A Sermon by The Rev. Dr. Stephen K. Nash
In the twelfth chapter of his Letter to the Romans, Paul preaches his own version of the Sermon on the Mount. Any discussion of distinctively Christian ethics must begin with those words of Jesus. So Paul, in twelve short verses turns out thirty instructions, all of them meant to put flesh on the bones of Christ’s one commandment to love.
Paul had good reason for going to so much trouble. The church in Rome was splitting apart in at least two different ways. Inside, by conflict between Jewish and non-Jewish Christians. And outside, by conflict between Christian and non-Christian Romans.
There were black eyes and bad feelings all over the place. Marcus went to the midweek service so he wouldn’t have to sit in the same room with Clovis on Sunday. Lucius was so mad at both of them that he had quit coming to church altogether, and Chloe had just bought herself a pit bull to keep her pagan neighbors from cutting through her yard.
It was a mess, all the way around. People said they believed that God was love. They said they believed in the power of goodness, at least until someone crossed them. Then goodness and love fell pretty much by the wayside and retaliation turned out to be what they really believed in after all. If you have ever been on the receiving end of a really awful wrong, then you know how your mind works.
This is wrong . . . you tell yourself. I’m in a lot of pain here. This shouldn’t have happened to me. Somebody should pay for this. Evildoers have to be stopped, and if I don’t do it someone else will get hurt. It’s not my nature, but I’m gonna strike back. I’ll fight fire with fire. God is a god of justice, after all, and what has happened here is simply not right!
That’s how it usually works. Then the lawsuit is filed, the insult is returned, the line is drawn, and the cold war begins, full of stony silence and clenched teeth. Because something deep down inside of us believes that we will be annihilated if we do not gain control, fight back, and dominate.
A ministry colleague tells of going to her nephew Will’s first birthday party. Will was as round as a Buddha at that point, still hovering on the verge of speech. Never out of his parents’ sight, he was a typical only child—used to being the center of attention—only he wasn’t spoiled yet, because he hadn’t yet learned how to manipulate love for his own ends. He just thought everyone was loved the way he was, and he gave it away as fast as he got it.
There were only a handful of guests that day—Will’s parents, aunts and grandparents, plus his godparents and their seven-year old son, Jason. After the cake and the singing and the presents were all over, Will let them know how pleased he was by doing his new dance for them—a shy twirling in place that he had invented several days before with lots of fancy arm work.
They were all circled around him admiring his dance when Jason simply couldn’t stand it anymore. He charged through the circle, put both of his hands on Will’s chest, and shoved. Will fell hard. His rear end hit first, then his head, with a crack. He looked utterly surprised at first. No one had ever hurt him before, and he didn’t know what to make of it. Then he opened his mouth and howled, but not for long. His mother hugged him and helped him to his feet and the first thing Will did was to totter over to Jason. He knew Jason was at the bottom of this thing, only since no one had ever been mean to him before he didn’t know what the thing was. So he did what he had always done. He put his arms around Jason and lay his head against that mean little boy’s body, and at that moment all my colleague’s Christian conviction went right out the door.
She said that the thought that went through her mind was: I’ll buy him a BB gun for his next birthday. Iron knuckles. A karate video for toddlers. It just about killed her to think how that sweet child would have to learn to defend himself, but it was either that or eat dust on the playground the rest of his life, with some bully’s foot on the back of his head.
Only according to Paul, Will was right, and my clergy colleague was wrong, along with most of us, I suspect. “Do not repay anyone evil for evil,” he wrote the Romans, “but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.” What Will did to Jason put an end to the meanness in that room. What most of us would want to do to Jason would only have multiplied it. Paul’s advice is utterly idealistic, hopelessly impractical, and dangerous to one’s health, but there it is: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
All I can figure is that Paul had incredible faith in the power of love, faith that either most of us do not share or are not eager to test. He seemed to understand that the real enemy is not whoever pushes us down in the middle of our dance but whatever it is inside of us that wants to leap up and push back.
Evil is never satisfied with controlling one side of a situation. Its goal is to infect everyone involved—the victim along with the bully, the plaintiff along with the defendant, the offended along with the offender, for the line between good and evil isn’t drawn between us and them but rather cuts through the heart of each one of us. Even in the good, it has a foothold, and seeks to take advantage of every opportunity to infect us completely. And when everyone has his or her dukes in the air and there is a loaded gun in every household (did you know that is a city ordinance in Kennesaw, Georgia?), then the enemy will have won, because the whole point is to recruit the good guys by making them believe that they are stopping the bad guys.
