Eugene England - On the "Demands of Justice"

Christ is the unique manifestation in human experience of the fulness of that unconditional love from God which Paul chose to represent with the Greek term agape.  As Paul expressed it, "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Christ's sacrificial love was not conditional upon our qualities, our repentance, anything; he expressed his love to us while we were yet in our sins--not completing the process of forgiveness, which depends on our response, but initiating it in a free act of mercy. This is a kind of love quite independent from the notion of justice. There is no quid-pro-quo about it.  It is entirely unbalanced, unmerited, unrelated to the specific worthiness of the object (except in that each man has intrinsic worth through his eternal existence and God-like potential), and that is precisely why it is redemptive. It takes a risk, without calculation, on the possibility that man can realize his infinite worth. It gets directly at that barrier in man, his sense of justice, which makes him incapable of having unconditional love for himself--unable to respond positively to his own potential, because he is unable to forgive himself, unable to be at peace with himself until  he has somehow "made up" in suffering for his sins, something he is utterly incapable of doing.  The demands of justice that Amulek is talking about, which must be overpowered, are from man's own sense of justice, not some abstract eternal principle but our own demands on ourselves, demands which rightly bring us into estrangement with ourselves (as we gain new knowledge of right but do not live up to it) and thus begin the process of growth through repentance, but which cannot complete that process.  an awareness of the true meaning and source of that last sacrifice and its intent has the power, as Amulek says, "to bring about the bowels of mercy, which overpowereth justice, and bringeth about means unto men that they may have faith unto repentance."