Such is the justice of Jesus, but, alas, after two thousand years we
still stand astonished at it, more than half doubtful of its validity,
and, if truth be told, secretly dismayed at its boldness. It is
romantic justice, we say, but is it practicable justice? We might at
least remember that what we call practicable justice has never yet
attained the gracious results of Christ's romantic justice. Simon the
Pharisee knows no more how to deal with "this woman" than the elder
brother knew how to deal with the prodigal. Such sense of justice as
they possessed would have infallibly driven the penitent boy back to
the comradeship of harlots, and have refused the penitent harlot the
barest chance of reformation. Is not this enough to make the least
discerning of us all suspect that Pharisees and elder brothers, for all
their immaculate respectability of life, are by no means qualified to
pass judgment on these tragedies of life with which they have no
acquaintance, and cannot have an understanding sympathy? Does not the
entire failure of legal justice with all its apparatus of punishment
and repression, to give the sinner a vital impulse to withdraw from his
sin, drive us to the conclusion, or at least to the hope, that there
must be some better method of dealing with sinners than is sanctioned
by conventional justice? There is another method--it is Christ's
method.
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