What Jesus Commands in a Violent Week
Dear Friends,
When I picked my son up from baseball practice yesterday afternoon, he'd already seen the video of Charlie Kirk being shot in the neck and the blood gushing out of his body. It's horrific.
It is necessary to say the obvious things we all agree on: that such violence is abhorrent, that the assassination marks a dark and dangerous step in our country's descent politically, that we mourn for his wife and young children, that we pray for his soul.
But even in saying those shared truths, we are led towards topics that are more divisive: the place of guns in our society, the availability of mental health resources, the stifling of dissent on college campuses.
Yesterday also brought news of children shot (again) at a school in Colorado — which really would be the biggest story of any normal day. Oh, and there were Russian drones being shot down in Poland, a NATO ally. This in the same week that Israel attacked Hamas... in Qatar, that the video of the young Ukrainian woman being stabbed in Charlotte last month went viral, that the National Guard is deployed in urban areas, that ICE focuses enforcement on new cities, and that we're moving military assets closer to an increasingly violent standoff with Venezuela over drug trafficking. (One naturally worries that any one of these might be like the Defenestration(s) of Prague or the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand and send us spinning into chaos.)
Beneath the shared horror and repudiation of the violence, here too lie a lot of contentious issues: guns (again); the appropriateness of intervention in Ukraine and the projection of American power abroad generally; Gaza, Palestine, and the moral and political disaster that it has all become; and the constantly simmering issues of race and violence in our society.
My point is not that these things are hopeless, but that we actually do not agree underneath. We cannot yell, beat, arrest, or shoot our way to agreement and harmony. Living with disagreement, living in peace, is always a matter of the heart. This is why Jesus commands us to love our enemies (the other option being kill them, which seems to be our current strategy). We have to want good for one another. I worry we've lost that desire, but the Lord gives it to us as a command, not an aspiration.
I read this yesterday from a classmate at seminary. We didn't have a lot in common at school, and we weren't close, but I respected him deeply (and all the more so after this):
"May Charlie Kirk rest in God's peace. Being shot in the neck isn't a way for anyone to go. I know what his politics were. But I also know what my politics and piety are: I hold abolitionist aspirations, pacifist convictions, and have committed my life to preaching the... gospel of Jesus, who came preaching peace. If the peace of Christ doesn't include Kirk, it is unworthy of attention, let alone proclamation."
If the peace of Christ we preach doesn't include our enemies, it is unworthy of our attention, let alone proclamation.
In that peace,
Fr. Andrew
