Breaking the Old Pattern--May 1, 2023

Breaking the Old Pattern--May 1, 2023

"It is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. If you endure when you are beaten for doing wrong, what credit is that? But if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God’s approval. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps." [1 Peter 2:19-21]

I do believe that this is Christianity at it most subversive and most powerful.  When the Christian community actually follows the way of Jesus and breaks the cycle of returning evil for evil and violence for violence, it shakes the foundations of a world built on revenge and fear.  And let's make no mistake about it--that is the world in which we live, and that kind of shaking is precisely what the followers of Jesus are meant to do in it.

At first, though, it might seem just the opposite.  It might sound like this biblical voice is just saying to give in to evil and let it run roughshod all over you, and everybody else, without any comeuppance.  And that sounds like a recipe for leaving all the world's injustice and rottenness in place, unchanged and unquestioned.  It could sound like First Peter is just counseling early Christians to grin and bear it when the world wrongs them, and just to hope for a better shake in the afterlife.  I know it can sound like that because for an awful lot of the last twenty centuries, a large number of Respectable Religious Voices have used passages like this for that very purpose--to quiet the victims of injustice into sheepish acquiescence.  And I am convinced that is decidedly NOT what First Peter is really up to.  I believe he is actually showing us how radically the way of Jesus shakes up the status quo, rather than reinforcing it.

And that's because the usual pattern in the world for dealing with someone else's trespass is to lash back out and to get "even," only for that response to provoke an even stronger counter-response [in the name of getting even for getting even], and before long, we have spiraled out of control with each move and countermove attempting to one-up the opponent.  You hit me, so I punch you harder.  You push back with even greater force, and so I respond by hurting someone you love as well, or destroying something valuable to you.  And then you feel you have no choice but to cause more pain back to me, not only for the sake of revenge, but to make up for losing "face" and because you don't want to look "weak."  And so the cycle of violence feeds back on itself like the old ouroboros--the mythical serpent that devours its own tail.  That never works out well, and it leaves us only hurting and seeking to hurt others.  Like the old line attributed to Gandhi puts it, "An eye for an eye only leaves the whole world blind."  But as long as we are convinced we have to look "tough" to get ahead in this world, we'll keep that terrible cycle going.  As long as we believe the lie that being brave means hitting back on the enemy's terms, we will keep reinforcing the terrible old patterns that have plagued us since our first ancestors figured out how to weaponize sticks and stones.

So this is where the witness of New Testament voices like First Peter turns all of that upside down.  First Peter reminds us that our calling is, first and foremost, to love like Jesus, not to make ourselves look "tough" or to get "even" and call it seeking justice [they are not the same].  And First Peter knows, too, that refusing to answer evil with more evil is not the same as saying the evil was OK, or giving it a pass.  It is rather about refusing to accept the terms of engagement that evil sets, and refusing to play by its rules.  As Walter Wink once put it, "Evil can be opposed without being mirrored.  Oppressors can be resisted without being emulated.  Enemies can be neutralized without being destroyed."  Real change for the better is only possible when we refuse to perpetuate the old cycles that keep us hating and hurting each other, and that means at some point, someone has to break those cycles.  At some point, in other words, someone has to determine in advance, "I will not hold the wrongs done to me against those who have done them."  Someone has to be willing to take seriously that God's kind of love does not base present action on the past actions of others.  Jesus' kind of love is not hemmed in by what someone's past actions have earned them--rather it opens up a new future by not keeping score.  Justice can be attained without sinking into revenge, and reparation can happen without it curdling into "getting even."

And the need for this kind of radical breaking of the old endlessly viciously circles is immense.  We are watching every day on the news the tragic consequences of a way of life built on "They threaten me, so I've got to get them" thinking.  Especially when the feeling of being "threatened" is based on fear that we have weaponized, I can give myself permission to see anyone around me as a threat I have a "right" to stop before they hurt me.  We are witnessing what happens when people believe they have a right, not merely to get even, but to get "pre-venge"--to stop them first before they have the chance to harm me, even if the one I see as a "threat" is really a harmless stranger.  We have been barraged with story after story recently of strangers making innocent mistakes--ringing the doorbell and the wrong address, pulling into a driveway at the wrong house, and the like--and having someone shoot and kill them, because they perceived the person at their door or driveway as a threat... and they were convinced they were justified in answering that threat with more violence.  And it always dresses itself in the garb and pretext of being justified--"I was afraid, and so I shot him because I thought he was a threat to me."  "They were on my property, so I had to counter that offense with retaliation."  All of it is the same tired cycle of revenge and fear that we've been stuck in from our earliest ancestors.

But it doesn't have to be this way.  And the voice in First Peter has been telling us all along that we do not have to give into that impulse to get revenge.  We do not have to get sucked into the vortex that says, "You have to get them... even if you strike first, it's allowed because you can't let them win."  We do not have to become so misguided by fear and anger that we shoot first and never get around to asking questions.  We do not have to keep repeating the cycles of violence and vengeance--and it can start now, with the choice not to keep record of wrongs, and not to demand revenge.  In other words, it starts with taking Jesus' kind of love seriously.

Look, I don't know what dangers or unforeseen situations may be in store for us in this new day.  And I will not pretend that this world is not still full of violence, terror, and evil.  What I can say is that First Peter--who is neither naive nor ignore about that evil--still calls us to give our allegiance to the way of Jesus over and above our impulse to get even or answer the world's evil with more evil.  We do not have to do that any longer.  The way of Jesus calls us to break that old pattern with something new--the Reign of God that is grounded in graceful love.

That's the revolution the world needs.  And in Jesus and his followers, it has already begun, in all its disarming power.

Lord Jesus, give us your kind of courageous love that refuses either to answer evil with evil or to preemptively lash out at those we might have seen as threats.