Easter Sunday 2026…
‘Mercy for me, justice for them…’
This is the rhetoric of some people today who claim to be Christian.
I think it’s problematic for many reasons.
Firstly, we need to define what mercy is, then we need to define ‘justice’, and then we need to explore the idea of what ‘deserving’ either might mean.
Getting our heads around this to my kind is essential to understanding what Christianity actually is. I make no apology for saying that.
Bear with me. Imagine the context: God designs a world to run on the twin principles of love and forgiveness. Then there’s a situation where, for complex reasons, a force is resident on that world that aims to work against the health and happiness of the humans living there. How can this force wreak havoc? By taking those humans to court – by demonstrating that the immutable laws of love and forgiveness are not being adhered to. This gives that force the legal right to invoke harm.
It’s an interesting supposition, isn’t it? Because it also illustrates the concept of the justice of God. God must be just. So in this situation, the legal stuff wins. Any legal case brought definitively showing that love and forgiveness have been transgressed, permits a hole in the universe through which the crap – for want of a better word – can pour.
BUT – let’s go further – indulge me. Let’s say that God is perfectly well aware of this and has always, for eternity, had a plan. And this plan bisects the universe in that there is a before and an after. But God, whose qualities also include being eternal, can take the after and apply it to the before. (This perfectly matches Deleuzean concepts of time, incidentally.)
So God’s plan then allows a protrusion of themself into the world to experience the human condition, caught between these two – the before and the after, the law versus unconditional love. This is the case that is fought in the person, birth, life and death, of Jesus Christ.
I think it’s sometimes more helpful to unthink the idea of Jesus as God’s son, because we have flesh-dictated ideas about childbirth. I’m thinking instead of ‘spooky action at a distance’ – the idea that atoms communicate with each other across seeming impossible distances. Jesus therefore does what God does because he is God. The problem element here is free will, because although he is God, he can choose his courses of action. There’s too much more to say about this, but that is (arguably) how the situation is presented.
So we have a 30 (or so) year hiatus in which God observes the legal struggle from the human point of view. What is necessary and what happens, in order to liberate humanity from the legal ropes tying everyone and everything to the concept of punishment, is an act of love so extreme that it breaks the process.
This is what happens. God subjects them self to the legal process and in so doing smashes it. The big smash echoes through eternity, into the before and to the limits of the after. That’s it.
So now, Jesus becomes the advocate – the barrister. The court of law still exists, because the laws still exist, but his presence there means that any case brought against us can be defeated through the very laws we’ve broken – namely, love and forgiveness. I think this is what the writers mean by saying Jesus is the fulfilment of the laws and the prophets.
I don’t think humans bring cases here – I think we’re victims or witnesses (thinking of the story of Job). In other words, a human standing before the mercy seat screaming ‘mercy for me, justice for him!’ Has not understood the process. He’s living in the before, not the eternal now, and his words are doomed.
So – to Hegseth and their ilk – move out of the before into the after. That’s what Christianity is, and you’ve missed the point. God’s created an eternal now, where love and forgiveness, the strongest forces in the universe, are at work.
Happy Easter.