READY FOR A quick pop quiz? It’s just one multiple choice question. Complete the following sentence: “God is…”

• (a) righteous and just,
• (b) gracious and merciful, or
• (c) both a and b.

The correct answer, of course, is (c), both a and b.

I sometimes hear Christians speak as if God sternly and angrily demanded justice in the Old Testament but then decided to be loving and merciful in the New. But biblically, this won’t do. There is one eternal God at the center of the entire Bible, which teaches that justice and mercy are both intrinsic to the character of God. Grace and mercy abound in the Old Testament, if we care to notice it. And let’s not forget: Jesus himself insisted in the Sermon on the Mount that his purpose was to fulfill every requirement of the Law.

In God, justice and mercy co-exist in harmony. And both lie at the heart of the Beatitudes. In the fourth beatitude, remember, Jesus pronounced a blessing on those who “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matt 5:6) — a way of describing those who see the brokenness and sin of the world and long for God to bring justice and make things right. In the fifth beatitude, Jesus then blessed those who are merciful (vs. 7). In the kingdom of heaven, therefore, those who long to see things put right are to join God’s work of peacemaking by embodying God’s character of mercy.

For fallible creatures like us, however, this is no simple matter. We can feel torn, as if justice and mercy were pulling us in opposite directions. We want righteousness to prevail, but too easily fall into self-righteousness. We want justice to be done, but can’t completely shake the desire to get revenge for the injustice that has been done to us. And through it all, we remember Jesus, the sinless one who suffered and died for our sins, so that God’s justice and mercy could be done perfectly and at the same time.

So what are we to do? Do we insist on justice, or opt for mercy? This is where we come to some of the most challenging verses in the Sermon on the Mount.

WE CRY OUT for justice when an injustice has been or is being done. We want what’s wrong to be put right, and that’s as it should be. But what is the right response in any given case? What does justice entail?

Often, our assumptions about justice have to do with retribution and payback. But as the saying goes, “the punishment must fit the crime.” This is what’s known in Latin as the principle of lex talionis, the law of exact or equivalent retaliation.

In the Law of Moses, this takes the form of an “eye for eye” type of compensation for damage or injury. There are only three such passages in the Old Testament. The first is part of the regulations God set before Moses on Mount Sinai:

If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise. (Exod 21:22-25)

This may seem oddly specific — were pregnant women routinely getting injured in fights between other people? But much of the Law is like this. A somewhat more general example can be found in Leviticus 24:

Anyone who takes the life of a human being is to be put to death. Anyone who takes the life of someone’s animal must make restitution—life for life. Anyone who injures their neighbor is to be injured in the same manner: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. The one who has inflicted the injury must suffer the same injury. (Lev 24:17-20)

And in the third and final passage, the principle applies even in the case of maliciously bearing false witness against someone else:

The judges must make a thorough investigation, and if the witness proves to be a liar, giving false testimony against a fellow Israelite, then do to the false witness as that witness intended to do to the other party. You must purge the evil from among you. The rest of the people will hear of this and be afraid, and never again will such an evil thing be done among you. Show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. (Deut 19:18-21)

Let’s be honest: if we’re used to the endless twists and turns of contests between well-mannered attorneys, all of this may sound a bit like primitive frontier justice. But the opposite is true. Texts like these set important legal boundaries on retaliation in a culture in which families feel honor-bound to take justice into their own hands and avenge any wrong done to one of their kin, often leading to an escalating, back-and-forth cycle of self-righteous revenge and violence. So yes, eye for eye and tooth for tooth, but no more than that; only what the crime itself demands. And by the time of Jesus, just as in our day, the court would often order defendants to compensate their victims financially.

ALL OF THIS, then, is background to what Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount. Again, he begins by stating what his hearers have already been taught:

You have heard that it was said, “Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.” (Matt 5:38, NIV)

This isn’t something the Pharisees made up; as we’ve seen, it’s straight from the Law of Moses. What then? Is Jesus going to contradict Moses? Here’s his corrective:

But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. (Matt 5:39-42)

We’ll take some time to look more closely at each of Jesus’ examples. For now, though, notice that each of the “eye for eye” passages we read from the Old Testament had to do with the application of justice in a legal context, in which judges had to hear evidence and make a ruling. The scenarios Jesus cites, however, have to do with how we respond to others personally in a variety of settings.

Jesus, in other words, is not contradicting Moses; he’s correcting how the Law of Moses has been misunderstood and misapplied. Reading between the lines, we might imagine that the people had been taught that if someone slapped them, it was fine or even right to slap them back, and so on. But someone who behaved that way — and felt completely justified in doing so! — would hardly qualify as salt and light.

Jesus is illustrating how, in a practical sense, the righteousness of the kingdom is to be found in mercy, not in insisting on fairness for ourselves in interpersonal situations. It’s a hard teaching, so let’s dig more deeply into what Jesus has to say.