Us and Them

In his wonderful book, Simply Christian, N.T. Wright suggests that one of the “echoes of a voice” that perhaps speaks to the existence of God is the echo we hear and call justice. It just doesn’t seem to feel as though things are “right” and that sense of “not right” is the echo of the voice of justice. In one of the more convicting parts of that chapter, Wright notes how easy it is to adopt and kind of “us and them” approach to justice. For me, that can easily come out as seeing “us” as more just and “them” as less just, if just at all. Wright brings the lens of our observation in to extraordinarily clear focus when he notes that the line between justice and injustice runs right through our own hearts.

Ouch! Not sure I wanted to be reminded of that, especially at a point in time when the cries “justice has been done” inundate the news. That’s not to suggest that bin Laden and the average American are equally unjust – just wanting to be careful not to fail to look in the proverbial mirror, even if dimly.

The first time I realized how sensitive of an issue this could be was in the first course I taught as a college professor. It was an ethics class and the topic that week was war, violence, and the Christian point of view about such subjects. In was the fall of 1976 and merely saying the word Viet Nam poked at nerves that were still prickly and very sensitive. Of course one of the students asked about those who dodged the draft and went to Canada. I felt a little sensitive to the question for a number of reasons; among them was the fact that as a college student studying for ministry I had an exemption from the draft, despite having a draft lottery number in the teens. All I said in answer that question was that knowing what we knew at that point in time, I thought we should be very careful in not being too critical of those who practiced a kind of civil disobedience our Constitution allows.

I thought that was a pretty reasonable response to the question, especially in view of the fact that the class was made up of college seniors at a school focused on preparing men and women for ministry. Most of the males in that class had the same selective service exemption I did. How naïve. There was one student in the class who had served in Viet Nam, and he took serious exception to my statement. While I still thought (and still think) my statement was reasonable, I easily understood his objection. What I didn’t understand (and still don’t) is how many of the males in the class were offended. Apparently the obviously failed “us and them” of the crisis in Southeast Asia was now transferred to those who chose to go to Canada instead of enrolling in a college preparing men for ministry.

So, here I go again with some more naivety. While I understand the sense of “justice has been done” with the death of the one who may be the Hitler of our age, I’m not too sure that it is quite that simple. Some very bright and committed Christians would argue, using Scripture to support their conclusions, that capital punishment is a just response to awful crimes and that there is such a thing as a just war. Other equally bright and committed Christians would argue just as passionately that neither capital punishment nor any war is consistent with the kind of life Jesus calls us to live. I can hardly blog an answer to that debate!

However, it wouldn’t hurt a single one of us to think a little about the back story that produced bin Laden and those of his ilk of humanity. That doesn’t mean that back story gives excuse for bad behavior, but it can at least help us understand it better.

Not trying to pretend to be an historian, it nevertheless seems to me that the resettlement of Israel with Jewish people from Europe and Central Asia was, at least to some degree, an effort to provide a little ointment for otherwise seared consciences of bad Western European leaders. There is no debate that the treatment of Jews at the hand and leadership of Adolf Hitler will forever be a blight on human nature. But do we really think that the abysmal treatment of Palestinians at the hands of western leaders and Jewish settlers is the way to solve that injustice? Two wrongs never add up to one right.

As a southern boy who grew up on a farm and in a culture where “land” was in the category of nearly sacred, I can’t imagine what my reaction – and even more so of those with whom I grew up and who still live on that sacred land – would be should there be some international settlement effort to re-populate the lands my family has owned for centuries with the native Americans who once thought they were theirs. That might make relatively peaceful Huxford a terrorist.

Western political support for a mostly secular Jewish state at the expense of Palestinians in general and Palestinian Christians in particular has not helped with the “us and them” issues of geopolitical conflicts. In fact, it has exasperated the problem to the point that it is relatively easy for the bin Ladens of the world to manipulate frustration into abject hatred of the west. Does that make it acceptable that bin Laden was the mastermind behind the murder or 3000+ people who did nothing personally to him or Palestinians? Of course not. No sane person would suggest that it does.

But it might mean that the desire of some to celebrate the death of an evil man should be tempered by the realization that it hasn’t solved the problem that made it possible for bin Laden to become the depraved individual he was. The false hope that the politicians of the world offer us with bin Laden’s death at best fit in the category of wishful thinking, unless those promises of hope are accompanied by a commitment to solve the chronic problems of the Middle East. That means, in real terms, dealing with the problem of Jewish settlements in land Palestinians once lived upon, among other rather serious challenges.

Who among us isn’t happy that bin Laden can no longer mastermind mass murder? But I hope an equal number of us are unhappy that the geo-political issues of the last half of the twentieth century and in this first decade of the twenty-first century pretty much assured bin Laden of never seeing what Jesus is really like. Those same policies have made it extraordinarily difficult to be a Christian in the land in which our faith was first preached – without regard to gender, geography, or groups. God is no respecter of persons! But our politics have made it appear that He is.

N.T. Wright is exactly on target – the line is not an “us and them” line – it runs right through our own hearts.