God’s Restorative Justice
Just Love
Sunday, March 1, 2026
Father Richard Rohr emphasizes how God’s justice in the Bible is fundamentally loving and restorative rather than punitive.
As we read the Bible, God does not change as much as our knowledge of God evolves. I certainly recognize there are many biblical passages that present God as punitive and retributive, but we must stay with the text—and observe how we gradually let God grow up. Focusing on divine retribution leads to an ego-satisfying and eventually unworkable image of God, which situates us inside of a very unsafe and dangerous universe. Both Jesus and Paul observed the human tendency toward retribution and spoke strongly about the limitations of the law.
The biblical notion of justice, beginning in the Hebrew Scriptures with the Jewish prophets—especially Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea—is quite different. If we read carefully and honestly, we will see that God’s justice is restorative. In each case, after the prophet chastises the Israelites for their transgressions against Yahweh, the prophet continues by saying, in effect, “And here’s what Yahweh will do for you: God will now love you more than ever! God will love you into wholeness. God will pour upon you a gratuitous, unbelievable, unaccountable, irrefutable love that you will finally be unable to resist.”
God “punishes” us by loving us more! How else could divine love be supreme and victorious? Check out this theme for yourself: Read passages such as Isaiah 29:13–24, Hosea 6:1–6, Ezekiel 16 (especially verses 59–63), and so many of the Psalms. God’s justice is fully successful when God can legitimate and validate human beings in their original and total identity! God wins by making sure we win—just as any loving human parent does.
Love is the only thing that transforms the human heart. In the Gospels, we see Jesus fully revealing this divine wisdom. Love takes the shape and symbolism of healing and radical forgiveness—which is just about all that Jesus does. Jesus, who represents God, usually transforms people at the moments when they most hate themselves, when they most feel shame or guilt, or want to punish themselves. Look at Jesus’s interaction with the tax collector Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1–10). He doesn’t belittle or punish Zacchaeus; instead, Jesus goes to his home, shares a meal with him, and treats him like a friend. Zacchaeus’s heart is opened and transformed. Only then does Zacchaeus commit to making reparations for the harm he has done.
As Isaiah says of God, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways” (Isaiah 55:8). Yet I am afraid we largely pulled God down into “our thoughts.” We think fear, anger, divine intimidation, threat, and punishment are going to lead people to love. We cannot lead people to the highest level of motivation by teaching them the lowest. God always and forever models the highest, and our task is merely to “imitate God” (Ephesians 5:1).
A Prophet’s Call for Justice
Monday, March 2, 2026
Richard Rohr considers how God used the prophets to upend notions of retributive justice, which prevail in most cultures to this day:
Justice, most of us believe, is when we send bad guys to jail. We imagine that we can point out the few who get caught and that then we can think of ourselves as a fair society. But we don’t dare convict the whole system of massive injustice and deceit. Maybe we are refusing to carry both guilt and responsibility? Taking responsibility for the common good is the more important moral mandate. And that is exactly where the prophets began. When the common good is the focus, preaching is not about imposing guilt and shame on individuals, but about giving vision and encouragement to society.
What history has needed is a positive and inspiring universal vision for the earth and the people of God. Harping about individual sin and convicting wrongdoers might shame a few individuals into halfhearted obedience, but in terms of societal change it has been a notorious Christian failure. Retributive justice has backfired because it is not founded in a positive love and appreciation of the good, the true, and the beautiful in the world or in creation. Negative energy feeds on itself, but positive energy evokes a positive vision.
So what is the Hebrew prophet Amos’s positive vision? When we read the way he ends his prophecy, it’s clear that the rewards and rejoicing are very much based in this earth and this world. According to Amos, God says:
I mean to restore the fortunes of my people Israel.
They will rebuild their ruined cities and live in them,
plant vineyards and drink their wine,
dig gardens and eat their produce (Amos 9:14).
Radical unity with God and neighbor is the only way any of us truly heals or improves. Perhaps that is why Alcoholics Anonymous continues to make such an enduring difference in people’s lives. AA insists on personal responsibility for woundedness, the inner experience of a Higher Power, and some kind of ongoing small-group practice: the whole package of healthy religion.
By his final verses, Amos sees God as more merciful and more compassionate, even as he continues to lament Israel’s foolishness and failures:
That day I will re-erect the tottering hut of David,
Make good the gaps in it,
Restore the ancient ruins,
And rebuild its ancient ruins (Amos 9:11).
Amos is inaugurating a revolution in our understanding of how divine love operates among us. This is no longer retribution or punishment, but a full reordering. It is such divine extravagance, a philosophy of love them into loving me back, that sets the pattern for all the prophets to follow. He represents a strong and clear movement away from retribution and punishment to what will become a new covenant of restorative justice that we see worked out in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and, of course, in the life of Jesus. This changes everything, or at least it should.
