Forgiving Ahab: Naboths vineyard and Gods justice

The strangest thing about freedom in America is not how invisible it is to a foreigner or how cherished it is by those who live there but how frequently it’s portrayed as being under threat. Unlike almost every other country in the world, America went through the 20th century without being invaded or living under totalitarian government, and it left the century with the same constitution with which it entered it. Yet nowhere else is public discourse so saturated with the rhetoric of freedom being in daily peril. When one political party looks to be elected, the right of abortion on demand is seen as on the point of being snatched away. When another party looks to be elected, the right to bear arms is said to be in dire jeopardy. When America is attacked by an unknown force, the president assumes that the attack comes from parties who “hate our freedoms.”

One feature of American life that fascinates me is the degree to which the law in general—and the Constitution in particular, and what might be called the amphitheater of the Supreme Court—has become the focal point of our culture. We’ve come to believe that the best place to discover right and wrong, to identify good and bad, and to resolve ambiguity is the law court. I would guess that of all the dramas broadcast on network television over a regular month, more than half include some kind of pivotal courtroom scene. The wonderful dimension of this is the remarkable statement of hope that our diverse culture really can function harmoniously and that rules can emerge to govern this flourishing effectively. The risk is that the attention given to getting the rules right can distract from the fact that a healthy society is always primarily about relationships and only secondarily about rules.

The question is whether it’s ever possible for a society to reach a point that could be called justice. For all the drama and excitement of electing a new president to occupy the White House every four years, it sometimes seems that the most significant job a president gets to do is to appoint new members of the Supreme Court. And no one for a moment thinks the president will be impartial. Everyone assumes that he will want to stack the court with like-minded judges. It makes you wonder whether anyone really believes in justice, or if we’ve all settled for the manipulation of the legal system to get the results we want. But that shouldn’t make us cynical. After all, a flawed legal system is a lot better than no legal system at all. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”