Broad meadows

My daily reading in Scripture took me to Mark 12 today where Jesus was asked what are the greatest commandments of the law. “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

The reason that I mention this is that it actually goes to the reason that we are governed at all, why there are laws. Justice, at its heart, is a simple concept: punish those that do harm, exonerate those who do not. In other words, government is for those who will not govern themselves. This is meant to be true especially in the United States. The Constitution is written to say what the government can’t do, not what we can’t do. The limit comes when a harm to body, property or reputation is involved. That is when an agency of the government may step in.

The complexity of jurisprudence doesn’t lie in the understanding of what justice means, but in the details of each individual case. It takes a wise judge to decide what is and isn’t relevant in a case and that judge must not be compromised in each case. But there is another side of justice that has basically gone unchallenged that i believe is the crux of the friction between those who govern and the governed.

Understand that law, then, must serve the needs of justice, not the other way around. Law that is arbitrary is an example of this. Traffic law is completely arbitrary . The ten feet before a speed limit sign means they can take money out of your pocket for the same speed in a twenty foot stretch. Is that a good use of law. The law is only meant to serve the need of the justice department, not justice. You see what they have done is to use the damage done by those who do harm to punish, and I would say rob, those who have done no harm. Really no different than being mugged in an alley, other than I’m given no legal option but obey.

Obedience is owed to kings and in America the people in the public sector, regardless of title, are servants. They are not the masters of the banquet, they are the people who clean up afterwards. They are not the owner of the building, they are the security guards. They are not meant to order us around. Judicially, they are to apply their reason to cases that involve a distinct harm. Without that, they are meant to harmless. That hasn’t been my experience.

The Apostle Paul writes in Romans 13:10, “Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” This is not just a biblical principle, it is the soul of justice.