"Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you," turn the other cheek, says Jesus, and it sounds a bit like a pacifist manifesto, but isn't. Our Lord is not issuing a divine command to the Joint Chiefs of Staff forbidding the use of lethal force in a just war or self-defense. He is ordering us to love our enemies, which means willing what's good for them and acting accordingly.
This doesn't mean we've got to like or agree with them, much less feel romantically inclined towards them, but we must will and act in their best interest as opposed to lashing out in wrathful hate-filled vengeance upon them when they attempt to destroy us. So tempting, don't do it. Our Lord sums up the spirit of the thing:
Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven..."
Love, mercy, forgiveness. Divine values which conform our hearts to the heart of Christ, instead of the satanic anti-values, vices, of hatred, vengeance and wrath. Embrace the former. That in mind, a churchman came up to me after Mass and said:
"Father LSP, I've thought a lot about those verses and know them by heart, but here's the thing. A few years back someone stole all the tools out of the back of my truck in Itasca," bear in mind, readers, that this is a contractor who needs those tools for his livelihood. He continued, "Well, we got his license plate on a game cam and reported it to the police, who did nothing."
"Huh," I replied, "That's entirely useless," and he agreed, "Right, so what we did was trace that plate to an address, a meth lab, loaded up with AR15s and shotguns and paid those boys a night time visit." I pondered the scene:
Midnight, meth lab, pock-marked malfeasants cooking away under fluorescents with a shop full of stolen tools as our guys turn up, weapons hot, "What then?" My friend looked me in the eye and said, "They gave us our tools back. Was I wrong, Father?" I looked him right back in the eye and replied, "No, you were not. Good thing the place didn't blow up, eh?"
If you had told me, back in the early '90s, that I'd be a rural mission priest in North Central Texas some 30 years later, I'd have laughed. You know what? I'm not complaining.
Here Endeth The Lesson,
LSP
1 comment:
Jesus' instructions were never (from what I have parsed) meant to turn oneself into a doormat. More like, don't let the little insults get to you.
And from what I've parsed from the New Testament, there's no restriction on retribution and whacking one's attackers.
As to 'is property more valuable than a life?' whine that the leftists use all the time, a set of tools to a man on the bottom economic rung is as or more valuable to that man than all the toys and gewgaws of a rich man's tsotski collection. Steal a poor or barely-scraping-by person's car can cause said person to slip rapidly to homelessness and despair. Take away the possessions like cooking gear, food, clothing, bedding of someone who has to work to keep $100-200 in the bank monthly is to effectively kill that person.
So, yes, property is more valuable than the life of a scummy criminal.
Back in the day, places like Texas made stealing a man's horse and horse furniture a capital crime. As in, someone's going to be either swinging in the breeze or will be suffering from heavy metal poisoning.
There's a reason that 'Don't Steal' is one of the 10 Commandments. And there's no commandment against killing, only murder. So self defense killing and killing in defense of the public good (execution) are A-Okay to God.
Kind of the religious version of "Don't want none? Don't start none!"
That's my interpretation. I may be wrong (shocking, no?) but that's how I feel.
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