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Sometimes another person can, in just a few words, sweep away cobwebs that are obscuring meaning in a way I only notice when a clearer, brightly-lit meaning jumps off the screen at me.

Candace does this for me as she writes about John Dominic Crossan’s lecture yesterday on what life was like in first century Israel:

Crossan spent a great deal of time talking about justice and how our form of justice differs greatly from the form of justice touted by both Judaism and Jesus. We see justice as retribution, but Crossan argues that the Old Testament and Jesus both argue for distributive justice — a form of justice that distributes God’s mercy and love evenly to everyone.

Yes, yes! This is the justice I’m always longing for … and agitating for.

I use the word “justice” frequently, and these days — by the grace of God and some excellent theology teachers — I habitually mean distributive justice. But others could easily assume I mean retribution when I say “justice” as I haven’t been accounting for that as an unintended connotation. Hmmm, that would change my meaning rather radically.

Candace then expands wonderfully on this idea of upending our might makes right retributive understanding of justice, as Jesus does with Rome’s “first victory, then peace” slogan, replacing it with the Jewish notion of “first justice — that is, the fair and equitable distribution of God’s blessings on earth — then peace.”

Thanks very much, Candace.