Logan, Sunday Afternoon
I look at what's happened on college campuses this spring, and I'm struck by the intensity of it, the cry for conversion within every teach-in, within every encampment, within every moment of every action. It's hopeful, I thnk, that so many--including thousands of Jews in city streets, thousands of Palestinians confronting annihilation with courage, and so many allies--are resisting the myth of redemptive violence and rising up to confront the logic of it, the practice of it, and our institutional complicity in it.
Walter Wink would probably caution us all that angry protest ought to be disciplined by persevering love; and that might be reason to review and assess our many movements, and our ways of solidarity and resistance. That said, these students (and their faculty supporters) have shaken us all, and roused many from sleep and passivity. You just can't watch what's happening this morning in Rafah, and take into account what's happened over the last month at Columbia and Emory and Yale and Berkeley and CUNY, without being confronted with a choice. Am I going to stand up against genocide and systemic annihiliation? Or am I going back to bed? "The myth of redemptive violence," Walter wrote, "is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known." (In The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium). And Jesus says, in the garden, "Watch and pray. Stay awake. My heart is heavy." The fundamental challenge for disciples now, in the sad and cruel and sometime hidden talons of empire, is to watch, pray and stay and awake.
And again, Walter Wink pierces shadow with light. Discipleship means a paritcular kind of watchfulness: "Jesus did not advocate nonviolence merely as a technique for outwitting the enemy, but as a just means of opposing the enemy in such a way as to hold open the possibility of the enemy's becoming just as well. Both sides must win. We are summoned to pray for our enemies' transformation, and to respond to ill-treatment with a love that not only is godly but also, I am convinced, can only be found in God.” The book's called,Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way. And it's that "third way" to which I myself am called, and by which I am convicted. To stand with the persecuted. To practice aggressive nonviolence as resistance to the violence they suffer. To hold open the possiblity of the enemy's becoming just as well.
I've been challenged, of late, to consider my own commitment to resistance and nonviolence. Is it simply and only another version of partisan politics? Is discipleship reduced to a knee-jerk response to issues of the day? And these are questions that always, always require prayer and honest reflection. Always. My hope is that our organizing now is responsive and faithful: responsive to the cry of dear siblings even now fleeing violence and burying their children, and faithful to the call of Jesus, his insistence on discipleship and embodied compassion and sacrificial love. “The issue is not, 'What must I do in order to secure my salvation?'," Walter Wink wrote, "but rather, 'What does God require of me in response to the needs of others?' It is not, 'How can I be virtuous?' but 'How can I participate in the struggle of the oppressed for a more just world?' Otherwise our nonviolence is premised on self-justifying attempts to establish our own purity in the eyes of God, others, and ourselves, and that is nothing less than a satanic temptation to die with clean hands and a dirty heart.”
God, make me an instrument of Your peace, only that I might respond in love and faith to the real, human and present needs of others. Amen and Ashe!
