The church’s gradual and at times nearly complete break with the pattern of her Lord and of the first Christians on the question of war is yet another public witness to the unconscious practical atheism of many whose mantra is “in God we trust.”
Either we believe finally that love is stronger than death, and the way of the cross stronger than the way of the sword, or we do not.
Our Lord trusted this way to his death.
Our Lord trusted this way to his death.
My meditation from last week—prior to the escalation with Iran—asks whether at some point before the end of history the whole church will return to Jesus and the first Christians and put our money where our Creed is.
Either we trust the cross & resurrection as revealing the way to become human as God is human in the flesh of Jesus Christ—as the cruciform path by which God saves the world—or we believe in the will to power, in horses and chariots, like the majority of Homo sapiens in history.
Does the end of history involve a global church that recovers from amnesia and remembers to trust the way of the cross in all its weakness, to trust that co-suffering love is stronger than any means of power this world offers?
Does a church arise that trusts God will defend and rescue and vindicate and resurrect them after their passion, and so they, as the only body Christ now has in the world, lay down their collective life in this world as the body of Christ in imitation of our Lord?
It is after all the *kind* of life one human lives among us as the only living God dies for the life of the world that ought to instruct how *we* live and how *we* die—a life manifested in the dispositions, thoughts, words, and actions of Jesus Christ.
The first Christians were fully immersed in his way of dying to become human. They chose the way of the cross.
It’s a mystery of existence that the first Christians did this for 300 years—without insurgencies, without a Spartacus, without a Mark Anthony—unlike any movement of humanity before or after, and this sign & wonder is certainly a great witness to the authenticity of the gospel.
The way of self-preservation (as families or communities or cities or nations) has not always been the way of Christians, and as citizens of a world power we may not know how to make this path our own.
Millions have perished while trusting in the resurrection and in their crucified God. To suggest that they should have taken a more realistic or utilitarian stance, that they should have taken up arms, is a kind of blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.
These were looking to a transfigured world, had a different country in their hearts.
They trusted that God was on the side of humanity, on the side of his creation, no longer a God with or for one geography or one people or one culture but a God with and for everyone, everywhere
They trusted that God was on the side of humanity, on the side of his creation, no longer a God with or for one geography or one people or one culture but a God with and for everyone, everywhere