It can be called “the myth of redemptive violence,” and it is as old as mankind, enshrined historically in literary works and popular culture from classical myths to modern-day cartoons, and is embodied as the true religion of our culture. The Myth of Redemptive Violence. Only rather than bringing redemption, it more often than not ends up in turning us into that which we hate.
The psychologist Carl Gustov Jung once wrote, “you always become the thing you fight the most. It is a principle known as “mimesis.” We become what we hate. It is a fixed rule of human behavior from intrapsychic conflict to international relations. The alcoholic who tries to “resist evil” by overpowering it by force of will quickly discovers that the very attempt to conquer the compulsion by force only energizes the compulsion, and depletes his or her own resources to that exact extent.
A frontal attack energizes its opposite.
“Whoever fights monsters,” one philosopher said, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,” because, as one poet put it so well “The iron hand crushed the Tyrants head and became a Tyrant in his stead.”
George William Russell wrote, “By intensity of hatred, nations create in themselves the characteristics they imagine in their enemies. Hence it is that all passionate conflicts result in the interchange of characteristics.” This reality of violent mimesis, or becoming what we hate is powerfully documented on a personal and an international level by Walter Wink in his remarkable book, “Engaging the Powers” in which he quotes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as saying: “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.”
So, is there no such thing as tough love? Do we not resist evil? Is that what Jesus meant when he said to turn the other cheek, and give away the coat to one who would take your cloak, and going the second mile with the one who forces you to go one? Doesn’t Jesus say in the Sermon on the Mount not to resist the evildoer? Actually, that is a very poor translation of Jesus’ statement in the Sermon on the Mount. What Jesus said was not to refrain from resisting evil, but to not resist it in kind . . . using violent or lethal means. His instructions when facing evildoers was not to be passive or to submit to evil . . . it was to resist: but to resist using a creative third way, beyond violence or acquiescence. Beyond flight or fight. A novel, surprising, non-violent resistance.
Paul says, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” Now, we can take issue with that as being helplessly naïve. But if we are not prepared to at least take seriously the ethical imperatives that are at the heart and core of the Christian faith, I wonder why we would even start to bother with the Christian faith? Because the founder of that faith as well as the earliest interpreter of that faith say that the moment you curse your enemy, you join them, and however good it may feel at the moment, it is still a surrender. The only way to conquer evil is to absorb it, Paul says. Take it into yourself and disarm it. Neutralize its acids. Serve as a charcoal filter for its smog. Suck it up, put a straightjacket on it and turn it over to God, so that when you breathe out again the air is pure.
It is an incredible dare, and Paul apparently knows that very few of us will accept it unless there is something in it for us, so he adds a little bonus near the end. “If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Nice talk, Paul! Convince us to care for our enemies by telling us how much it will hurt them if we do!
I don’t know what that crazy sentence is about. Martin Luther thought it meant that those who are converted by love “burn against themselves,” in remorse and repentance once they have discovered what they’ve been missing. All I know is that the first half of the sentence makes the second half harmless. People who come upon their enemies in a weakened state and who resist the temptation to take advantage of them—who help them instead, giving those who have hurt them food and drink—those people are already out of danger. By the time they have packed the picnic basket and filled the thermos with pink lemonade, I guarantee you they will have forgotten about the burning coals part. “Do I not conquer my enemy,” said Abraham Lincoln, “by making him my friend.”
Now, I realize that we don’t live in a simple world, and the question of war and peace is not an easy one. What do you do when a madman like Hitler stalks Europe? What do you do when religious zealots do not share humane values and pose threats to security? Is there such a thing as protecting our neighbors if we have the opportunity, even if it means using force? Is there not such a thing as a just war, historically recognized by the Christian tradition? Are the traditional peace churches just off-base in their call to ideological pacifism? Or do they reflect the true Christian ethic on this subject? Tough questions, and I sure don’t have the answers to them. But we’re still left with the challenge of Jesus and Paul.
There is nothing sentimental or wimpish or the least bit easy about any of this. There is not even a guarantee that it will work, although there are countless examples, personal and international, of how it can and has worked. But one thing is for dead sure: When we repay evil for evil, evil is all there is, in bigger and more toxic piles. The only way to reverse the process is to behave in totally unexpected ways—blessing the persecutor, feeding the enemy, embracing the bully—breaking the vicious cycle by refusing to participate in it anymore.
That is what love is, Paul says: not a warm feeling between like-minded friends but plain old imitation of Christ, who took all the meanness of the world and ran it through the filter of his own body, repaying evil with good, blame with pardon, death with life. Call it divine reverse psychology. It worked once and it can work again, whenever God can find someone else willing to give it a try.
Amen.
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