Restorative Justice: God's Way for NZ
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We are a nation with Western Judaic-Christian traditions, This tradition has had enormous impact on all of our social institutions, none more so than the law.  Interpretations of Scripture and the teachings of the church from the 13th century on have helped shape and form the body of law we have inherited and our understandings of it. There are two dimensions to law: moral and legal. The base on which law is built is morality. Law is never neutral. It always reflects a system of values.  Justice, truth, honesty, compassion and respect are the basic tenets of an acceptable morality which should seek to protect and enhance the common good.

Law, justice and the common good
Law and justice then are, regrettably, not synonymous terms. The law is not sacrosanct and never should be. What are sacrosanct are true justice, the dignity and equality of people and respect for the human person over and above every other consideration.
In a secular society, the basis for good law and justice has to have the protection and enhancement of the common good as its starting point. Problems arise when the law is written by powerful interest groups with little feeling for the common good. This is the basis for unjust law.
The balancing act for any good government relates to how to define, defend and protect the common good particularly when there is a, conflict of interests. Ii: seems that this is precisely what parliament in a true democracy should be about.
The promotion of the common good is at the heart of a fair and just moral code and central to the creation of good law. This is where our Judaic- Christian heritage still has a special contribution to make if the common good is to be achieved.
According to St Thomas Aquinas, possibly the most influential theologian in history,  common good is the end of each individual member of the community, just as the good of the whole is the end of each part."
The end of all law should be the common good. Any law - that is. unjust is not true law and one is not obligated to obey it.
Many laws promulgated in Nazi Germany or under apartheid in South Africa provide illustrations of this. The common good is the context in which each person can most effectively engage in living out. the gospel demands of justice, forgiveness, compassion and non-violence.
In this spirit one's own good does not come first but rather the good of the other. This religious tradition demands that the economically poor, the sick, the dispossessed and vulnerable minorities be especially protected.

Shalom and covenant
The two most central concepts of biblical law relate to shalom and covenant.
Shalom is not just a peripheral theme of scripture, but is a basic core belief from which God's vision and plan for creation and the development of the human family flow. Hence notions of salvation, atonement, forgiveness and justice have their roots in shalom.
In English shalom is usually translated to mean peace. But this is a very inadequate translation. Shalom includes physical wellbeing, including adequate food, clothing, shelter and wealth, a right relationship between, and among people and the acquisition of virtue especially honesty and moral integrity.
The absence of shalom means the absence of one or other of these features. There is a flow-on of this concept in the Christian Scriptures where Christ's life and teachings and eventually His death and resurrection transform relationships between and among people, thus inaugurating the Reign of God, the New Creation, wherein shalom - justice, peace, righteousness - are lived by believers.
The other major concept that has a direct relationship with law and justice is that of covenant. A covenant is a binding agreement between parties. There were several in the Scriptures starting with God and creation in Genesis.
Then there were those with Abraham, Sarah and the newly created People of God, followed by the one with God and Moses representing the people on Mt Sinai when the Ten Commandments were' given.
The culminating covenant came with Jesus and the whole of humanity at the Last Supper. This was enacted through the suffering and death of Jesus on the doss at Calvary and through the resurrection.
This new covenant opened up for humanity a new way of viewing things, of relating, of recognising the dignity of all persons within the con- text of their community.
In his seminal book on restorative justice, Changing Lenses, Howard Zehr says that biblical justice seeks to make things right; and this often means liberation for the unequal. Thus biblical justice shows a clear partiality towards those who are oppressed and impoverished.
It is clearly on the side of ,the poor, recognising their need and disadvantages. Biblical justice is open-eyed, with hands outstretched to those in need.
He goes on to say that, since biblical justice seeks to make things better, justice is not designed to maintain the status quo. Indeed, its 'intent is to shake up the status quo, to'
improve, to move towards shalom. The move towards shalom is not necessarily good news for everyone.
In fact it is downright bad news for the oppressor. This too stands in contrast to that justice which, by working to maintain order, works in fact to maintain the present order, the status quo, even when it is unjust.
The test of justice in the biblical view is not whether the right rules are applied in the right way. Justice is tested by the outcome. The tree is tested by its fruit. It is the substance, not the procedure, that defines justice. And how should things come out? The litmus test is how the poor and oppressed are affected.
The Jewish understanding of Hebrew law has often been quite different from a Western Christian understanding of the same law.
For example, Martin Buber, the famous Jewish scholar, in his German translation of the Scriptures, translates "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" as "an eye for the value of an eye, a tooth for the value of a tooth."
There is no historical evidence that one would lose an eye as a punishment for assaulting and damaging the eye' of another. The eye and the tooth notions are symbolic.
If damage was done to someone's house or field, the person responsible for the damage should repair it. Later in the Christian Scriptures, Christ specifically rejects a retributive notion when He says quite emphatically, "You have heard it said 'an eye for an eye'. But I tell you, do good to those who harm you."
The focus on crime wasn't so much on individuals as on the community.
Corporate responsibility was central to the Hebrew understanding of crime.
It is from this under- standing that the prophets are able to warn that the entire nation is doomed because some widows have been mistreated or because the hungry have not been allowed to glean the fields.
Not only all the people, but the land itself is caught up in sin' and all its consequences, for the meadows lie barren and
the mountains quake and the trees bear no fruit.
For Israel, the fullest response to crime was not the isolated punishment of an individual lawbreaker, but the repentance of the entire nation.
There are several key words in Scripture that indicate the presence of justice in a much fuller sense than what we usual- ly understand.
Justice is part of the very essence of God as can be seen from reading the psalms, the prophets, especially Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah and Amos; and from reflecting on the Gospels.
According to the Old Testament authors, the justice of God is not the quality whereby God rewards the good and punishes the wicked.
God is just when intervening in the lives of the underprivileged especially orphans and widows, to save them from the injustices of others (Deut 10:18). God is just when defending the cause of the innocent.
God is just when re- establishing those who have been exploited by the wicked. God is just when saving the poor.
 

