Year: 2019

Love your enemies

One of the three great untruths of our times, according to Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), is “the untruth of us versus them” where life is seen as an endless conflict “between good people and evil people.” This is really “a pathological dualism,” as Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks points out (Not in God’s Name (2015)), which divides our humanity into “the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad” and in which “you are either one or the other.” This kind of conflict narrative is endlessly divisive and gnostic. You begin and end with division, with difference as hatred of the other. The awareness of difference leads to division which in turn leads to the demonization of the other. It is static and dogmatic. All there is is difference. Sadly such polarizations largely determine the tenor and character of our current social and political discourse.

While in evolutionary terms this may be explained away as an aspect of tribalism and of our tendencies to favour those in ‘our group,’ in a deeper sense it betrays all and every sense of our common humanity. It is ridiculously reductive and utterly destructive of our souls and of our life in community for the simple reason that we begin and end with our enmities, with our divisions as hardened into hatreds. In the face of such things, today’s Gospel is profoundly and wonderfully counter-culture and redemptive. It also connects to the rich traditions of wisdom in many of the great religions of the world.

Arjuna, a great warrior prince in the Hindu tradition, stands in the middle of the battlefield between two competing armies. They are all his relatives, sort of like the Maritimes. Why should I fight? he wonders. This is his ethical dilemma. How to transcend the enmities, the animosities, and the divisions that we encounter? It can’t be by denying that they exist because they are there. It has to be by some other way of thinking grounded upon a deeper understanding of our humanity. The Bhagavad Gita, reflecting the teachings of the Upanishads, offers a way of transcending such dilemmas. In that work, Arjuna is taught by Sri Krishna to follow his dharma, the law or duty of your being. A wonderful illustration of the meaning of dharma is found in the story of the Guru and the Scorpion. The scorpion falls into the river and the Guru rescues it from drowning only to be stung by the scorpion who falls again into the river only to be rescued again and again by the Guru who continues to be stung. Those looking on ask the Guru why he keeps rescuing the scorpion who keeps stinging him. He replies: it is the dharma of the scorpion to sting; it is the dharma of the human to save.

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“Nevertheless, at thy word, I will let down the net.”

In the face of the nihilisms of our contemporary culture, this is a welcoming word that signals an openness to God and to his will and way for our humanity. It should and is meant to complement the opening line of the Epistle reading, “be ye all of one mind,” but it doesn’t, at least not now in our situation as a church. We aren’t of one mind on many matters of great importance. We are a church divided, and a community and culture of souls divided. This is, sadly, nothing new. I have offered a brief statement of reflection about the current state of disarray, disaffection, and division with respect to the issue of same-sex marriage. The institutional church remains caught in the controversies of identity in our contemporary culture. We live in a divided church but prayerfully and, I hope, charitably with respect to these divisions and with an openness to the rediscovery of the principles that provide a more complete understanding of our humanity.

Today’s Gospel grounds our lives not on self-assertion but upon God’s word. Ambrose, in his commentary on this passage, indicates that in the figure of Peter especially, we have the figure of the Church. Peter is the rock upon which Christ builds the Church but only “at thy word.” It is a powerful idea and concept. There is the constant struggle to understand what it means to act in accord with God’s Word but, at the very least, it acts as a check upon human presumption. Simon Peter expresses very clearly the nature of the human predicament. “We have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing.” This complements wonderfully Mary’s statement to Jesus at the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee that “they” – we – “have no wine.” The awareness of our limitations, of our mortality, of our insufficiency, of our confusion, is a profound truth about our humanity. In our current distresses, it suggests at the very least uncertainties about ourselves and about the claims of the autonomous self. To put it in another way, what these Gospel stories indicate is that God knows us better than we know ourselves, on the one hand, and that God seeks for us to know what he seeks for us, on the other hand. “We see in a glass darkly,” not least of all about ourselves. “Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known,” as Paul says, known in Christ. Hence the significance of the nature of God’s engagement with our humanity in Jesus Christ. Divine love transforms and perfects our human loves in all our confusions and illusions but only “at thy word.”

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