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“Lead me, O Lord, in your righteousness because of my enemies; make your way straight before me. For there is no truth in their mouths; their hearts are destruction; their throats are open graves; they flatter with their tongues. Make them bear their guilt, O God; let them fall by their own counsels; because of their many transgressions cast them out, for they have rebelled against you. –– Psalm 5:8-10
Every once in a while it is important to understand our experience in the larger context of history. When personal or communal trauma takes place, our experience of it is moderated by the awareness that we are neither the first nor the last to walk that dark journey. In distress we are vulnerable to the assumption that we are singularly burdened with such tribulation on history’s great timeline. Following the shock and searing national grief that engulfed us when the towers fell on 9/11, it was both instructive and healing for us heighten our awareness of the reality that in any given moment there are communities and nations encountering traumas that are no less shocking, world rattling, deadly, immoral, unjust, and painful than the trauma of 9/11 has been for us. That has been true since the beginning and will be true till the end. That is not cynicism, nor is it fatalism. It is the fundamental human predicament. The lengths to which we will go in the pursuit of our wants and whims take us far into the territory of cruelty. Greed, pride, and lust for power compel us to rely on dehumanizing anyone who stands in the way of our agendas. From the mocking of a peer to the terrorist’s plot, one has to view the target as unworthy of concern. Blaise Pascal was quoted saying, “I hold it to be a fact, that if all persons knew what each said of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.” The Psalmist was certainly familiar with the harsh end of that reality. “Their hearts are destruction; their throats are open graves…”
When observing the news of late, the word that keeps popping into my mind is cruelty. In the refusal to weigh the human cost of one’s agenda, whether instituting policy or sitting at a keyboard spewing hate and parroting rumors, there seems little thought given to wounds rendered. Do folks wake in the morning preoccupied with the question of who they may be able to hurt today?
John Calvin said, “If we can no more bear fruit of ourselves than a vine can bud when rooted up and deprived of moisture, there is no longer any room to ask what the aptitude of our nature is for good.” And so it is that Paul wrestles with the question –– “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! There is an antidote to human iniquity. In Ephesians, we read –– “We were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ —by grace you have been saved.” Through that same Spirit of mercy in Christ, we are given the strength to resist those impulses of malicious intent, and the will to swim against the tide of evil in the pursuit of the good. The power of Christ is revealed in the refusal to mimic the malevolent and the work to treat all people as God’s own.
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