How We Change the World--August 8, 2022

How We Change the World--August 8, 2022

"In fact, to have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded?" [1 Corinthians 6:7]

The first time I heard these words and realized that they came from the Bible, it blew my mind.  More than twenty years later, they are still just as radical, and they turn me upside down all over again, like Lucy yanking the football away from Charlie Brown every time.

When last we left the apostle Paul and his readers in Corinth, he was scolding the folks in the church who had skipped out on trying to settle disputes with one another through mediation from other wise believers.  Rather than taking each other to a Roman court [and after all, why would they expect justice from the same system that executed Jesus?], Paul had urged them to work things out among themselves, encouraging them to trust that they had the resources and wisdom to resolve disputes on their own, "in-house," as it were.

But now, Paul does something even more radical, something that my freshman-in-college self had never been told when I first heard these words read in a college dorm Bible study, even after having grown up in the church from birth.  Paul asks a subversive question to the ones who are so eager to have themselves declared "victorious" over somebody else in court.  And his question is simply this:  "Why not rather be wronged?"

To a mindset that is bent on defeating the other side rather than arriving at a resolution everyone can live with, Paul's question is nonsense.  To a culture that teaches its citizens to fear being called "weak" or being labeled a "loser," the apostle sounds absurd.  And to people living in an empire built on domination and conquest, to ask, "Why not rather be wronged?" flew in the face of everything Rome said about how to be a "winner" in life.  But to people who see God's triumph in the One crucified by that empire, Paul's subversive question is precisely what we need.

Paul has been talking from the very beginning of this letter about strange logic of God's reign, which looks upside-down compared to the rest of the world's ways, but turns out to be actually right-side-up.  And in God's Reign, what looks like foolishness turns out to be a more profound wisdom; what looks like weakness turns out to be divine strength.  And in place of the empire's creed, "You've gotta get them before they get you," there is Paul's provocative question--"What if you didn't accept those terms, and instead decided that you would rather accept being wronged than to risk wronging someone else?"  In other words, what if we were people who valued others more than we valued "being right"? And what if we chose not to press everybody around us for every penny in punitive damages that we could, but rather decided we would be willing to absorb loss from time to time as acts of forgiveness?

In a culture like ours, twenty centuries after Paul's day, we are still just as litigious and often even more petty than our ancestors in the faith in Corinth.  Plenty of folks seem to have a default setting of, "I'll sue you!" and they are willing to lob that threat at anybody else the first chance they get.  Plenty of folks seem to be more interested in looking "tough" than in being like Christ Jesus, and plenty of folks seem to think the only way to fix hurts in our relationships is for someone to be punished, rather than forgiven and offered a new path.  But that's what Paul is pushing us to imagine.  He's not saying that victims of abuse should stay in situations of abuse, or that we should give up on pursuing justice in the world.  But he is daring us to see a life beyond mere vindictiveness, and he is daring us to make that life a reality now by refusing to accept the dog-eat-dog mentality of the culture in which we live.

I know that is difficult for us, especially when it runs against the grain of the retaliatory attitude that passes for conventional wisdom these days. But this is exactly what our moment in history needs:  people who will embody the counter-cultural way of Jesus by breaking the cycles of meanness.  When so many loud voices shout that Christians need to dominate others and seize the levers of power around us so that "they" [whomever "they" is imagined to be] don't persecute or wrong us, Paul calls us to be people who put the forgiveness we have first received from God at the core of our actions toward others.  This is how we change the world--not by seeking vindictive victories over others, but by breaking the old cycles of hitting back every time we feel slighted or wronged.  That's what it looks like to live our belief that Jesus has already won the victory over evil in the cross and resurrection.

So even if Paul's question shakes us to the core and makes us re-examine an awful lot of what we have been told about "winning" in life, it is worth letting him put that question to us... and then seeing where it leads us.

"Why not rather be wronged?" might just turn out to be another way of asking, "Why not allow Christ-likeness to be more important in our lives than being seen as 'right'?"

Lord Jesus, give us the courage today to break the cycles of pettiness and vindictiveness that keep us trying to one-up each other, and instead to respond with your kind of love to a world full of mean.