I believe God dwells with those who make love their aim. And there is no sentimentality in this love; it is not endlessly pliable, always yielding. Prophets from Amos and Isaiah to Gandhi to King have shown how frequently compassion demands confrontation. Love without criticism is a kind of betrayal. Lying is done with silence as well as words. And always the love that is of God lies on the far side of justice, never on the near side.
(William Sloan Coffin, Credo, p. 21)
After four years of a national nightmare, at noon on January 20, 2021, most of the United States (as well as much of the world) can breathe a collective sigh of relief. We can look forward to our eyes, ears, hearts, and very souls no longer being assaulted on a daily, if not hourly, basis by a constant barrage of lies. We can find solace and hope in concerted and compassionate efforts to finally address a pandemic which has taken almost 400,000 lives. We can rejoice that reason and empathy will replace insanity and narcissism. And we can witness a president who actually takes his job and oath of office seriously rather than one who spends his time wearing out his little fingers and thumbs on Twitter, watching “fake news,” and plotting revenge and ways to enrich himself and sell his brand. I suggest most of us (at least, those who still possess any concern for the common good) will begin the long journey back to some sense of normalcy and decency. We cannot be faulted if we take some time to pause, rejoice, and catch our breath before we try to pick up the pieces of our fragile democracy and return to the difficult task of “building a more perfect union.”
As we experience this transition, we are already finding that Republicans who followed and worshipped the idol they created are trying to remount and reload. Some continue the baseless and sinister lies regarding the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Others try to shift the blame for the assault on our Capital to Antifa while at the same time condemning the rightwing extremists who were incited by Trump and his toadies to insurrection and sedition. (They assume that their base will not recognize the contradiction inherent is proposing two diametrically opposed explanations for that tragedy.) Meanwhile, other politicians, who for four years did all they could to divide this country, are now calling for us to unite and heal. The hypocrisy of the Republican party is matched only by the blind and cultic allegiance of Trump’s base whom these politicians fear. They have sold their political souls to the devil and now find themselves shackled to a beast they can no longer control or even question.
The Jesus who said, “Love your enemies” also said, “Be gentle as a dove and wise as a serpent.”
Within churches and among ministers there is a call to forgive, unite, and heal. We are challenged to love those who have caused so much suffering, oppression, and destruction in our society and in our world. I agree that as followers of Jesus, love must always be our aim. And there is no room for hate and revenge in such love. But neither is there a place for silence, sentimentality, and naivete. The Jesus who said, “Love your enemies” also said, “Be gentle as a dove and wise as a serpent.” The Jesus who talked about the lilies of the field and the birds of the air also spoke truth to power and confronted the lies and evil of his time. The Jesus who preached a message of compassion also said he came to divide people as they made their choices regarding their own allegiance to what he called “the Kingdom of God and its justice.” No one who says we ought to love everybody without unwrapping what such radical love means would ever end up on a cross (which was used by the Romans for only two groups: slaves and rebels). Jesus was executed as a rebel. Rebels do not confine their speech and actions to notions of sentimental and ineffectual love.
The kind of radical love Jesus demanded of his followers is best defined and fleshed out as compassion. Compassion requires us to put ourselves in the place of others and ask what they need for healing, liberation, and joy. Once we experience that empathy and solidarity, we must do what we can to address their suffering and oppression. Without such action, there is no compassion. Compassion is empathy and action. Empathy informs the action, but action brings about the results required by love. And when that compassion is applied to society as a whole, it demands justice. As Cornell West reminds us, justice is what love looks like in the public arena. And justice always requires confrontation. Injustice is made possible by allegiance to the status quo. Injustice exists because majorities are silent. The keepers of this status quo are quite happy for those of conscience and decency to remain silent or speak about a generalized type of love which never confronts, transforms, or redeems (“redeem” in the Bible means to “deliver/free/liberate.”) As Coffin wisely observed, “Love without criticism is a kind of betrayal.” It is a betrayal of the truth, a betrayal of those who suffer from injustice and oppression, and a betrayal of those enslaved by their own hatred, fears, greed, and ignorance.
… commitment to justice requires patience, long-suffering, and a willingness to postpone one’s own experience of that justice for the sake of future generations.
