Understanding Justice - The Pit & the Mound - Too Little or too Much

An analogy that helps us to understand the concept of justice is the analogy of the pit and the mound. Imagine a bad guy sneaks into your yard, digs a pit and and steals or scatters your dirt.  Hearing the noise, you look out the window, and see him digging the pit.  Justice occurs when a society makes the bad guy fill up the pit he dug. Injustice occurs in two ways: 1) a society does not make the bad guy fill up the pit he dug or 2) a society makes the bad guy not only fill up the pit but put a mound on top of it.  Too little or too much is an injustice.  Like the children's tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the soup must not be too hot or too cold but just right.

We humans have a tendency to demand a mound from pit diggers.  When God imposed the rule on mankind, "An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth" God was limiting what we may exact from a pit digger.  No more than filling up the pit may be lawfully exacted. 

Human Mercy is not demanding a mound from a pit digger.  Mercy the magnitude of God's is allowing the pit to remain unfilled.

Justice: Blood for Blood!

Plucked from the headlines of the New York Times on Saturday April 23, 2011 was a story illustrating retaliation as the means of bringing justice back into balance in a land whose system of justice and whose ministers of justice are not dedicated to the noble and holy mission of restoring balance and harmony between disputants. In Syria, where civil unrest is being suppressed with deadly force, the protestestors cry, "We want revenge and we want blood."  "Blood for blood." they shout.  Happy is the land with a system of justice that takes its role as peacemaker to heart. Sad is the land that does not.