"Now you, son of man, listen to what I am speaking to you; do not be rebellious like that rebellious house. Open your mouth wide and eat what I am giving you." Then I looked, and behold, a hand was extended to me; and behold, a scroll was in it. When He spread it out before me, it was written on the front and back, and written on it were songs of mourning, sighing, and woe. Then He said to me, "Son of man, eat what you find; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel." So I opened my mouth, and He fed me this scroll. And He said to me, "Son of man, feed your stomach and fill your body with this scroll which I am giving you." Then I ate it, and it was as sweet as honey in my mouth.
— Ezekiel 2:8–3:3

The Revised Common Lectionary set Ezekiel 2–3 in front of me this week, and I can't stop thinking about the scroll.

God extends a scroll to Ezekiel — written front and back with songs of mourning, sighing, and woe — and tells him to eat it. Not read it. Not study it. Eat it. Fill your stomach with it. And Ezekiel does, and it tastes like honey.

That's the part that stops me. The content is grief. The experience is sweetness. Those two things shouldn't sit together, but they do, and I think the reason they do is that the sweetness isn't about the content at all. It's about the intimacy. To be given access to the inner life of God — even when that inner life is sorrow — is itself a gift. Ezekiel isn't enjoying the mourning. He's tasting what it means to be trusted with it.

But here's the thing we don't talk about much: the sorrow of God. We spend a lot of time on grace, mercy, love, justice, judgment. We organize these into frameworks and systems. We talk about how mercy and justice meet at the cross. But we skip past the grief — the sighing and woe that God Himself puts on the scroll before handing it to His prophet.

I think that's because grief in God is destabilizing. A sovereign God who governs and judges — that we can manage. A God who sorrows — that implies something we'd rather not sit with.

But I don't think sorrow is the starting point. I think justice is. God is just, and justice ultimately must act. It must punish. And when the object of that punishment is something you love — something you made, something that bears your image — the acting produces sorrow. The grief isn't sentimentality. It isn't hand-wringing. It's what justice feels like when it belongs to a God who loves what He must judge.

And justice doesn't only punish. A judge who punishes but never restores hasn't actually executed justice — he's only executed half of it. Restoration is as much a component of justice as retribution. The Hebrew bears this out. The Old Testament's primary justice vocabulary — mishpat (מִשְׁפָּט) and tsedaqah (צְדָקָה) — resists the narrow Western reading of justice as purely punitive. Mishpat carries the sense of right ruling, setting things in proper order, which includes both verdict and remedy. And tsedaqah, often translated "righteousness," is fundamentally relational — it describes faithfulness to covenant obligation, which for God means not only holding His people accountable but actively working to restore them. When the prophets pair these two words — and they do constantly — they aren't describing a courtroom. They're describing a God who is compelled by His own nature in both directions — toward judgment and toward making whole.

Both of those compulsions meet in the same act, on the same cross.

We typically narrate the cross as a legal transaction or a substitutionary mechanism — and those frameworks carry real truth — but underneath all of that is a God whose retribution over separation drove Him to absorb the full weight of it Himself. Retribution wasn't waived. It wasn't softened. It wasn't a legal fiction. It landed with its full weight — just not where we expected. The One who demanded it was the same One who received it.

Which means mercy isn't the suspension of retribution. It's retribution fully executed but voluntarily borne by the offended party. That's a harder gospel than the one where God simply decides to be lenient. It preserves the seriousness of the rupture while revealing the depth of the love — because only someone whose retributive response is real can demonstrate love by absorbing it.

Isaiah 53:10 says it pleased the Lord to crush Him. That line has always been a stumbling block — it sounds cruel until you understand what the pleasure is. The Hebrew is chaphets (חָפֵץ) — to delight in, to take pleasure in. It isn't pleasure in suffering. It's the pleasure of justice fully accomplished in both directions at once. Retribution and restoration in a single stroke. The crushing satisfies the demand. The satisfaction opens the way for making whole.

And here the thread back to Ezekiel tightens. A scroll full of mourning and woe tastes sweet. A crushing pleases. In both cases something that should register as unbearable instead registers as chaphets, as delight — not because the pain isn't real but because the purpose behind it is. The sweetness and the pleasure are the same thing: the taste of justice completing its full work.

So the sequence runs something like this: justice requires punishment. Punishment of the beloved produces sorrow. Sorrow drives toward resolution. And the only resolution that honors both sides of justice — retribution and restoration — is the cross. God doesn't choose between His attributes. He fulfills all of them at once, and it costs Him everything.

Ezekiel ate a scroll full of mourning and woe, and it tasted like honey. Maybe that's because he was tasting — without fully knowing it — the whole arc of what God would eventually do with His own grief.