Bring on the Barristers

Bring on the Barristers
Acts 24.1-9

Jokes about lawyers are unkind, ungrateful, uncharitable – and often uncannily accurate. I remember listening in horror as a clever and unscrupulous young lawyer, in a meeting of a college governing body, constructed a rhetorically powerful argument out of bits and pieces, scraps of ideas, and made a case which colleagues found hard to refute even though everyone who knew what was in fact going on knew it was nonsense. That is, after all, what lawyers are paid for: to make sure that everything that can be said on one particular side is said. And part of the problem, in the ancient world as in the modern, is that people with money and power can hire extremely clever and effective lawyers, who can not only master their brief but also present it in such a way that a jury, and for that matter a judge, will be led along by it to the conclusion the client wants, and has paid for...

Taken from Acts for Everyone Part 2 by Tom Wright