We just observed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr Day in our nation. MLK was all about love, but the love he preached and lived was the hard love of God. He knew that such love required evil and injustice be exposed and confronted. His ultimate goal was the Beloved Community which, in its completion, would encompass and heal all the divisions which plague this world. But he also knew that dedication to truth and justice was the only way to reach that final goal. “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This statement, often quoted but not always in its entirety, recognizes that the arc of justice bends slowly (“long”) and, at best, “toward” justice. In other words, commitment to justice requires patience, long-suffering, and a willingness to postpone one’s own experience of that justice for the sake of future generations. MLK used nonviolent resistance motivated by such sacrificial love to bring what justice he could to this nation. But in that nonviolent resistance, he stubbornly clung to truth and an incessant demand for justice. He knew that civil right legislation, which would end segregation by force if necessary, probably could not change the hearts of whites harboring racial hatred. Such complete transformation could come only through love. However, he realized that such legislation, enforced by the long arm of the law, could keep whites from killing Black men, women, and children. Like Gandhi, MLK knew well the dynamics of love, justice, and reconciliation. And like Gandhi, he was aware that the path to this Beloved Community would be costly and prolonged. But he had deep, abiding faith that God’s truth is and forever will be marching on. The only question for him (and for us?) was whether he would join that march.
Within our world, it can never be a choice between love and justice. Without love, justice can become self-righteous vengeance with no concern for the healing and reconciliation of the whole. But without justice, love becomes sentimental and worthless babble, silence, and complicity. Yes, we must love our enemies, but we must love them enough to confront them with truth. And God’s version of justice based on truth always starts with the liberation of “the least of these” from whatever oppression they suffer. Today, “the least of these” also includes the blind and deaf followers of Donald Trump. They too need love, but that love must begin with a confrontation with truth. There is no salvation without God’s grace and love. But there also is no salvation without repentance. And repentance always begins with an embrace of the truth about oneself. As the Bible says, “The truth will set you free” (John 8:32). We must love the white supremacists, racists, misogynists, homophobes, xenophobes, neo-Nazis, KKK members, and the hoodwinked and gullible of our society enough to tell them the truth. We must speak the truth in love—but we must speak the truth if there is any hope for our nation and ultimately for ourselves. Reconciliation may be our goal, but truth must lead the way if we are to reach that Promised Land. Archbishop Tutu taught us that with his Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As Coffin said, “And always the love that is of God lies on the far side of justice, never on the near side.”
[I acknowledge that many of those in the Trump cult are controlled by emotions of fear and hatred. They have been hoodwinked into embracing an alternative vision of reality (although I suspect many of these people already possessed some version of that sick and perverted vision). Reason is not what brought them to their fanatical allegiance, and reason will not bring most of them to abandon their folly. There may be hope for these followers who perhaps, in time, may be loved into their repentance and healing. However, there are other followers of Trump as well as members of fanatical rightwing organizations who may be beyond the possibility of repentance and transformation in this world. (What God can do with them in the next dimension may be their only hope). Examples of such people are those who call to mind Nazis who experimented on Jewish children without the use of anesthesia, who tortured homosexuals through unspeakable acts of cruelty, and who fought to their last breath in allegiance to a madman like Adolph Hitler. There are also Klansmen who arbitrarily choose Blacks for beatings, lynchings, and other hideous forms of death. These fanatics through their hatred and intentional blindness may well have rendered themselves immune to the experience and sharing of authentic love. (And frankly, I have no patience with those who do not see a parallel between Nazis and some of those who attempted a coup of our government. Among those insurrectionists were individuals carrying Nazi flags and wearing sweatshirts in praise of the Holocaust!) We need to take whatever legal actions are necessary to stop these perpetrators of evil from hurting innocent people.
As we face those in our families and among our friends who have fallen victim to the insanity of Trumpism and such lunacy as Qanon, any presentation of truth and reason will probably not be effective in the repentance and transformation needed for their healing. Our patient love and compassion for them until their Trump world implodes may constitute the emotional foundation which can lead to eventual recovery. Only then may they be open to truth and reason. However, as a nation we cannot postpone speaking truth, confronting evil, and bringing justice. Such postponement in the name of a (in my opinion) misguided love is not fair to those whose suffering has increased exponentially over the past four years and are still vulnerable to the violence and oppression of rightwing fanatics. Confrontation with evil can also keep those who are open to truth and reason from falling into the clutches of a racist and hate-driven mentality which is poisoning our nation. At times we may have to rely on justice enforced by the might of the government (just as King and others relied on the execution of civil rights legislation in the 1960s and just as Blacks depended upon Federal troops to guarantee the enforcement of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution during Reconstruction). The softer approach of patient love for those closest to us and the harder approach of a love that demands justice and truth in the present moment in our larger society may both find their places as we deal with the greatest threat to our democracy since the Civil War.]
