Is God love, justice or forgiveness for us?

INTRODUCTION - - Many men, even among Christians, even among those who profess to be atheists or indifferent, still fear God today as a severe and inexorable judge and, so to speak, "automatic": ready to strike, sooner or later, the man who made certain mistakes. There are many who today think, with skepticism or anguish, that the evil done remains and that the forgiveness, received in the confessional or in the conscience, does not change anything, it is a simple comfort, and an outlet for being alienated. Such conceptions are insulting to God and do no honor to man's intelligence. Just when in the pages of the Old Testament God, through the mouth of the prophets, threatens or inflicts terrible punishments, he also proclaims high and reassuring: "I am God and not man! ... I am the Saint and I do not like to destroy! »(Hos. 11, 9). And when even in the New Testament, two apostles believe they will interpret a reaction of Jesus invoking fire from heaven on a village that had refused it, Jesus responds firmly and admonished: «You do not know what spirit you are from. The Son of man came not to lose souls, but to save them ». The justice of God when he judges absolves, when he punishes purifies and heals, when he corrects he saves, because justice in God is love.

BIBLICAL MEDITATION - The word of the Lord was addressed to Jonah a second time, saying: «Get up and go to Niníve, the great city, and announce to them what I will tell you». Jonah got up and went to Nineveh ... and preached, saying: "Forty more days and Nineveh will be destroyed." The citizens of Nineveh believed in God and banished a fast and dressed the cilice from the largest to the smallest of them. (...) Then a decree was proclaimed in Nineveh: «... each one should convert from his wicked conduct and from the iniquity that is in his hands. Who knows? perhaps God could change and repent, divert the ardor of his anger and not make us perish ». And God saw their works ... he repented of the evil he had said to do and did not do it. But this was a great sadness for Jonah and he was indignant ... Jonah left the city ... he took shelter of branches and went under the shade, waiting to see what would happen in the city. And the Lord God made a castor plant sprout ... to shade Jonah's head. And Jonah felt a great joy for that castor. But the next day ... God sent a worm to gnaw the castor and it dried. And when the sun had risen ... the sun hit the head of Jonah who felt himself failing and asked to die. And God asked Jonah: «Does it seem good to you to be so indignant at a castor plant? (...) You feel compassion for that castor plant for which you have not tired at all ... and I should have no pity on Nineveh in which more than one hundred and twenty thousand human beings cannot distinguish between the right and left hand? »(Jon. 3, 3-10 / 4, 1-11)

CONCLUSION - Who among us is not sometimes surprised by Jonah's feelings? We often want to stick to a tough decision even when something has changed in favor of our brother. Our sense of justice is often a subtle revenge, a "legitimate" "civil" barbarism and our judgment that wants to be clear is a cold sword.

We are imitators of God: justice must be a form of love, to understand, to help, to correct, to save, not to condemn, to make it pay, to distance.