It starts with math. No, really. Bear with me.
We all should know from high school math that anything finite divided by infinity is zero, and infinity divided by anything finite is infinity.*
But what is infinity divided by infinity?
As it turns out, it can be anything. Not any old thing -- it's not random. Each case is specific. I can still remember Mrs. Mason saying, "Sometimes it's three. Sometimes it's a billion. You have to work it out."
This is relevant because the attributes of God are infinite. He is, among other things, infinitely just and infinitely merciful. And sometimes these infinite attributes lead us to an apparent contradiction.
Jesus faced such a contradiction head-on in a gospel reading from a few weeks back, in the form of the adulteress. A just judgment would have had her stoned to death according to the law. A merciful judgment would have allowed her to live and reform. His interlocutors were trying to catch him in a contradictory trap. So what did Jesus, infinitely just and infinitely merciful, do?
First he let them stew a little bit. He wrote on the ground.
"Them" includes the woman. Her death was in front of her. I imagine that her regret was intense and her understanding of her wrongdoing was clear.
Then he said, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."
It's hard to imagine the sensations that washed over the people who were there. There's an idea called the Irresistable Force Paradox, popularly expressed as, "What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?" That's what they had just seen. Except, instead of being a paradox, it was a solution to a problem. An infinitely just and infinitely merciful solution.
The woman was subject to the law, and Jesus didn't demand any abrogation of the law. His suggestion was perfectly just -- infinitely just.
Yet the woman lived, and so his suggestion was also perfectly, infinitely merciful.
One might even say that mercy arose from justice: Each potential stone-thrower recognized how unjust it would to cast a stone, and therefore woman lived.
Or is it that justice arose from mercy? We don't know anything about her, but we can guess that she repented, becoming, in a way, a different person -- perhaps during those few moments when Jesus wrote on the ground -- who would never do such a thing again. Jesus told her, "Neither do I condemn you." (There's a Jewish tradition that, if I understand it correctly, says that God won't condemn someone who truly repents her wrongdoing, because if she truly repents, she's no longer the kind of person who would commit that act. Although this isn't a Christian teaching, it seems to have at least an echo of truth to it.) She no doubt suffered social stigma, loss of trust with her husband, and other issues, but that's also just. Her acts had caused real harm, and she had to deal with the repercussions.
Perhaps a less-than-perfectly-just result wouldn't have been merciful. Is it mercy to let someone continue doing something that puts her soul in jeopardy?
So infinite justice and infinite mercy worked out, in this concrete situation, to be the salvation of the woman. The solution wasn't saying, "This woman is forgiven." It wasn't saying, "This woman should be stoned to death." Jesus worked out a specific and necessary solution.
It almost makes me wonder if, in that enigmatic bit about Jesus writing on the ground, he was working out equations.
This brings us to Easter.
It's a strange thing that Jesus did, sacrificing himself on a cross. For us modern Westerners, it can be hard to understand. Why should an innocent man take the punishment for other guilty parties? And on the flip side, why should Original Sin cause innocent people to merit punishment for something another person did?
Humanity would be different if Adam and Eve had never committed their sins. It wouldn't have been just to go "poof" and fix the consequences of our First Parents' sin, and it might not have been merciful, either. It would have made us different: Our origins are historically and generatively tied up with sin. Forget whether we "should" all suffer the consequences of their sin. We do, in the world and in ourselves. God so loved the world that he sent his only son -- he didn't love some other hypothetical one, but this one, that we're actually in, including us with all the screwed-up consequences of that original sin.
Look, I don't pretend to understand fully why the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection were the solution to the problem of original sin. I have ideas, but they're messy, and I'm not really even the best person to write about them. Even worse, they all deal with the sorts of things humans are worst at, intellectually, like infinities and paradoxes and counterfactuals. I wouldn't trust my own thinking on the matter, and all of church history suggests that it's a mystery, so I shouldn't expect to understand it fully. That's why I called this post "silly" right at the very beginning.
But I'm willing to believe that the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection are that weird nexus where infinite justice meets infinite mercy for the entire world. We expect that kind of thing to be counterintuitive.
That's what we celebrate today. The person who is fully human and fully God, eternal and existing in time, the begotten creator, unchanging and interactive, died and yet is alive.
He is risen.
I don't really get it.
Alleluia anyway!
