"Jesus answered, 'My Kingdom is not of this world. If my Kingdom were of this world, then my servants would fight, that I would not be delivered to the Jews. But now my Kingdom is not from here.'"(Jn 18:36)
The trajectory of God's revelation and teaching has always been one from minimal justice toward greater mercy and enlightenment. In the Old Testament the Lord God had to teach a people infected by many pagan ideas the minimum of bare justice: Lex talionis, i.e., no more than an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It was now to be understood that bloody revenge, disproportionate to the offense, was an intrinsic evil. This is minimal justice. In the same way that God's unity had to be grasped in a polytheistic world before His Trinitarian nature could be understood, humanity had to be first shown minimal justice if it was to understand God's perfection which is ever greater than that, shown supremely in love on the Cross.
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While the Old Testament affirmed minimal justice in war as a concession to prevent excesses, it encouraged grasp of God's deeper dimension and goal:
He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.( Isa 2:4,5)
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Traditional Catholic Reflections
