Epiphany 7 C - Sunday, February 24, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Epiphany 7 C - Sunday, February 24, 2019

Genesis 45:3-11, 15
1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50
Luke 6:27-38

My earliest image of Jesus is a larger-than-life cowboy.  In Sunday School as a young boy, Jesus was the ultimate macho tough guy, the Avenger and Conqueror, a man’s man.  What I heard in church, (and surely this is partly what was said and partly my imagination), was that Jesus’ first coming was about dying on the cross for our sins – an important act that would allow us to be forgiven and go to heaven.  Yes, he was kind and compassionate.  Yes, he cares for the rejected and desolate.  But the really good stuff is coming when he returns.  The last judgment passages in the gospels and the Revelation to John were the ultimate wish fulfillment of a Jesus who was the triumphant and patriotic figure Americans in my part of the world strived to be.  We talked about a savior who loved the world.  What we wanted was a warrior who would vanquish our enemies.  The violence and chaos of the world could only be brought to an end by an equally violent Jesus – and not before.  Yes, the real Jesus was the one who would ride in from the clouds on a white horse, sword in hand, sheep and goats – line up accordingly.  This was a much more morally acceptable Jesus than the one who had already come.  We longed for Super Jesus, we charted his course, we looked for signs…  Soon he will come and rescue us!  The message was “Get saved, get ready for heaven, or good luck in the tribulation.”  There was much more language about Jesus coming back than about Jesus alive and present. The Seventies and early Eighties in my religious world were all about getting off the planet and God getting on with the great judgment as quickly as possible.  In the meantime, we could help God with that judgment part by denouncing the obviously godless:  Communists, liberals, feminists, Yankees, and all manner of foreigner.  Although we had to wait for Jesus, we had Ronald Reagan, and he was very close.

All this was happening in my young life in a culture where violence was a given, an unquestioned fact of life.  I was physically abused, family members were victims of violence, bullying was normal, fights erupted at school, the daily news of murders somewhere in Houston.  Sometimes the 20 minutes of waiting for the school bus in the morning was a drama of survival and dominance akin to “Lord of the Flies”.  Getting off the planet did not seem like such a bad idea.  On hunting trips and out in the country, to relax, we shot stuff.  By the time I was 12, my introduction to adult power was walking through thick woods with a rifle, ready to take out whatever squirrels or birds stood in my path.

Justice was quick and visible, as it should be, I was taught:  “an eye for an eye” (it’s in the Bible!), or, “he had it coming”, “servers him right”.  What got formed, then, as is often the case in parts of the South especially, was an outer shell of manners covering over a heart that had befriended a good and holy vengeance.  The morality of violence was about context – bad people had no good reasons to be violent and good people were always justified in their violence. Thankfully, as an adult, my theological world was expanded by wise pastors and professors who helped me rethink this system.  I read and heard people who took the red letters – all of them, not just John 3:16 - seriously and I began to see that Jesus was not exactly the person I had been taught he was.  Perhaps, shudder the thought, he actually meant what he said – that “love your enemies” bit included.

Jesus really means us to live the kind of generous mercy and kindness that we hear proclaimed today.  He is not taunting us with moral impossibilities.  I may not be prone to physical violence, but I continue to exorcise the violence that is present too often in my thoughts and words.  My inner cowboy image is not totally gone.  I am just more aware of how fall short I fall and how much in need of grace I am.  Jesus articulates and embodies the highest and noblest and most difficult vision of humility and relationship possible – self-sacrificial love of one and all with everything I have and even my very body if necessary.  The alternative – the only alternative - is to spiral further into fear, division, and war.  Nevertheless, we must also reckon with the violence in the Bible itself, especially that inflicted by God’s people, that continues to be a presence and voice in our tradition.  The community has struggled with the most violent verses in the psalter.  We have even excised a few verses of Psalm 137 and 139 from our breviary because of the graphic nature of the imagery.  On this side of the empty tomb, it is good to wrestle with whether even to say such things as Christians.  But we still have phrases like “let them go down alive into the pit” and “let them be food for jackals”.  If we excised all of the calls for vengeance, it would be a much smaller book.  The psalms as well as other places in scripture certainly preserve violence as God’s prerogative and purview, so if the command now is not vengeance, but love, what is going on here?  If Jesus is not the cowboy, then who is he?  Is the antidote a passive resignation to evil?  Is the command to love, offer my cheek, give my shirt, my goods, not to judge, but to forgive and give to those in need not surrender, capitulation, defeat?
There is a third way between violence and passivity that is the heart of Jesus’ teaching and example.  From theologian Walter Wink:

“But Jesus did not teach non-resistance.  Rather, he disavowed violent resistance in favor of nonviolent resistance.  Of course Christians must resist evil!  No decent human being could conceivably stand by and watch innocents suffer without trying to do, or at least wishing to do, something to save them.  The question is simply one of means.  Likewise Christians are not forbidden by Jesus to engage in self-defense.  But they are to do so nonviolently.  Jesus did not teach supine passivity in the face of evil.  That was precisely what he was attempting to overcome!”

That phrase “nonviolent resistance” is very powerful.  It releases me to be clear about my vocation.  Wink and others – (please go and read Saint Oscar Romero, Tony Campolo, Jean Vanier, and Brian Zahnd for much more on this) - have been very helpful for me on this and similar gospel teachings in helping me see that what Jesus was about is an undoing of the endemic and assumed system of violent power and oppression that was then and is now the basis of the ordering of the world, the origin of most national borders and the wars that created them.  Jesus’ project is the kingdom in which mercy and forgiveness are the basic and fundamental ways of viewing my neighbor and being toward my neighbor.  At the same time Jesus confronts and calls out the oppressive system directly and forcefully, but not with violence toward persons.  By this third way, he frees us from the extremes of either violence on one end and non-resistance on the other.  Loving my enemy is connected to calling evil the attitudes and judgments which feed and fuel enmity in the first place.

The ongoing presence of violence is rooted in our fallen state and the corresponding illusion that believes violence is the greatest possible power.  Whenever persons are entangled in this delusion, the world becomes a series of binaries: us/them, win/lose, in/out.  The greatest fear is to be weak, emasculated, shamed, cowed, conquered.  And so we continue to fight, bomb, and kill because we are in a system where that is the only source of meaning and purpose.  The great revolution of Jesus is not an acquiescence to intransigent illusions of power, but a pointing to a greater, truer power.  Mercy, generosity, forgiveness are not passive reactions to the violence we are told is ultimate, but the means to transcend the illusion of power in order to embrace the real thing.  Once I am liberated from the attitudes and labels that drive the domination system and defined by the power of love, then I do not have to use violence in order to impose control.  Violence exposes who is not free.  Oscar Romero called this “the violence of love”.  And pastor and author Greg Boyd says, “love that refuses to retaliate is the most powerful force in the universe.”  He goes on, “Our call is to trust that the foolishness of self-sacrificial love will overcome evil in the end.”

In the end. In the end.  So it turns out that the Second Coming is important after all.  Not so that we can cheer on Super Jesus to slay the wicked, but because his return to set the world right gives the perspective that makes such sacrifice today meaningful.  Our longing for a world set right grounds us in the hope of Jesus doing what we cannot do fully by ourselves.  Jesus is the Judge and King, which means I am not.  He is the Avenger and Conqueror of all that distorts and harms his creatures.  I am not.  We are freed for self-sacrificial love because we are freed from the responsibility to play God and enforce our own version of justice now.   In the meantime, in the already-but-not-yet, we love, we trust, we wait, we hope, we resist.  True, ultimate, eternal peace and justice are surely coming.  And they are also available today.  We can live as if a new way of being is coming and indeed here among and within us.  The hope of the world to come is the reason to be faithful to this day.  Amen.