* People will note, correctly, that what follows should properly be discussed in reference to limits. The limit of C/y is zero as y goes to infinity, the limit of y/C is infinity as y goes to infinity, and the limit of x/y is some number or infinity as x and y go to infinity. And I haven't even talked about signs! It's all good. Someone who is more concerned about the specifics than I am can lay it all out if they like. (Return to post)
Comments (11)
Indeed He is risen! Thank you, Jake. And God bless you and your today.
If I remember correctly, some saints say that God could have forgiven our sins either without Jesus suffering, or without His death by a tortuous and humiliating criminal punishment, but a lesser suffering. But it would have been less fitting. Perhaps, then, the "fittingness" in His taking on suffering willingly is precisely what is the balancing of the equation that makes infinity / infinity tend to a limit, rather than not tending to a limit.
Posted by Tony | March 27, 2016 2:24 PM
He is risen indeed, Alleluia!
A special happy Easter to Jake and thanks for the post!
I'm inclined to think myself that Jesus had to die a cruel death in order for our sins to be forgiven, but that gets into very heavy theological waters. It has something to do with God's taking upon himself our sins and by that means forgiving them, or making it possible for them to be forgiven. (Which relates the deity of Jesus to the atonement--no one else's death would do the job.)
Where my mind esp. often boggles is on the matter of _time_. Somehow Jesus' death was the propitiation for the sins of those who lived and died before he did. And his rising to life again made their resurrection ultimately possible. Again, even though their whole lives were lived out and they died before he was incarnate in the womb of Mary. "Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it and was glad." The effects of Jesus' incarnation, death, burial, harrowing of hell, and resurrection seem to be timeless in a sense that goes beyond that of other events. There is a sense in which even the most trivial events can be said to "be forever" (in the mind of God, in B series time, or whatever.) But trivial events cannot bring about the redemption of people who lived before they happened. So there's something else here.
To quote George Herbert on the resurrection,
Can there be any day but this, though many suns to shine endeavor?
We count three hundred but we miss. There is but one, and that one ever.
Happy Easter to my fellow contributors and readers again.
Posted by Lydia | March 27, 2016 4:04 PM
I wonder about the "infinite" attributes of God. Where have these come from? I myself prefer the "all-" forms. All-knowing, all-merciful etc.
Posted by Bedarz Iliaci | March 28, 2016 4:20 AM
St. Thomas, Summa, Q 7, Article 1:
Obviously, if it runs back to (at least) St. John Damascene, it's been around in the Church for a long, long time.
Posted by Tony | March 28, 2016 8:55 AM
Jake,
Amen to this: "the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection are that weird nexus where infinite justice meets infinite mercy for the entire world." It is indeed mysterious and awesome (in the older, proper meaning of the word as awe-inspiring) to contemplate such an event.
A belated thanks for this post and I hope you and all our readers had a wonderful Easter.
Posted by Jeffrey S. | March 28, 2016 10:40 AM
Brilliant post, Jake, thank you!
Posted by Mia | March 29, 2016 12:09 AM
Jake, this particular example in the workings of Jesus is, I think, a little more complex than what you represent.
First, note that the Jewish authorities bring Jesus the woman "caught in the very act" of adultery...but not the man with whom she was committing adultery. This is a violation of the Mosaic law, BOTH were to suffer the punishment, not just the woman. What is clear, here, is that the Jews were neither operating according to the law, nor were they intent on justice as God had laid down. Their wills were in the wrong place.
Next, recall that the Mosaic law required that for stoning the adulterers, the first stone was to be cast by the witnesses whose testimony the finding of guilt rested upon. Under the law, the witnesses were responsible for the guilty convict's death, and Moses made sure that they understood their responsibility, by making them start the execution.
Third, under the law some people were NOT ELIGIBLE to be witnesses; namely, those whose own state cast doubts on their reliability. Generically, criminals, swindlers, perjurers, illiterates, and informers were not allowed as the witnesses by whom accusations could be proven for adultery (or other crimes).
When Jesus said "let he who is without sin cast the first stone", I think we have to take it in reference to the existing law, that it must be the eye witnesses to cast the first stones, and that those witnesses must be eligible to give that testimony. His writing on the ground, I submit, spoke directly to the fact that THESE people, these troublemakers, were not eligible, they either did not actually see the crime, or they themselves were tainted and their testimony could not be used. Given what we know of their state of soul, it is probable that the latter was a big obstacle. Indeed, some authors have proposed that the reason the authorities had "caught her in the act" (somehow without catching the man in the act!) was because she was a harlot and many of them were guilty of the same crime with her. Whatever the specifics, it is possible to read the entire event as Jesus primarily holding these people up by the scruff of the neck and saying "you tried to corner me by citing the Law at me, but you people have yourselves forgotten what the Law says. I remind you to obey the full Law of Moses."