Justice in Christian Scriptures
In the Christian Scriptures, Jesus clearly states that justice should be , based on principles of forgiveness and reconciliation, that retaliation has no part in it. He forgave the Gerasene maniac, the prostitute, the adulteress, the tax-gatherer who was an extortionist, the robber. He charged us both to place distinctions between wrongdoers and the virtuous and to see ourselves though as all in the same camp - brothers and sisters of each other, with varying strengths and weaknesses.
He rejected any notion of just deserts in the vine- yard workers parable (Matthew 20:1-16) and in the story of the prodigal son and loving parent (Luke 15:11-32).
It is the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31). Jesus explicitly teaches that the poor man has rights and the rich marl is obliged out of a sense of justice, not charity, to share what he has from his table. Here Luke draws on Leviticus 25:35 which spells out the obligations of the rich to the poor.
The rich man fails' to recognise that, though he may well have come by his wealth by perfectly,
legal means, in justice he still owes part of I his wealth to Lazarus who has nothing. He fails and is condemned.
Here Jesus explicitly expounds the nature of justice in terms of sharing with the needy. the poor, the vulnerable. Lazarus and the rich man 'Can only ever meet and be reconciled as brothers through the sharing of the riches.

Reconciliation then is at the heart of the New Testament understanding of justice and is the identifying mark of God's new creation.

The goal of restorative justice generally fit those of biblical justice, the process is similar to that practiced in Youth Justice in New Zealand. Victims and offenders assume central roles, and the state takes a back seat.
It does not focus on vengeance and punishment but seeks to heal both the community and the individuals involved. Thus the notion of reparation, in its widest sense, is placed at the centre.
The goal of restorative justice is to heal the wounds of every person affected by an offence. It obviously requires the co- operation of all parties. The offender, to be involved in any useful way, must acknowledge responsibility for the crime committed and express honest regret.
More than that, the full implications of the offence need to be spelled out and ,confronted as the offender deals with the causes of offending, where possible making restitution and giving concrete evidence of more appropriate future behaviour;
Restorative justice offers opportunity for healing, mercy, forgive- ness and reconciliation. It is clearly God's way for our time.
May 28. 1997