All week we’ve seen people cheering and high-fiving and celebrating the fact a U.S. sailor shot a 60-ish unarmed man to death. Which is not to defend who that man was or what he has done, but to point out America should, ideally, not be in the revenge business. Christians, most assuredly, should not be in the revenge business. True followers of Christ, therefore, have likely spent much of the week awash in mixed emotions: relief at an at least symbolic national closure. But, to truly know Christ, you have to be conflicted about the lesson, reinforced yet again, of conflict resolution by an act of violence. Would Jesus cheer the death of Osama bin Laden?
I don’t believe Jesus Christ would celebrate the murder
of Osama bin Laden. I don’t believe Jesus was all that much
concerned about justice. Justice was not His mission. Crime and
punishment were not the measure of His ministry on earth. Jesus
was wholly unconcerned about the Roman state or the actions of
the government. He taught us to obey the law, to pay our taxes,
to submit to those in authority over us. But He demonstrated
absolutely no nationalism, no flag-waving, fist-pumping pride.
It is likely that, while all of that was going on, Jesus would
more likely have been in a quiet corner somewhere, engaging some
stranger about the Kingdom of Heaven.
The president, a confessed born-again Christian, has made
repeated statements about how justice had been done. This is a
tough lesson to reconcile with our children, as we routinely
teach them justice occurs in courtrooms. This is difficult for
pastors to reconcile with congregants as the bible teaches us
that justice is God’s business, not ours. I am quite sure
pastors, black and white, across the nation struggled with the
issue of the bin Laden killing and how we, as followers of
Christ, should respond. My experience here in Ourtown leads me
to suspect, if it was mentioned at all, black pastors here
likely used it for a cheer line and did not bother grappling
with the morality of the event or using it as a teaching
opportunity. I sincerely hope and pray your pastor did and that
I’m just being obnoxious, but more then a decade of experience
here has aptly demonstrated most of our leaders here are simply
not thoughtful beyond whatever Noah’s Ark homily they throw
together on a napkin ten minutes before entering the pulpit.
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The qualities of God include a tough one: mercy. Mercy is, for us, terribly difficult because mercy requires a denial of self. With mercy, we have to mash on the brakes just as our bloodlust is at its zenith. Just as people who have hurt us, who have wounded us, done us wrong, cheated us, lied on us, are about to get their just deserts, God requires us to forego the ecstasy and release of |
the death blow. Jesus asks us to show mercy that
mercy might be shown to us [Matthew 5:7]. I know of almost no
Church Folk who have ever, in my lifetime, shown mercy to me or
anyone else. Not saying it doesn’t happen, I’m saying I myself
have not personally experienced this. Mercy is one of those
qualities of Jesus Christ that are best demonstrated in private.
Church Folk tend to embody few if any of the qualities of Christ
or the fruit of the Spirit, and, to my experience, most of these
folk simply live for revenge. They sacrifice for it. Expend
massive amounts of time, energy and resources to achieve it.
Will sit their fat butts on committees just to spite someone
else. Revenge. It’s so sweet. It’s like a drug. The
Schadenfreude—reveling in the suffering of others.
Jesus, of course, was not in the revenge business. Now, I have
to believe revenge was a tempting solution even to Him, Christ’s
humanity making itself known at inconvenient intervals. But He
never gave into it. Evil ultimately destroys itself. This isn’t
to suggest we should have left bin Laden be. My own flawed
humanity wrestles with the conclusion that the president’s
decision to kill and not capture was, regrettably, the right
one. A living bin Laden, imprisoned perhaps here in Colorado’s
Ultra Max, would represent a rallying call for extremists and
present a wide variety of global economic, political and
security consequences, many of which could not possibly be
accurately predicted or anticipated. In that light, I conclude
killing bin Laden solves more problems than it creates. But it
is ultimately a failure of the American esthete, a difficult
choice to explain to our children, a violation of the divine
example of Jesus Christ, Whom the right-wing extremists claim to
follow even as they routinely and without hesitation crucify Him
afresh by violating virtually everything He taught us.
CONTINUED