We must not, from this passage, arrive at the erroneous conclusion that for all cases, a judge can levy the just, legal punishment unless he is "free from sin". For "the just man sins seven times a day", no man could ever sentence anyone for any crime. Judges have the obligation to seek justice as a fundamental aspect of the common good, and that is, usually, found in demanding the just punishment be applied.
Nor can we draw the conclusion that stoning the woman would have been unjust had there been an eligible person to cast the first stone.
Nor can we draw the conclusion that putting a guilty person to death is contrary to mercy. The Church teaches in the Catechism that if a criminal, who justly deserves the death penalty, repents to God of his crime and accepts that punishment in good will as atonement for his sins, by uniting his suffering with that of Jesus as "making up what is lacking in the suffering of Christ", he can thus achieve full expiation of his sins and go straight to heaven. The death penalty does not in principle cut off a person from receiving the grace of God, from receiving forgiveness for their sins, from salvation. Indeed, by facing up to the gravity of their crime, facing up to the JUST punishment and its manifest horror, they are more likely to be led to repentance and repudiation of their own evil acts. Would the woman have "gone and sinned no more" had she not have been standing face to face with death?
Posted by Tony | March 29, 2016 7:12 AM
Thank you to those who have wished me a happy Easter above. :)
Tony, without going too deeply into it, we don't know what he was writing on the ground, and I'm not sure that we have enough information to understand what the situation was with the accusers. Maybe I'm simple, but I'd rather avoid all of that other speculation. My focus in writing this wasn't related to them anyway, but to the adulteress, since we're in her shoes, not theirs.
If we want to shift the focus to those times when we're lawmakers, accusers, or judges, then we should first acknowledge that we're in over our heads. As mundane and fallen creatures, we aren't infinitely just or infinitely merciful. If we were, we wouldn't need laws: We'd just know what to do to satisfy justice and mercy in each case.
As it is, we make laws, but they're not always just. Sometimes we'll follow our laws scrupulously in the name of justice, but without showing sufficient mercy; sometimes we'll be too lenient for the demands of justice.
Nevertheless, we have to try, in our creaturely way, to administer justice (and mercy) as appropriate. We should do it with care and humility, but we should still do it.
Thus none of what I've said extrapolates a general principle that would prevent a judge from levying a just and legal punishment unless he's free from sin (though, of course, from a Catholic perspective it would be best if a judge frequently received the sacrament of Reconciliation), nor that stoning the adulteress would have been unjust, nor that killing a guilty person would be. I think we agree on those things.
But if we're to focus on Easter, we aren't in the position of lawmakers, accusers, judges, or executioners. We're the criminals. We've been caught, in flagrante, patently guilty of a million crimes large and small, and we are standing before the judge, just as the adulteress did.
Yet, in an act even more astonishing than the release of the adulteress, our judge says, "Yes, you're guilty. I'll take the punishment so that you can go free. Go and sin no more."
No Earthly law could prescribe that course of action. Human lawmakers could not have known that this would somehow be just -- it still boggles us after two thousand years. Human lawmakers could not possibly have known that such an action would be merciful rather than just lenient. And what judge could share in our punishment, other than the one who did, who would rise again so we could also share in his redemption?
God is above the law -- not because he's capricious, or subject to the Euthyphro dilemma, or any of that ridiculous stuff we creatures can relate to, but because no set of laws can capture the infinite justice and infinite mercy that is his essence.
That was shown in a small way with the adulteress, in the limited context of human laws and interactions.
It is shown in the largest of ways with the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.
Happy Easter.
Posted by Jake Freivald | March 29, 2016 11:48 AM
Well put.
Posted by Tony | March 29, 2016 5:54 PM
Tony,
I had not read about your interesting interpretation of the Mosaic law concerning eligiblity of witnesses and about who should cast the first stone. Is it in Torah or is it something that rabbinical or any other Jewish tradition added to the Torah?
Posted by Bedarz Iliaci | March 29, 2016 11:35 PM
That the eye witnesses cast the first stones is in the Torah, i.e. Deuteronomy 17:7.
Posted by Tony | March 30, 2016 9:53 PM