(art: La Justicia entre los arcángeles Miguel y Gabriel, Jacobello del Fiore, 1421 C.E.)
Justice is an important matter for forgiveness. When we are experience a hurtful event and its accompanying moral distress or moral injury, from something deep and fundamental in our own being we know “that’s not the way it is supposed to be.” We know that there is a right and “just” order in our natural world, and that this order is directed toward wholeness, balance, and peace. We also know that the exceptions are the times when people act our of their own ego, willfulness, or very often their own wounded selves, to disrupt this natural order in hurting and in offending or hurting someone.
The REACH Forgiveness Process developed by Everett Worthington identified that these hurtful events and their potentially persistent injury to a person constitutes a justice gap. To the extent that justice is not fulfilled, forgiveness is so challenged as to be practically impossible. In the REACH Forgiveness process that can be taught in a Live and Forgive presentation, guided retreat, small group series or wilderness walk, the justice gap is addressed through a process of finding empathy with the person who hurt us and replacing negative emotions, such as anger and resentment, with positive emotions of deep abiding love (agape). This process for a full and lasting forgiveness does much to address the justice gap created by the original transgression and injury. That said, it can take a huge amount of trust and patience to work on the justice gap through a gradual forgiveness process. The justice gap is like a nagging question as one works through forgiving someone.
One way to work with the justice gap while completing a forgiveness process is to include a lot of prayer in that work. As a matter of fact, it is practically indispensable. The good news is that today’s Liturgy of the Word from the Gospel of Luke (18:1-8) communicates to us God’s promise of justice. The reading includes a perfectly applicable parable about a widow who follows and repeatedly pleads to a judge for justice in her case. She eventually wears down the judge until the judge declares, “because this widow keeps bothering me I shall deliver a just decision for her lest she finally come and strike me.” Jesus uses this story to explain how God is cosmically more attentive and caring to pleads for justice delivered through prayer:
Will not God then secure the rights of his chosen ones who call out to him day and night? Will he be slow to answer them? tell you, he will see to it that justice is done for them speedily.
When God’s delivery of justice is so assured, how can people still struggle with the question? I think that people most often struggle with three important questions:
- What is taking so long for justice to be delivered?
- Will the justice that is delivered be what I think it should be?
- Does forgiveness excuse the person who hurt me from justice?
What is taking so long for justice to be delivered? It can be difficult to understand that the delivery of justice may not depend on our own expectations for timeliness. If we understand that justice is part of the natural order of things, we may also see that things are always being fulfilled in nature, we As the Franciscan mystic Francisco de Osuna explained:
It is a proven fact among the learned that the special property of nature is to provide … it does not leave anything empty for even a moment…so that nothing would remain empty.
Once we can see this for ourselves, we can also see how things in nature take time for fulfillment. The justice gap is a circumstance of the “empty” that Francisco de Osuna points to. The wheels for fulfillment are always turning, nature is always providing what is needed to fill the justice gap, and it just takes time — perhaps more time than what we can be comfortable with. We can pray for understanding, the grace of patience that comes with it, and the needed abiding faith that justice will be delivered.
Will the justice that is delivered be what I think it should be? It is fundamentally human to have expectations. With regard to the justice gap, especially when we look at it from a perspective of anger, resentment, grief and pain, we can develop our own expectation of what would fill in that justice gap. Unfortunately, to the extent we develop the usual expectations for swift and overwhelming (if not annihilating) justice from our perspective of negative emotions, we build a huge possibility for disappointment. As we just said, justice is part of the natural order, which means that we are only involved with it to the extent that we ourselves are part of the natural order, “interconnected” and participating as Francisco de Osuna phrased it. That means we may not have our own little corner of control when it comes to justice, and that most and sometimes all justice depends on, not ourselves, but the rest of the big system of justice that is the natural order — and ultimately God, the creator and vitalizing force that works through all of that natural order. As in for patience with the pace of justice, we will have to set aside our expectations for what justice will look like, and place our faith in God, as executor of perfect justice. Pope Francis explained in Fratelli Tutti that forgiveness is what gets us out of the danger of our angry and resentful expectations for sift and overwhelming justice turning into our own downfall:
Justice is properly sought solely out of love of justice itself… not as an alleged outlet for personal anger. Forgiveness is precisely what enables us to pursue justice without falling into a spiral of revenge or the injustice for forgetting [the transgression].
Of course letting go of our own expectations for justice is difficult to do, and that is why prayer is again so important to acquiring an understanding that we ourselves don’t decide justice, that the natural order will deliver justice in a way that it needs to do so, and faith in God that justice will always be delivered. As Pope Francis explained in Fratelli Tutti:
Does forgiveness excuse the person who hurt me from justice? One of the most common concerns people have about forgiving someone is that forgiveness excuses injustice. Good instruction in what actually makes a full and lasting forgiveness (e.g. the REACH Forgiveness Process) always makes very clear that excuse from justice is just not part of that forgiveness process. At no point does the process for a full and lasting forgiveness require a forgiving person to abdicate their desire for justice and their faith that God will deliver justice. Pope Francis explained in Fratelli Tutti that forgiveness actually demands justice:
If [someone] has harmed me or a loved one, no one can forgive me from demanding justice and ensuring that this person – or anyone else – will not harm me, or others, again. This is entirely just; forgiveness does not forbid it but actually demands it.
We can and should have faith that God will always deliver justice, and that forgiveness does not take away from that at all, but actually energizes the delivery of justice.
Please share these words with someone who needs them today.
This text is an original work of its author Tom Delaney and was entirely composed without the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
If your parish or faith community is seeking a deeper experience of forgiveness, healing, mercy, and spiritual renewal, Live and Forgive is here to help. To begin the conversation, email Live and Forgive presenter and facilitator Tom Delaney at tom@liveandforgive.com — he will be glad to connect with you for a conversation. Please type in your email and click “Subscribe” below to stay connected and get Live and Forgive articles delivered to you.
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