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“But they started it…”
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 30, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Leviticus 24:10-23 Matthew 5:38-48
“Long before seat belts or common sense were particularly widespread,” wrote Harvard professor of psychology Daniel Gilbert in last Monday’s New York Times, “my family made annual trips to New York in our 1963 Valiant station wagon. Mom and Dad took the front seat, my infant sister sat in my mother’s lap and my brother and I had what we called ‘the wayback’ all to ourselves. In the wayback,” Gilbert recalls, “we’d lounge around doing puzzles, reading comics and counting license plates. Eventually, we’d fight. When our fight had finally escalated to the point of tears, our mother would turn around to chastise us, and my brother and I would start to plead our cases. ‘But he hit me first,’ one of us would say, to which the other would inevitably add, ‘But he hit me harder.’” Gilbert’s point in the context of now darker days is that these juvenile claims writ large provide acceptable rationales “for doing that which is otherwise forbidden. Both civil and religious law provide long lists of behaviors that are illegal or immoral—unless they are responses in kind, in which case they are perfectly fine.” Moreover he notes that our language for such behavior—retaliation, retribution, revenge—reminds us by way of a prefix “that a punch thrown second is legally and morally different than a punch thrown first.” The catch, as we all know from watching our children, is that subjectivity trumps actuality when it comes to testimony concerning the order of our aggression. The same holds for our ability to judge what constitutes an “in kind” response verses an escalation of violence: I respond in kind while the other escalates, we think, which justifies my escalation in kind! Research actually confirms the working of this inner logic: we think of our own actions as “consequences of what came before” (we were provoked) and think of other’s actions as “the causes of what came later” (they started it). Moreover, “our reasons and our pains are more palpable, more obvious and real, than are the reasons and pains of others, [leading to] the escalation of mutual harm, to the illusion that others are solely responsible…and to the belief that our actions are justifiable responses to theirs.” So it is that siblings, spouses, colleagues, neighbors, nations offer vastly different narratives when asked to explain what started the downward spiral of a marriage, a friendship, a working relationship, a backyard disagreement, a church dispute, a global conflict. Gilbert suggests two reasons for this, what he calls “two innocent facts. First, because our senses point outward, we can observe other people’s actions but not our own. Second, because mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own thoughts but not the thoughts of others. Together, these facts suggest that our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us than the punches themselves—but that the opposite will be true of the other people’s reasons and the other people’s punches.” What psychology and social sciences deem to be innocent facts, theologians tend to identify as marks of our fallen human condition, evidence that sin stalks us early on in the wayback and thereafter on every relational front of our lives. What then to do and why: in the “wayback” where Cain and Abel actually did start it all, in the bedroom as the decibels rise, at the office when the air is rife with resentment, around a globe now about to implode? To a crowd whose divisions remain the divisions that threaten to undo us to this very day, Jesus said “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be children of your father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good…sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” Therefore let us begin again, this time taking our cues not so much from the social sciences, interesting though their studies may be, but from the claims and context of the biblical narrative. The context is a context of disparate tribes whose volatile relationships were historically checked as well as provoked by what each defined as the tribe’s “honor.” Needless to say, little has changed in four thousand years! According to a book by the same name, Honor: A History by James Bowman, honor in these nomadic tribes meant “the respect of the local ‘honor group’—the family, the extended clan, the tribe, the religious sect. It meant maintaining a reputation for courage and loyalty, not being charitable to enemy civilians….‘The honor system in Arab culture,’” Bowman writes, “‘is the default honor system, the one you see in street gangs in America—you dis me, I shoot you.’” As we all know, the “eye for an eye” code in Leviticus must therefore be read as an enlightened and radical improvement upon the way things were in the wilderness. Yet even more radical are the words of Jesus, words that bring us to the claim of the biblical witness at a time when the behavior of so-called civilized nations resembles the honor code of tribes more and more each day. The claim an command of Jesus on the mount in Matthew where he rang the changes on the law given to Moses on another mountain [You have heard it said, ‘An eye for an eye’], is that we are to love the enemy. The command presupposes, in a word, the honor of God conferred no less on the other tribe than on our tribe. Baruch Spinoza said the same some 350 year ago and was excommunicated for the effort from the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. “Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly claim infallible knowledge of the Creator’s partiality to its beliefs and ways. After the