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Beyond Justice

Forrest Church • May 12, 2002

Let me begin by wishing every mother who is worshiping with us this morning Happy Mother’s Day. The adverb "only" is never more inappropriately applied than when someone answers the rarely illuminating question, "What do you do?" by responding that she is only a mother. In far more than their biological function, mothers are the sine qua non of human existence. Unconditional love is not unique to mothers, but it begins with you. I admit that, when given full opportunity, women have demonstrated that they can match men in destructive power, yet I cannot help but believe that ours would be a more peaceful world if more women were sitting in the war rooms and around the tables of diplomacy. With this in mind, this morning I celebrate mother’s day in the spirit in which it was first founded, as a day of peace.

On June 2, 1870, appealing to women throughout the world, Julia Ward Howe invented Mother’s Day. In a proclamation distributed throughout America and Europe, she called upon "all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or of tears," to say firmly: "From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says ‘Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.’" Having all but forgotten Howe’s original intent, we celebrate Mother’s Day as a domestic (and domesticated) holiday, but it began as an international day of peace.

It may be hard to imagine the same person who wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" establishing Mother’s Day as a platform for women to witness for peace. But in Howe’s day, many abolitionists were at heart pacifists. Hating slavery more than they hated violence, they chose the Civil War as an exception to the rule. Howe was director of the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston. A leading Unitarian layperson, she was throughout her live a tireless social activist. Among other things, she co-founded the American Women Suffrage Association. In 1869, she gave her heart to yet another cause. Responding to the horrors of the Franco-Prussian war, Howe emerged as one of the earliest and most articulate advocates for world peace.

Pointedly, she did not call her annual festival International Peace Day–she called it Mother’s Day, knowing of no other group that could more naturally or persuasively sponsor an annual festival in support of love and non-violence. The object was not to put mothers on a pedestal. She wanted instead to draw mothers out of their kitchens and parlors and into the public square, to unite as many women as she could in a common cause: the protection of children from the threat of war. Or, as she put it, "to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace."

Linking motherhood to disarmament, Howe asserted that the unconditional love they feel for their children invests mothers with a natural and deep interest in preventing bloodshed. On the first Mother’s Day, Howe proclaimed, "Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God." For several years in New York, Boston and Philadelphia–also in England, Scotland and Switzerland–the day was celebrated in Howe’s pacific spirit. With our own Civil War fresh in memory, enough Americans were stirred by her call to keep her Mother’s Day vision alive, at least for a short time.

Howe’s phrase, "The sword of murder is not the balance of justice" is a haunting one. Nor am I sure that she was absolutely correct. After all, war is often waged in the cause of justice. Having been wronged, one tribe or nation attacks another explicitly in order to balance the scales of justice. Religious wars in particular place God’s justice above the altar on which human life is sacrificed in burnt offerings. The law of justice is clearly established in scriptures held sacred by Jew, Christian, and Muslim alike. It is known as the lex talionis, or the law of the talon–an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. When I rectify a situation by taking from you what you have taken from me, I follow the logic of justice. I balance the scales. In Catholic doctrine, architects of a just war perform this act with mathematic moral precision. Following just war logic, when the cause is just and the means are proportionate, injustice is punished and balance reestablished. Or so the theory goes. Howe’s protestations notwithstanding, the sword is often an instrument of justice.

This is certainly true of Islamic doctrine. Yet one needn’t look to the Koran for a proof text, though many can be found there. Open the Hebrew scriptures to Psalm 137. The Jews have been vanquished by the Babylonians and taken into exile.

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept
As we remembered Zion.
On the willow trees there
We hung up our lyres,
For those who had carried us captive
Asked us to sing a song,
Our captors called on us to be joyful:
"Sing us one of the songs of Zion,"
How could we sing the Lord’s song
In a strange land? (Psalm 137:1-4)

The pain expressed in these words is poignant, and familiar to history. But no more familiar than the next chapter of the story, when the scales of justice are brought back into balance. Psalm 137 closes with these words.

Babylon, Babylon the destroyer
Happy is he who repays you
For what you did to us.
Happy is he who seizes your babes
And dashes them against a rock.

This year, once again, we celebrate mother’s day in the shadow of that rock. In Israel and India and other smoldering pockets of internecine strife, invoking the lex talionis (in the name of God or Allah or Jahweh) and driven by a righteous passion for justice, opposing sides mercilessly dash the babes of the other against the rock of justice. They sanctify it with innocent blood as if it were an altar. How unholy an altar it is becomes clear in the case of the suicide bombers. Here, in the shadow of their destruction, we witness the most unnatural act of all–mothers (at least those who reach out to the media) celebrating their childrens’ death. In a very real sense, Howe’s avowal notwithstanding, "The sword of murder is the balance of justice." And with such justice, there can be no peace.

