We interrupt our regularly scheduled lectionary readings, today, and offer, instead, the two passages I have just read for you.
Why?
This morning’s scriptural switcheroo is occasioned by a rare occurrence that happened last week – namely, that two passages from the New Testament – Matthew 25 and Romans 13 were invoked by important public figures, and have been discussed on the world stage.
You probably heard about this.
One of the public figures was Pope Leo. The other was American Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson.
Well…
I was feeling a little left out.
As it so happens, I also spend a lot of time thinking about the New Testament. It seemed only fair that I should get to join in the fun.
You know…
The Pope.
Mike Johnson
and…
Pastor Mark.
So…
Here’s the background.
Apparently, back in November when ICE was perpetrating its ugly festival of flagrant machismo in Chicago, a delegation of clergy, including a Catholic bishop, requested access to the Broadview Federal Detention Center outside Chicago, in order to offer holy Communion to the inmates who were being warehoused there. Not surprisingly, the clergy were denied access to the facility.
A reporter, who caught up with Pope Leo outside his residence on the outskirts of Rome, asked the Pontiff’s opinion about what happened at Broadview.
Speaking calmly and without the aid of notes or a prompter, the Pope replied:
“The spiritual rights of the people who have been detained should also be considered… and I would certainly invite the authorities to allow pastoral workers to attend to the needs of those people…
The role of the church, he went on to say, is to preach the gospel and just a couple of days ago we heard Matthew’s Gospel chapter 25 that says… Jesus says very clearly at the end of the world, we’re going to be asked, you know, how did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and welcome him or not? And I think that there’s a deep reflection that needs to be made in terms of what’s happening.
The interchange just described happened last November… but the thread was picked up last Tuesday, when, in a press gaggle outside the House of Representatives, a reporter named Pablo Manríquez confronted Mike Johnson:
“Pope Leo he said, has cited Matthew 25:35 to critique Donald Trump ’s mass deportation agenda. How would you respond to Pope Leo in scripture?”
Manriquez knew what he was doing. He asked Johnson to respond in scripture. Manriquez had a gut feeling that Johnson, a devout Southern Baptist, would take the bait.
And he was right
“So you want me to give you a theological dissertation? Johnson said, warming to the challenge. All right.
“People cite passages out of the Old Testament, and say, ‘Well, you’re supposed to take care of the sojourner and the neighbor and treat them as yourself, welcome them in.’ Yes, but that is an admonition to individuals, not to civil authorities. The civil authorities are given authority under Scripture to maintain order.
It appears, from this off-the-cuff-theology, that Johnson has found a convenient way to have his cake and eat it too. He agrees that Jesus commanded us to “love our neighbor as ourselves,”
but he says
that is an admonition to individuals, not to civil authorities.
Is Johnson saying that the government doesn’t have to follow Christ’s commandment to “love thy neighbor?”
And why this exemption? He seems to be saying that the government is exempt because it is their job to “maintain order”?
Is that what Johnson is saying?
How do you suppose he figures that?
Johnson continued…
“Romans 13 says that the civil authorities are God’s agents of wrath to bring punishment upon the wrongdoer. And it says, ‘If you do right, you have no fear of the civil authorities, but those civil authorities are necessary.’
Ahhh… I think I get it.
So, do I understand correctly, Mike, that Romans 13 essentially gives the government the right to ignore Christ’s commandment to “Love your neighbor as yourself”?
We should love our neighbor as ourselves, as individuals, Mike went on to say but as a civil authority, the government has to maintain the law, and that is biblical.”
**
Huh….
I wonder…
I wonder if, in my ruminations over the words of Jesus, I have ever taken the liberty to do a little cosmetic surgery and add a little something to his words that would suit my purposes.
Blessed are the Marks, for they shall inherit the earth…
In his defense, in this case at least, when Johnson doctors Christ’s meaning, at least he uses another scripture passage. But note that Johnson has to go all the way out of the gospels and into the Epistles to find a moment when, in Romans 13, the Apostle Paul encourages his followers in Rome to obey and keep their heads down, lest they end up being eaten by lions in the colosseum.
Johnson does not quote Jesus himself. He can’t. Its absurd to even imagine the messiah cozying up to the Jewish religious hierarchy let alone the occupying forces of the the Roman Empire. That was not his thing. Jesus was not interested in that kind of power.
