Yesterday morning, I decided to read the Sermon on the Mount. The invitation from Jesus to be a part of the Kingdom Among Us, as Dallas Willard would say. The Kingdom of love and justice, somehow married, somehow here and now but also not yet.
I came upon Christ's words: "Do to others what you would have them do to you." A prophecy and a warning, as much as a command.
A prophecy. When we enact violence upon an entire people, or upon a person, we almost always get that violence back. There is nothing surprising about this. The violence we're seeing this weekend in Israel/Palestine is preceded by a similar kind of dispossession and fear and inhumanity, nearly 80 years ago, and ongoing still today. 750,000 Palestinian refugees. Almost 500 towns destroyed. Entire communities massacred.
Now, 16 years of siege later, they are sheep prepped for a slaughter at any moment. For that is what life in Gaza is—slaughter—as land taken and held, gates locked and loaded laugh in their faces, trapping them in an open-air prison where the very air becomes fire—the source of bombs from which there is no escape or shelter. Suffocation, suffering, and despair. Violence. Long before this weekend. Long silent before the world.
Do to others what you would have them to do you. A prophecy.
Violence of the decades now returned in a weekend. Possibly 700 dead in Israel. Dozens taken hostage. Families running for their lives. Children abducted. Adults, innocent or not, now judged by the bullet.
Do to others what you would have them do to you.
Already, violence being returned and promised in return. A war of retaliation. An entire residential tower destroyed in Gaza. Hundreds dead. Tens of thousands displaced.
We know these sides aren’t equal. That injustice and oppression is the source, and it demands resistance. But the resistance of violence is as much self-destruction as it is liberation. It is sowing the seeds for what is to come.
Do to others what you would have them do to you. As much a warning as it is a command. We reap what we sow.
Bodies lining streets now on two sides of a wall.
But the command declares a deeper truth. That love is the only path to liberation. Love which is a commitment to my enemy's dignity and my own. Creative resistance to any form of violence that defaces that dignity without mirroring its means.
This love is the only path to justice, lasting justice, and freedom from fear. It does not make us immune to suffering or grief. Sometimes, it will only increase it. But it does liberate us from the prison of our own inhumanity. It does make us more fully human.
Do to others what you would have them do to you. A warning and a command.
A warning. Because each of us is complicit in injustice. We fund it. We participate in economies that create the wretched of the earth. We passively accept policies that bomb civilians and trap others under the rubble. We are not innocent.
By the world's logic, we deserve to be beaten, killed, abducted and destroyed if justice is to be accomplished by any means. If indiscriminate violence is a valid form of resistance to oppression. If we are to reap what we sow. None of us are free of this truth, even as many of us suffer under various boots of oppression and empire. No one is only oppressor or oppressed.
There must be another way. There is another way. Violence is a song that will only ever echo until it is silenced by the infinite expanse of love. Creative resistance to injustice, anchored by the sight of the image of God, seen in all—no matter how distorted. Only justice in love can bring victory. Only justice in love can bring peace.
Do to others what you would have them do to you. Be awakened to the futility of violence. Be awakened to the possibility of love.
-🌓
Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash
So we’ll said, thank you.