When the conversation become difficult, we agree to bow together before the idol named Balance.
‘Well, it’s really a matter of balance,’ we intone, only half suspecting that we are confessing a lie.
A slightly more sophisticated half-truth, half-lie stakes its seductive claim thus: ‘Well, these things must always be held in tension.’
We speak carelessly of love and truth as though they were fruits of the same size placed into our refrigerating care. We discourse with all the shallow persuasiveness of truism about ‘Grace’ and ‘Law’ and their needful equilibrium.
So does good intention come to smell of distortion, divine disclosure of human fabrication.
In point of fact, love and truth are not in human experience to be carefully balanced like some child’s Lego invention. Grace and Law are not equals, twin entities whose shared equilibrium must be carefully tended by the human custodians of reality.
The human experience of our Maker and of each other is not intended to be such a balancing act. The universe is blessed by a fearsome imbalance. Were it not so, we’d be long removed from it.
Outlandish disequilibrium is the Most High’s stance vis-à-vis our fragile and errant ways. Over and again, the God of the Bible discloses himself as a passionate Redeemer whose love for his creatures is entirely unbalanced, absurdly disproportionate to any observable cause. The Hound of Heaven relentlessly—and gleefully—pursues the most emaciated of hares.
The LORD passed before him, and proclaimed, ‘The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.’
If self-definition merits any pride of place, this passage from the biblical book of Exodus should be considered a first thing. Throughout the Bible it is endlessly parsed, exegeted, proclaimed, placed in counter-poise to claims of mere justice, and prayed back in YHWH’s face when he appears for the moment to have become more invested in truth and justice than in mercy and grace.
YHWH, we are told in moments of hope and desperation, is quick to extend mercy, egregiously slow to press the claims of justice.
The apostle Paul knew this well.
No stranger to matters of justice—one might plausibly if cynically conclude that he built a career on the investigation and proclamation of the thing—the man from Tarsus is aware that the justice upon which every martyr rests his case is not the greatest thing.
And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
It would be wrong to drive a wedge between love and justice, grace and law, as though the two were finally separate matters rather than a lush abbreviation of YHWH’s holy love. The drama of the Cross suggests that YHWH, the Father of Jesus Christ, finally took into his own hands the paradox that resolves the things that seem to us to be pure contradiction.
But to drive that wedge would not be so terribly and damagingly wrong as to go on mouthing the absurd and thoughtless mantra that says our task is to hold these things in balance.
That, most definitely, is not our cause.
Ours is love and mercy first.
All else, deeply and irremediably important, comes later.
Canter Bridge 
There’s a wideness to God’s mercy, as the hymnwriter put it, that extends out past judgement on either side–a point missed by Jonah, for instance, when he recalled this ‘self-definition’ from Exodus while on the hill outside Ninevah. Seems like that prophet would have liked judgement to triumph over mercy, rather than the other way round.
Thanks for this good reminder that words we often associate are not always ‘matched pairs’.
Dan’l,
You always say things well.
You should write a book on the Minor Prophets or something.
Oh, wait, you already did that!
Thanks, friend.
David