13th Sunday in Ordinary Time ( C-cycle )
July 1, 2007
The old saying, “with friends like these you don’t need enemies” has often applied to Christ. They say that when the barbarian chieftain Clovis was receiving pre-baptismal instruction and heard about the crucifixion, he exclaimed, “If I and my soldiers had been there, we would have rescued Him.” I don’t know if he ever understood that he needed to be saved, not Jesus. Down through history, people have done terrible things in the name of Our Lord. Think of the Crusades, those bloody adventures to free the Holy Land under the motto “God wills it!” Think of the inquisition and the execution of heretics by both Catholics and Protestants. Think of Christian anti-Semitism and persecution of the Jews, which gave Hitler a pretext to justify the Holocaust. Think of the killing in Northern Ireland by people identifying themselves as Protestants and Catholics.
In the Gospel, two hotheads among the apostles, James and John want to call down fire from heaven on a hostile town. And Jesus rebuked them. Violence is against everything He stands for. Oh, he overturned some tables in the Temple courtyard, but he never injured another human being. When he was struck, He never struck back. I don’t think we make the connection between Jesus and non-violence in the same way we make it between, say, Ghandi and non-violence. And that’s unfortunate because non-violence is at the very center of His teaching. Only in clear cases of self-defense should Christians resort to violence and then only with the greatest regret, knowing that turning the other cheek is the better course. Returning violence for violence seldom leads to peace. In fact, many of the current conflicts in our world, such as between Arabs and Jews; and Christians and Islamists exist because of resentment over past violence.
When I say Mass for our school kids, I warn them about the kind of violence called bullying. Bullying can be physical or intellectual or social. In any of its forms, it’s the stronger abusing the weaker. I tell them a story from the movie “Mississippi Burning.” In that picture about FBI men working to integrate the South in the 1960s, Gene Hackman plays an FBI man whose background some would describe as poor, white trash. Asked how he came to overcome his racist culture, he says: “When I was a kid, my father farmed a little piece of ground. Next to us was a black man with his little piece of ground. Only one day, he came home with a mule. We didn’t have a mule. It wasn’t long before they found that mule dead. I knew my father did it, and I asked him why, and he said, “If I can’t look down on him, who can I look down on.” Do we need someone to look down on? The bully doesn’t realize his own neediness, his own weakness. What he really needs is to look up---to Christ.
