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Following Jesus in nonviolent struggle for justice and peace, we love our neighbors and enemies as God loves us all, becoming a peace church to share in God’s work to save the world.

Jesus and World Religions: The Primacy of Embrace

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JESUS, ANTHROPOLOGY AND WORLD RELIGIONS
Some Good News

by John K. Stoner

3rd of 7.

3. The Primacy of Embrace

   But it will be asked, Why should we love our enemies when justice seems to demand something else? With this question we acknowledge the strongest reason which is given by those who justify homicide in some cases--specifically, who justify war.

   Having named the pursuit of justice as a strong reason (which will be dealt with in detail in this chapter) I will now name, in order to dispense with, some of the hidden, subtle, covert and unspoken weak and perverse reasons why the church has gotten sucked into justifying war. Let’s be clear that the devil as a liar uses these to great extent and advantage, masquerading these phony motivations under a stolen banner of pursuing justice, and even peace.

   First, greed is a great covert justifier of war. We want the oil that is under their soil; how did it get there? How can they refuse it to us? One people/nation wants to control the resources of another. An empire like the USA wants to control the resources of the world. It’s called our “national interest,” and our “way of life” which are euphemisms for our national greed, and our claim to vastly more than our share of the world’s resources.

   Second, profit. Closely related to greed, but focused in the greed of the military industrial corporations, profit is what makes perpetual war attractive to the rich and power-hungry. In the United States today it is impossible to overstate the corporate greed which drives war on and on. As long as the taxpayers will pony up hundreds of billions of dollars, the corporations will gladly receive and spend it. It is corporate welfare with a vengeance.

   Third, tribalism, nationalism, ideology, idolatry. Here I’ve pulled together just four words describing one big package of public opinion which justifies and motivates war. The slogans of this deceiving ideology include “united we stand,” “support the troops,” “these colors don’t run,” “9/11 Never Forget,” and similar mind-numbing utterances produced by and perpetuating group-think. The main visible symbol of this ideology is the flag. The public rituals of this false religion (idolatry of nation) include parades, pledging allegiance to the flag, military funerals, and school children collecting cookies and packages for people trained and commissioned to kill other people. (A Greek philosopher once said, “The first rule of good government is to call everything by its right name.”)

   None of the above causes of war have anything to do with justice or peace, but they are routinely camouflaged in empty rhetoric of concern for justice.

   Now, to the question “Why should we love our enemies when justice seems to require something else?”

   Here I am will borrow heavily from a paper by Miroslav Volf, professor of theology at Yale Divinity School, which appears as a chapter titled “Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Justice” in STRICKEN BY GOD? edited by Brad Jersak and Michael Hardin. After noting that “not only have Christians committed atrocities and other lesser forms of violence but they have also drawn on religious beliefs to justify them,” Volf states his thesis thus: “The cure against religiously induced or legitimized violence is not less religion, but, in a carefully qualified sense, more religion.”

   I will seek to integrate the somewhat theoretical discussion of forgiveness, reconciliation and justice which Volf gives with my perceptions of those behaviors and words of Jesus which seemed to make people with whom he interacted feel welcomed and embraced. These same behaviors and words,remarkably enough, seem to cause people today who spend time reading and absorbing the life and teachings of Jesus also to feel welcomed and embraced, forgiven and reconciled. For some reason many people sense a moral resonance with Jesus. I will note how the life and teaching of Jesus concerning how to deal with the other, and especially the radically other called enemy, impacts our own selves, our own sense of who we are and who we could become, in such a way that we tend to feel more loved and more whole, more internally integrated and embraced by life and others.

   Volf begins: “I will first discard two wrongheaded ways to relate forgiveness, reconciliation and justice, and then argue for an alternative.” In a discussion first of what he calls cheap reconciliation, he notes that
“It is almost universally recognized by theologians and church leaders today that the prophetic denunciation of injustice has a prominent place in the Christian faith.” He goes on, “but it is precisely here that watchfulness is needed. For the imperative of justice severed from the overarching framework of grace within which it is properly situated and from the obligation to non-violence, underlies much of the Christian faith’s misuse for religiously legitimizing violence.”

   In the story in Mark 3 of Jesus confronting the unjust use of power by the Pharisees, we briefly noted that Jesus’ emotional reaction to the Pharisees included both anger and compassion. And what are we seeing in that compassion? Surely an “overarching framework of grace!” Jesus is feeling “the hardness of their hearts”--he is aware of something in his enemies which comes partly from their own choices and intention but also partly from beyond themselves--that is what is meant by “hardness of heart.” The scriptural notion of this very human phenomenon is that it is caused by forces of evil which play upon the individual from beyond themselves, as well as from within themselves. This is a recognition which each of us has made within our own hearts. To have Jesus recognize it is to feel understood by Jesus, and in some sense embraced by him.

   Volf goes on to say that because forgiveness “is conceptually tied to justice as desert, it always entails foregoing a rightful claim against someone who has in some way harmed or offended us.” Since the forgoing of such a claim makes forgiveness apparently unjust, the question remains: What is the precise relation between justice on the one hand and forgiveness and reconciliation on the other? Cheap reconciliation is not the answer.

