One feature of American life that has always fascinated me is the degree to which the Supreme Court has become the focal point of its culture. Most Americans seem to believe that the best place to discover right and wrong, to identify good and bad, and to resolve ambiguity, is through legal judgment.

The risk is that the attention given to getting the rules right can distract from the fact that a healthy society is always primarily about relationships and only secondarily about rules. It is only when both of these dimensions are working harmoniously that we might say that we have reached a point that could be called justice.

And this brings me to the story of Naboth's vineyard from the First Book of Kings (21.1-21). This is a salutary story of what happens when there's no justice and the powerful get to crush those who stand in their way.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Theology

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