Forgiving Our Enemies: The Fort Hood Shootings

Throughout the Gospels, there are many sayings and teachings ascribed to Jesus whose authenticity Biblical scholars have been questioning for a long time. Take, for example, his alleged statement in Matthew that he had not come to change anything about the Law (5:18). It is difficult to reconcile this statement with what all of the Gospels together present about his ministry as a whole. By means of it, Jesus changed the understanding of righteousness under the Law quite a lot.

About the authenticity of another teaching attributed to him, however, there can be no reasonable doubt. It has to do with the necessity of being forgiving. Both Matthew and Luke introduce the theme in their respective versions of the Lord’s Prayer, coupling a petition to be forgiven of our own wrongdoing with a commitment to forgive others who wrong us. (Matthew 6:12; Luke 11:4.) Matthew muddies the water somewhat by adding the warning that unless we forgive others, God will not forgive us (vs.14), which flies in the face of the gospel message of God’s unconditional grace, mercy, and forgiveness. But this tangent need not distract us from the central point: if we are ever to love people the way God intends for us to love them, we are going to have to let go a lot of our sense of being owed by them for the offenses and the harm they do us both accidentally and deliberately.

It is not difficult to forgive someone who wrongs us without meaning to do so. A quick counting to ten before reacting is usually enough to activate the right thought that it is the intent that finally counts. But, if Matthew can be relied upon at another point, in The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus did not leave things at that. At 5:44, he is quoted as saying, “Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors…” Here, the stakes are raised exponentially for the God-humanity relationship. We are to forgive not only those who wrong us inadvertently, but also those who wrong us maliciously. Even Major Nidal Hasan?

This vastly more demanding summons from God is not difficult to understand or accept. It is, however, vastly more difficult to carry out in practice. Most conscientious Christians with whom I have discussed it over the years have the same response to it: a question, not of whether we should do it, but how? The story of Hasan’s despicable actions at Fort Hood can only intensify the sense of the impossibility of fulfilling Jesus’ command; even with God, not all things may be possible after all. But then again…

One of the best answers I know to the question of how to love the unloveable revolves around the word “compassion”: feeling-with, by striving for a level of understanding of another’s mean-spiritedness that shrinks at least somewhat the degree of genuine differences between them and us. This need not lead to the obscene speculation that most anyone might, under the right circumstances, do what Major Hasan did. Rather, it leads to the sobering observation that those who do good are often influenced by factors beyond their control as much as those who do evil.
In Hasan’s case, the brainwashing inflicted by a mindless branch of Islam exposed a vulnerability to uncontrollable rage that a properly managed psychiatric training program should have caught and treated very early in Hasan’s residency years at Walter Reed. Did the flagrant irresponsibility of Hasan’s supervisors contribute directly to Hasan’s evil acts? Probably not. Does it, however, narrow the gap between the respective characters of the supervisors and Hasan? Probably more than just a little.

As far as it goes, urging the development of compassion in the service of becoming more forgiving is sound advice. The obstacle it must overcome, though, is daunting: a sense of confusion bordering on anger toward God for continuing to permit genuine evil in the first place. Why, many ask, does God not doing something to interdict everywhere the emergence of a character so depraved as Nidal Hasan’s? The Christian answer to this question is at once profoundly confounding and uplifting. The confounding part is: no one knows. The uplifting part is an invitation to consider another kind of question altogether: in the midst of the world’s genuine evils, for what goods may we be genuinely thankful? If forgiveness is a means to becoming more loving, and compassion is a means to becoming more forgiving, then thanksgiving is surely a means to becoming more compassionate. No truly thoughtful person can rest content never putting questions to God. But neither can he or she become whole without giving thanks to God, too.
　
　

Another 3:16 To Ponder

It still catches my eye when football fans evangelize from the stands by holding up placards that read JOHN 3:16! This was my favorite of all the Bible verses I had to memorize growing up. It contained just about everything that my nowhere near Christian mind could then manage to comprehend of the Christian message. At least, the first half of the verse did. The idea that God came to earth out of love captured my imagination so completely that I never paid much attention to its accompanying reminder of what awaits those who do not believe that he did. By way of reminder, they will all "perish." It made no sense to me then, and it makes no sense to me now, to conjoin a threat of everlasting punishment with a proclamation about a God of Love. So, my John 3:16 has had to remain 3:16a, and not 3:16b.

There is another chapter three, verse sixteen passage in the Bible that I also had to learn once upon a time, this one from Second Timothy. It was and still is the conversation-stopper of all conversation-stoppers about the attitude that Christians are supposed to take toward the Bible. In the much favored rendering of the King James Bible, 2 Timothy 3:16 reads this way: "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness…" It takes the next verse to complete the sentence, but this is the part that has created so much trouble in the church. To the generations following Timothy’s, right down to our own, it clearly implies that the Bible, alone among all the world's other books, was written by God. All of the Bible --- every last book, chapter, and verse in it from Genesis to Revelation, and not just our favorite parts of it --- was given by God to make us perfect in his sight. The reference to inspired scripture in 2 Timothy 3:16, then, is to that book on our coffee tables and in our church pews as the one and only book that anyone is ever to look to for answers about anything truly important in life.

But whoever wrote and first received 2 Timothy (both are subjects of considerable debate among New Testament scholars today) could not possibly have meant by the KJV’s "All scripture" what preachers and Sunday School teachers kept insisting they meant, the Old and New Testaments as a whole. In the first place, many of the books included in what would only much later become the latter --- at least three of the four Gospels, the letters attributed to Peter and John, the books of Hebrews and Revelation --- were not even written yet. And secondly, the Jewish community had not yet made up its mind about its own Bible; thus, there was no Christian Old Testament around either. What, then, does "All" (better: "every") scripture mean in 2 Timothy? Almost certainly, the reference is to the "sacred writings" known to the letter's recipients from childhood (3:15), that is, most or all of the books that by the end of the century would become the Jewish canon, and only those books.

It is hard to believe, however, that the author of 2 Timothy would have rested the early church's ability to discern truth from error solely on Jewish writings. He must have had Christian materials available to him as well: surely at least some of the genuine letters of Paul, perhaps a collection or two of Jesus' sayings, and most probably a coherent narrative --- or narratives --- of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, to name just a few. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, he chose not to group these materials under his category of "inspired scripture." Later on, they would come to be so designated, but not here. These considerations make 2 Timothy 3:16 irritatingly complicated. It is still unclear just where for him the church's most "profitable" writings were to be found among those that were beginning to circulate under distinctively Christian auspices.

The fact of the matter is that the early church was far less locked in than we are to the notion of a single, normative body of scriptures within which and within which alone God reveals Godself. And so, dropping the Bible on a podium or desk with a loud and dramatic flourish, as if it were a weapon designed to strike fear in the hearts of all doubters and dissenters, exhibits only a seriously deformed faith. Turning its pages slowly, deliberatively, and searchingly is better. Particularly if in the process we remain open to God’s speaking to us in unanticipated ways through unexpected passages.