Both Justice and Mercy

~ The scriptures today dwell quite heavily on mercy, which in this instance might be described as the act of being generous with someone beyond what it is they might have merited.  The Gospel is example after example of how the Lord is merciful with each of us, and how he calls us to love in the same way.
Yet we know our God is one of justice as well as mercy – both are important and necessary.  Where justice exists without mercy, a legalistic culture can emerge; where mercy exists without justice, we chance losing our holy pursuit of equity and fairness.  Said another way, by St. Thomas Aquinas, “Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution; justice without mercy is cruelty.”

In some ways, we who pursue liturgical ministries – including as worshippers in the pews – can get lost in a sea of rubrics and laws which can turn the execution of our liturgies, if we are not careful and aware, into cold, legalistic performances that lack the warmth and radiance of God’s merciful love, shared with us and which we are call to share with each other, both inside the church and outside.  Perhaps this is one reason Divine Mercy Sunday was added to the Church calendar in recent times, to remind us of exactly this.  There too are circumstances where some have strayed so far from the universal liturgical rubrics, perhaps in the name of merciful love, but to such an extreme that the prayer experience is nearly unrecognizable as authentically Catholic.  Both of these generalized examples are in fact distortions of who God is and calls us to be.

Pope Francis, echoing Aquinas, has recently reminded us that mercy is not something altogether different than justice, but rather is the fullness of justice: “[Justice and mercy] are not two contradictory realities, but two dimensions of a single reality that unfolds progressively until it culminates in the fullness of love.” (Misericordiae Vultus, 2015, #20)  Even within the liturgy, justice and mercy must coexist; they temper one another and reveal a fuller sign of holiness and indeed a fuller image of our God and of ourselves.

Throughout the year, we present an article in the bulletin each week on a variety of topics, written by a member of our Parish staff or ministries on a rotating basis.