excommunication,” writes philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in yesterday’s Times, “he spent the rest of his life studying the varieties of religious intolerance…the powerful tendency in each of us toward developing a view of the truth that favors the circumstances into which we happen to have been born.” The radical counterclaim of the biblical witness, a claim missed by readers who believe more in religion than in the Living God, is that honor is a gift of God, a reflection of God’s glory falling upon each and every human being ever born, according to Karl Barth. “[Honor therefore] cannot be lost. It belongs to the character indelebilis of [each person’s] human existence. Honor is not overlooked, forgotten, nor misunderstood by God, not even where a [person] tramples it underfoot, or where it is trampled under the feet of others.” To be sure we can sin against our own honor [turn and distance ourselves from God’s call and command] or we can dishonor the honor of another [turn and distance ourselves from God’s call and command of the other] but the honor remains constant. Hence far from defending or grasping or holding exclusively to God’s honor as a possession to defend, we may only receive it as a gift in “pure thankfulness, in the deepest humility and in free humour.” So even though the enemy is a creature who may be against us, the enemy bears the indelible mark of God’s honor no less than you do or I do. Love your enemies, says Jesus whose life and death revealed love as an action rather than an emotion, as a self-giving rather than a self-securing, as a dying to self and living to God. In this utilitarian age, we must be quick to note that this is not a non-violent strategy for winning the enemy’s heart and mind; it is not a means to the end of disarming the other morally or even converting the enemy to our enlightened perspective. Love has no motive other than regard for the other who bears God’s honor no less than we do; love has no expectation of the other in return; and love never quits. Then in the second place, the next words out of Jesus’ mouth offer us concrete help in obeying a command so contrary to the human code of honor in the wilderness: pray for those who persecute you, Jesus says. “Praying for enemies,” notes New Testament scholar Douglas Hare, “involves a serious attempt to see them from God’s point of view.” No doubt our enemies see us as infidels from the point of view of God’s Jihad, but the claim of the God revealed in Jesus Christ is clean contrary to this. The other is one for whom Jesus died, no exceptions, none left out. “We cannot earnestly pray for enemies without acknowledging our common humanity; they too have been created in the image of God,” says Hare, “and no behavior, no matter how nefarious, can erase that image…[Besides] we cannot pray fervently for our enemies without reminding ourselves that the God who is able to love us despite our disobedience is able to love also those who hate us.” Barth puts the matter another way. The indelible honor we along with our enemies bear is the honor both of being given life and of being called into service by God. Alongside our common humanity, Barth emphasizes our common call to God’s service, noting that it is “in service that two [human beings] learn to know and respect one another, not by simply observing or thinking about one another, or even by living with one another, however great their concord or even friendship….The honor of two [human beings] is disclosed and will be apparent to both when they meet each other in the knowledge that they are both claimed…for and by the service [the witness] which God has laid upon them.” In this regard, my eyes strain to see the beachheads of such prayer and service that seem so insignificant in relation to the death and carnage all around, beachheads that, nevertheless, help us imagine what it might look like to obey Christ’s command: the Seeds of Peace in Maine where Palestinian and Israeli children spend the summer knowing one another inside out; Corrymeela in Northern Ireland where Protestant and Catholic youth and adults have retreated for decades only to return to the front chastened and changed by one another’s humanity; work camps comprised of black and white, rich and poor, northerner and southerner rebuilding burned churches or water-wrecked communities or blighted city blocks; the House of Hope on the West Bank of Palestine where Christian, Muslim and Jewish grade-schoolers learn the things that make for peace. Again says Barth of the honor disclosed as two human beings meet each other in the knowledge that they are both claimed and so given honor by God that cannot be taken away, “It will be very small indeed. It will be only a very modest extolling of [God’s] glory, perhaps in the pious ejaculation of a prayer, perhaps in the simple reaching out of a hand to the neighbor, perhaps only in a small exercise of humility, sobriety or courage….” In these things, I hold no illusion about the behavior of nations, nations and kings being the judgment of God upon our choice to trust kings more than God. But I do believe the one who spoke that day to a crowd on the mountain speaks also and still to you and to me. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, Jesus says, so that you may be children of God. Not exclusively, not over and against those who do not hear God’s address, not for the sake of our own private salvation. Rather the biblical claim made absurd by the claim of power politics is that in obeying Christ’s command we may show forth the nature of the Holy One who makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. It is a small thing. Small and yet, in God’s mercy, perhaps it may be said of those who love in this way, “But they started it…” Thanks be to God. Amen. |