Many religious leaders today–from Muslim Shiites on the religious right to Christian liberation theologians on the left–invoke justice as the highest of all theological virtues. Their cases are often strong, for victims of injustice are everywhere, victims of economic injustice, social injustice, political injustice, victims too of racial and gender and identity inequity. To struggle against such injustice is noble, even holy. But only if we remember that to balance the scales of justice perfectly is humanly impossible. It always has been. It always will be. The only hope for peace comes when we balance the scales of justice not by the lex talionis alone, but by mercy, compassion, and forgiveness as well. Without such leavening, retributive violence in the name of justice weighs both sides of the scale so heavily that the scales themselves are broken. Over-burdened by justice’s claims, no longer are they capable of any meaningful measure. As in nuclear conflict– the almost unimaginable yet ever more conceivable endgame of untrammeled justice–every adjudication becomes an act of murder/suicide. Taken to its logical conclusion, the quest for perfect justice is a new kind of zero-sum game, one in which everyone is finally left with nothing.

It remains true that without justice there can be no lasting peace. The scales of justice cannot remain too far out of balance for too long. Appropriate demands for rectification, if resisted, lead almost inexorably to violence. To stem the welling potential of violence, both morality and enlightened self-interest commend a ceding of power, wealth, or territory until not equity but at least a mutually acceptable balance is achieved. As absolutes, however, peace and justice are mutually exclusive. As long as justice is the first prerequisite for peace, peace will never be established.

Think of our personal battles. The war of the Tates is a war of two victims demanding justice and exacting revenge. Without some measure of equity between partner’s needs successful marriage is impossible. But when absolute justice becomes the benchmark for survival, a marriage (or any kind of human relationship) is on the rocks. Two people can only live together by balancing their just demands with more than the occasional act of forgiveness. Often it is not the establishment of perfect equity but the exercise of empathetic imagination that can end a stalemate and lead to a new beginning.

In our families we do our best to strike a balance between peace and justice. The problem is that the two operate according to very different sets of rules. We mete out justice on a crime-and-punishment or virtue-and-reward basis, whereas peace and love depend, at least to a degree, on a sin-and-forgiveness model. For instance, when we impose a life sentence against a loved one in punishment for an injustice, justice may be done but love dies. This insight can be expanded from family to neighbor and from neighbor to enemy. When Jesus tells us to love our enemies, it is not for their sake that he asks this of us, but for our own.

As between individuals, genders, and races, perfect justice will never be established between nations. The blood and tears of victims, innocent and otherwise, stains the ground of history and always will. I am not a pacifist. Wars must sometimes must be fought to answer injustice or it will grow. But when justice alone determines the resolution of such wars, there can be no end to bloodshed. Should, to save Jerusalem, the city itself be destroyed–should, to avenge the past, the future be sacrificed–in the name of justice, not only justice itself but hope too will be sacrificed.

Here Solomon’s judgment is illuminating. Two women laid equal claim to a child. Solomon determined, in the name of equity, that the child be cut in half. One mother agreed to this sentence. The other gave up her claim. To this mother, Solomon awarded the child. History will award those who give up some of their claims in order to spare their children with the highest laurel, the laurel of peacemakers.

This brings us back to Julia Ward Howe’s vision for Mother’s Day. A mother’s love dwells in a place deeper than justice will ever inhabit, for it dwells in the heart. The logic of justice notwithstanding, peace finally and most surely issues from the heart’s wisdom, the wisdom of mercy and compassion, not from the mind’s exacting rectitude. To reestablish mother’s day in Howe’s spirit, the heart must become as eloquent an advocate for peace as the mind can be for war.

I have no interest in eliminating justice from my ethical vocabulary. Justice, especially social justice, is not only the battle cry for Muslim, Christian, and Jewish warriors but a watchword for liberal religion as well. Nonetheless, the logic of justice makes me increasingly uneasy. If any part of Julia Ward Howe’s dream for Mother’s Day is to come true–if peace has any prospect whatsoever–for the sake of all our children, justice will have to be tempered by mercy, vengeance by compassion, and anger by forgiveness. The child Isaac is always on the rock ready to be sacrificed for a higher law. As long as Sarah does nothing but stay home and weep, and certainly if she stays home and cheers, Abraham–common ancestor of Jew, Christian and Muslims alike–will continue both to sacrifice his own and dash his enemies’ children on the rock of his father’s God. "Vengeance will be mine saith the Lord" in the scriptures. How often God’s procounsels and soldiers and martyrs rush to make it theirs as well. This year once again, Mother’s day reminds us of the high cost of such vengeance, at least it should. As Julia Ward Howe proclaimed on the first Mother’s Day:

We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says "Disarm! Disarm!"