Sunday Sermon: Retaliation and Christianity's Weakness
38You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye and tooth for tooth.’ 39But I tell you not to resist an evil person. If someone slaps you on your right cheek,turn to him the other also; 40if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. Matthew 5:38-40 (ESV)
A hacker hacked the crowdfunding website used to give money to the Canadian Truckers. The media used the hacker’s information to target and harass the donors. Some lost their jobs. Some had their bank accounts frozen. Some had their businesses threatened.
A strong part of me thinks this will not stop until there is retaliation — until someone starts outing the information of the reporters and the hackers who did this. But, that’s the sin in me. This got me started in a conversation with friends of mine about this and what a Christian response could be.
The bottom line is that from the Old Testament to the New Testament, God is explicitly consistent that vengeance is for the Lord. The Christian cannot engage in worldly retaliation. Take a listen.
I see that you and I were on the same page of the lectionary (Luke 6:27-38). That was the passage I was given for my Bible study yesterday. When I was considering it, the amateur historian in me came up with three things from American history which to me illustrate Christ's point.
The first and second are based on Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, specifically one paragraph:
“With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
Had his vision of post-Civil War America been followed, perhaps we would not even now be dealing with much of the detritus of that conflict. However, Lincoln was assassinated, and the mood changed from forgiveness to revenge. And the result of Reconstruction without Lincoln's vision was.... the Klan, and all which went with it.
The third happened 54 years later. In 1919, the victors of what people hoped would be "The War To End All Wars" assembled in Versailles, France to determine the nature of the peace. President Woodrow Wilson was there, advocating much the same spirit of reconciliation to a defeated Germany Lincoln had advocated toward the Confederacy. Wilson even used Lincoln's words - "Let 'em up easy" - in doing so. He, however, found that Britain, and in particular France were unwilling to follow Christ's advice from Luke, and instead sought the old ways of revenge and retribution. The result was sadly predictable: Germans were angered and looked for some way out. Eventually, the "stab in the back" theory to explain Germany's defeat became accepted by far too many Germans, and various groups sprang up advocating the Germany take action to end "the shame of Versailles". 20 years later, a racist madman advocating just that plunged the world into a war which claimed the lives of some 70 million souls.
We do a really pathetic job at being Christlike, Erick, and I can't help but fear that eventually that will be the cause of our permanent undoing as a species. We still have the right to legitimate self-defense in the face of aggression, but we too often fail to see that perhaps our actions inspired the anger and desire for revenge which leads to the aggression. Christ didn't advocate we become doormats, but He did call upon us to be far more forgiving and understanding that we seem to be capable of being. Seeing everything in the terms of a zero-sum game only leads to zero progress, and the continuation of the attitudes leading to conflict. Yes, evildoers must be brought to account for their actions. What we too often do is to leap to the conclusion that everyone in the evildoer's group is similarly evil. Every American southerner was responsible for slavery, nor was every German living in 1914 responsible for WWI. Jesus was telling us that group rights, group guilt, or any other attempt to treat members of a group as all equally responsible for anything, for good or for ill, reflects the values of man, not those of God.
Perhaps we'll learn these truths someday, and perhaps we won't. I am convinced that the price we'll pay for failing to do so is far higher than we could ever imagine.
I have a thought every time I pray the Lord's Prayer." For give our debts as we forgive our debtors," I really hate what is being done to this country by people who are using scorched earth
policies against the citizens. I know that we are to pray for our President and other folks in our federal and local government. It is really hard to find grace for those who continually use there positions for personal gain with out regard for the people who elect them. I know this is like swallowing poison hoping someone else will die. Who could not know what Joe Biden is. It's been in the open and has been for years. When did elections become a beauty contest or a popularity contest. I have begun to think that Americans are very shallow and dishonest. The Republic can not survive this. Dan