God of Judgment or God of Justice

I think that we have missed a major point in the Gospels: God is better than we give her credit for. We still attend to the God of the Pharisees, God casting judgment rather than God bringing about justice. What is the difference?

To cast judgment (and we are not talking here in the sense of good judgment versus poor judgment) is to prescribe a punishment for an action. To bring about justice (now we are more talking about judging rightly versus judging wrongly) is to affirm the dignity of all persons without exception.

Jesus makes this idea of justice clear in many Gospel stories, sayings, clarifications; I think that he most clearly distinguishes justice and the law in his teachings about the Sabbath. A Jew was not to violate the Sabbath by doing work; but there are several stories in the various Gospels in which Jesus cures people on the Sabbath, and he says essentially that it is better to work for good on the Sabbath than to be idle while evil flourishes. His most pithy comment on the matter, "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath," denounces the preeminence of the law when the law would harm rather than help the person.

The Catholic Church seems sometimes to favor its own laws over the dignity of the human being. We ought to make sure that we are making and remaking a church that upholds our dignity, that we are not making and remaking ourselves to conform to the Church.