Bringing Jesus to a Gunfight

Bringing Jesus to a Gunfight--November 4, 2016

"For [Christ] must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death." [1 Corinthians 15:25-26]

While there are a handful exceptions in pop culture, TV, and movies, the conventional wisdom seems to agree that you should not bring a knife to a gun fight.

In case that lovely little pearl of wisdom isn't already hanging on your living room wall as a plaque you got from Cracker Barrel or embroidered on the throw pillows on your sofa, the gist of the expression is that one should not be underprepared or underequipped in any situation, especially one in which there is conflict.  And if everybody else at the OK Corral has brought revolvers, you will feel awfully vulnerable if you have only got a switchblade on you. Thus the expression, "Don't bring a knife to a gunfight."  You could file that proverb as a variation on the theme of "Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire."

But in all honesty, God believes that kind of thinking just doesn't go deep enough.  Bringing a gun to a gunfight may be a fine strategy if the worst enemy you have to face is the desperado pointing his six-shooter at you from behind the saloon doors.  But the New Testament says that Jesus is not aiming for just another gunslinger--Jesus has his targets set on death itself.  And you cannot shoot at death, nor, for that matter, cut it with a Bowie knife.  You must go deeper still and undo the power, the fear, the grip that death has on us.

And the Christian faith is, if you think about it, the amazing claim that God won the universe's great victory, not by bringing a bigger caliber gun to a showdown with Pontius Pilate or wily old King Herod, or even the self-satisfied Pharisees.  Jesus wins God's great victory without having the bigger gun in the gunfight, and without even having so much as a pocket knife.  Jesus wins the victory against death by dying--by being swallowed up by death himself and then breaking its power from the inside out.

That is a totally different--and more radical--kind of victory.  It is, as the apostle says elsewhere, not a battle against flesh and blood, but against the powers (remember them?) that are bigger than any one person or mind.  That means Jesus' kind of victory--and the kind that we, his followers, are called to be about--wins by transforming enemies into reconciled and beloved sisters and brothers.  Jesus doesn't destroy enemies by killing them--that is, frankly, too sloppy and ineffective for Jesus.   Jesus "destroys" enemies by dying for them so that they are not longer enemies but forgiven children.  In other words, if you bring Jesus to a gunfight, he sees the bigger picture--it's not the guys in black hats who are the enemy; it is the death and fear and hate that have them ensnared.  Killing the "bad guys", from Jesus' perspective, is not only cowardly, but insufficient and just plain shortsighted. It's like smashing the shards up more because you didn't have the patience to put the pieces of the vase back together. It's like thinking you've cured yourself of smallpox by scraping the blisters and pock marks off your skin while leaving the virus to course through your veins.   The real enemy is death.  The real enemy is the way sin distorts and infects and sickens our hearts.  You don't defeat that enemy with a knife or a gun or a bomb or a drone--you deal with it by breaking the power of death from the inside out, pouring yourself out in self-giving love.  Love is the only scalpel that goes deep enough to excise the cancer.

We need that reminder in a world and in a culture that believes that the right way to deal with an enemy is simply to select the right weapon to take to the fight, that you fight fire with fire, you fight angry yelling and mud-slinging with more angry yelling and mud-slinging, and you stop a bad guy with a gun by getting an even bigger gun.  But Jesus has promised us a victory that is not so meager.  Jesus has promised us a share in his victory that is won by getting at the real enemy--death itself--by breaking death open, rather than playing by death's rules.

Don't ever forget, even though we do still live in a world where evil has to be restrained, that Jesus' kind of victory is what creation really needs.  Don't ever forget, even though there needs to be restraint against gun-wielding drug dealers, armed terrorists, and cruel tyrants who gas their own people, that the real triumph does not happen by shooting the other side, but in the prayer, "Father, forgive them...."  And don't ever get comfortable with the inadequate means the world uses to try to fix things.  We are, after all, followers of Jesus, who only brought nails to the showdown on that Friday afternoon... and, it must be said, they turned out to be sufficient for the fight.

Lord Jesus, give us confidence in your ultimate victory over death, and your victory over the hate and fear in each human heart, so that we will no longer seek to destroy one another, but to let your love and justice victoriously transform enemies into reconciled sisters and brothers.