¹

Punishment and Redemption

Even in the context of doling out the punishment curses, God sneaks in a redemptive note. He mentions the offspring of the woman who will be an enemy of the serpent and eventually “crush” the serpent’s head (Gn 3:15). While the serpent had provoked Adam and Eve to fall away from God in the Garden, justice will come full circle eventually. At the moment of the Fall, the ominous consequences of the first sin loomed large, yet God chose to promise a change, a way to undo the consequences, to right the wrong of sin. The offspring he mentions points to Christ, the one who will come to break the power of sin and release those enslaved to it into the freedom of God’s children.

What we can deduce from the Fall and the moral discord between God and man which it introduces is this: suffering, punishment, and God’s just judgment are rooted in original sin, in humanity’s fall from grace brought about by our own actions, our own choice against God. Adam and Eve started the ball rolling. The wonderful harmony they enjoyed with God was not only damaged, but smashed to pieces by their violation of his simple command. They deliberately broke their relationship with God, and so God meted out punishment to them. The moral consequences of evil actions lead to suffering and harm. God’s judgment with its attendant punishments addresses evil action and aims to right the wrongs humanity brings forth. Yet in an odd way, just punishment is a kind of mercy, since punishment is meant to lead to conversion, reformation, moral transformation. Punishment is not only punitive but instructive.

We were supposed to be “immune” from it, but the original sin brought the consequence of death for all of us.

There is always a tension between justice and mercy. God is a just God, but he is also merciful. In the end, “mercy triumphs over judgment” (Jas 2:13), but that doesn’t mean that judgment is nonsensical or unnecessary. In fact, in that same verse James says that “judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy.” Evil deeds ought to be repaid justly with fitting punishments. Again, this is why we hesitate to hand out punishments, because inside we realize our own moral failings and that we too deserve punishment. But punishment is only part of the story. Just punishment is fitting, yet incomplete. It appropriately responds to evil action, but it does not solve it or redeem it. Something more is needed. Long prison terms do not necessarily rehabilitate a prisoner. In fact, a long prison term could incline a person to repeat offense. A recent study showed that three-quarters of released prisoners were arrested again within five years of release.¹² While punishment is just, it does not necessarily bring the moral transformation necessary to live a flourishing human life.

This tension between mercy and justice, and the need for redemption, reveal certain dynamics of God’s relationship with humanity. Our evil acts demand a just response from God, a response that includes punishment. But as sinners, we stand in need of God’s mercy. Many of our sufferings, like death, originate from God’s just punishment, yet he reaches out to heal us in his mercy. The tensions we see in the Bible between justice and mercy stem from our troubled relationship with him; sometimes we act in loving obedience, and sometimes we rebel. God’s justice appropriately punishes wrongdoing, but his mercy and redemption invite us to something even greater than satisfying the demands of justice.