Let’s imagine, just to play out this absurdity a little, what the Jesus in the Gospel according to Mike, might say:
“Hear me, O Pharisees, Roman Legions, and Client Kings of Israel: you may have heard that I once said it was important to love your neighbor as yourself… well, I only meant that for individuals, not for you. You civil authorities don’t have to pay that any mind, because, after all, it would be so inconvenient for you to be hindered by such moral considerations, when you are so busy making sure we are all behaving ourselves. Go ahead and crucify us to your heart’s delight. Be my guest. In fact, if you don’t God you’ll be violating the natural order established by God. God has given you power, and since you have it, you have carte blanche to use it in any way you want in order to keep us in line… Hey, I know it’s not easy for you great and powerful people to keep our society nice and tidy, so look, just do what you have to do! When you are throwing power around, love is basically irrelevant anyway, right?”
Doesn’t sound like the Jesus I know.
Jesus was many things, but he wasn’t spineless sycophant.
Jesus didn’t tell the powerful what they wanted to hear. If he did, he would have been promptly forgotten. He is remembered for his moral courage.
He spoke his truth… with no buts … and because he had so much integrity, regardless of the power that threatened him… he became the model for all the honest, and courageous prophetic voices throughout the ages.
What you fail to understand, is that, when it comes to moral integrity, there can be no distinction between the individual and the civil authorities.
When such a distinction exists, the civil authorities inevitably become civil oppressors.
Our individual hearts and souls are the factories that produce ethical reasoning. Are we to be ruled by civil authorities who wield power in a manner that disdains the ethical imperatives that we live by? Mike wants our love for each other to somehow exist in a separate ethical world from the ethical (or, perhaps, unethical) world that rulers live in. These rulers, I suppose, must be at liberty to treat us with disdain – in fact they feel that it is a functional necessity of their divinely-sanctioned task to not-love us.
Go ahead and love each other, but we – the civil authorities – we will be over here not-loving you, so that we can do a better job making sure you don’t do bad things.
Is that the theology that we are up against?
Sure sounds like it.
Mike Johnson’s theology is very convenient for those who are in power. Sadly, there is no lack, in human history, of such nefarious usurpations of Holy Writ. The government that rationalizes away their moral guideposts by making God their counterfeit ally, will have no compunction keeping true to their intention to flaunt the scruples they so nonchalantly cast aside and do whatever the hell they please.
But I have said – last Sunday, in fact – that I would not dwell on such sour tasting ruminations… that I would fill in those rabbit holes by taking equal time to emphasize the signs of hope that are out there.
In that effort, I would like to stand Mike Johnson’s theory on its head. He proposes that civil authority is exempt from the morals that guide individuals. Well… since he has the temerity to proclaim himself the very incarnation of “civil authority”, I propose to deliver to him the wise ruminations of individuals… individuals… who, in their incendiary prophetic wisdom, can instruct him on how love of power inevitably must capitulate to God’s one true love – love of neighbor.
Consider the words of Henry David Thoreau, who, in his essay entitled On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, wrote:
If injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth,— certainly the machine will wear out.
From your lips to God’s ear, Henry! I hope you are right, but I fear you are a bit naive. You, who did not live to see the Holocaust or Hiroshima, do not know the stakes, that we know, of letting it go to let the machine naturally wear out by its own friction.
If he continues the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil;
By springs and pulleys, ropes and cranks, Thoreau would mean the feckless posse of spineless bootlickers who make up Trump’s cabinet; the heads of agencies who were chosen not for their expertise, but for their mindless loyalty. The ICE agents in the streets of Minneapolis.
If civil authority has these mechanisms in place, perhaps, Thoreau says, it’s time to consider getting up and doing something about it… but if…
but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
This.
This, is the moral power of the individual.
My individual responsibility is to see that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
Got it, Mike?!
Listen to Dr. King who, imprisoned in a jail cell in Birmingham Alabama, wrote:
One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”
Alright, Martin. But how do you tell the difference between just and unjust laws?
Any law that uplifts human personality he writes is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.
Are you listening Mike?
Do you so easily dispense with the sacred requirement, instilled when God first breathed souls into our bodies, that all our neighbors, all our near, far, black, brown, yellow,red, gay, trans, queer, fat, skinny, blind, wretched, unhoused, addicted, poor, disabled, suffering neighbors deserve our love? Do you really propose to form your government around the idea that it is exempt from such love?
I cannot imagine a more despicable, and dangerous idea.
Jesus healed a blind man. That blind man was then seen by the people walking around like any other sighted person. Some said it was the man who had been blind. Others said no, its not him, it just looks like him.
And the man himself said.
“No, I am the Man.”
“I am the man.”
There will always be people in power who will say that you don’t deserve love. There will always be people in power who will say: “You are not really the man.”
But you are.
You can hold up a sign and say:
“I am a man!” or
“I am a woman!”
Why?
Because God loves you and God gave you life.
Don’t I deserve your love, Mike?
Or am I not a man?
If you say I am not.
I say that I am
because…
God says I am.
Amen.