   But neither, says Volf, is “first justice, then reconciliation.” An insistence on this sequence is a common way to try to solve the problem. On the surface that seems great, but in fact it doesn’t work, because it can’t work. And the reason it can’t work is because the demands of justice are always greater than any reconciliation which a postponed forgiveness can achieve. In other words, the effort, or efforts, to meet the demands of justice will always delay forgiveness and reconciliation just a little longer, and that little longer will stretch out into forever unless something better than a sequence of justice first, then reconciliation, is found. In Volf’s words, “No peace is possible within the overarching framework of strict justice for the simple reason that no strict justice is possible.”

   The better way which Volf finds, in Jesus, he calls “the primacy of embrace.” What is this? It is the welcoming of the other before the full demands of a justice legally conceived have been met. And what we see in the gospel is that this is what Jesus, in his own life and teaching, actually did. Jesus embraced people before he demanded their ethical reform or their moral perfection. Few things are more obvious from even a cursory reading of the gospels.   And we don’t know how good that feels, or how important that is, until we reflect honestly on our own case! Reflection even briefly on our own case brings us up short and quick against the fact our own personal maturation or moral growth, to whatever small or great extent it has happened, has depended decisively on experiences of being embraced before we were reformed.

   This begins for every one of us, except in the most tragic and unfortunate cases, in the experience of being embraced in spite of our imperfection by our loving parents. The primacy of embrace goes by many other names in what parents practice, like giving a second (and twenty second) chance, loving the unlovable, holding on through thick and thin, never giving up, or tough love but it all comes down and adds up to what Volf, with charming felicity, calls “the primacy of embrace.”

   In his discussion of this, Volf adds a word, and phrases it “the primacy of the will to embrace.” He asserts that the character of God is unconditional and indiscriminate love, and that therefore “the will to embrace the other is the most fundamental obligation of Christians.” He does not dwell on how the character of God translates into the obligation of Christians, so let us ask how that happens. I see it happening in the life and teachings of Jesus, who, we say, reveals God in human flesh.

   Throughout his life, Jesus showed unconditional and indiscriminate love to people. It is this reality about Jesus which makes him a winsome figure still today: People who spend time reading the record of Jesus life and relating to people who claim Jesus as their special ancestor and model, find themselves attracted to the way Jesus responded to people. When Jesus stands with a man oppressed by misused scribal religious authority, a woman condemned by men for adultery, a child stricken by debilitating illness, a hungry crowd seeking food, or a wayward son returning home we somehow feel him standing with us. None of these subjects of Jesus’ special attention are people of exceptional virtue as far as we can tell. We know ourselves not to be persons of exceptional virtue. But we are capable of responding to undeserved love and unconditional embrace. And so we respond, to Jesus. But so we are responding also to God, according to Jesus, who claimed to know something about God and to represent God faithfully.

   But the God step is a second step. The Jesus step is first, and according to the best records we have, Jesus identified himself more consistently and insistently as the son of man than as the son of God. In other words, he claimed to be showing us something about what is truly human as much as showing us something about God. He actually ran the connections this way.   He said, as he sent out his disciples: “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me” (Mark 9).    You do the math. You, me, God, all connected, all one.   Maybe this is the real trinity! How does it feel to be part of it?

   The point is, a fulfilled human being, a human being ready to “be all you can be” is a human who gives primacy to the will to embrace. Like a parent with a child, a mature human being relates to all people with a second chance, loving the unlovable, holding on through thick and thin, never giving up, and tough love mentality. Maybe this is why Jesus, introducing new language for God, called God Abba--father. God is the one who loves like a father loves--like parents love (the ancient problem of patriarchy forgiven for now).

   For humans it must be as it is for God, says Jesus in the words of his disciple Miroslav Volf: “the economy of underserved grace has primacy over the economy of just desert.”

Comments

This is good stuff, John. The "be all you can be" line reminded me of a church service a week ago, where the sermon was on Romans 12, and the verses which tell us to love our enemies. Specifically: "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them" and "repay no one evil for evil...live peaceably with all" and "never avenge yourselves...overcome evil with good..." But what was striking was that that this reading and the subsequent sermon was given shortly after a young man (a son of the church) was brought in front of the sanctuary and introduced as a soldier in training in Carolina, who was learning to "operate a $26M assault vehicle." (this brought oohs and aahhs from the congregation!) It was striking in that nowhere in Romans 12 are the words to "assault your enemy", which is exactly what we were paying exorbitant $$ to have our young men do (with the resulting exorbitant cost of lives). Ignoring for now the waste of money that could be used for those who need it, let's look at the theme of the sermon, which was "Who's team are you on?" It was obviuos by the applause and support (not just for this young man's well-being, but for his vocation and what he represented) that the messages conflicted. The sermon was for God's team. The support for the soldier was for the U.S. team. Why aren't our churches and our congregations disturbed by this? Is it right to save life or to kill? I pray that we can challenge as Jesus challenged the "authorities" when given these opportunuties.

Pat Brady

Posted by: Pat Brady

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