Breaking the Spiral of Violence--A Sermon

Breaking the Spiral of Violence

John Shuck

First Presbyterian Church

Elizabethton, Tennessee

April 22, 2012

Earth Day

Luke 22:24-27

Then they got into an argument over which of them should be considered the greatest. He said to them, “Among the foreigners, it’s the kings who lord it over everyone, and those in power are addressed as ‘benefactors.’ But not so with you; rather, the greatest among you must behave as a beginner, and the leader as one who serves. Who is the greater, after all: the one reclining at a banquet or the one doing the serving? Isn’t it the one who reclines? But here among you I am the one doing the serving.

As we move through the season of Spring, we are walking the path, or dancing the spiral of the via transformativa, the way of compassion and justice-making. This is the path of naming, unmasking, and engaging The Powers That Be.

The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium is a book by Walter Wink. Walter Wink is an interesting guy. He wrote a book on Jesus and Nonviolence and had it delivered in secret to clergy in South Africa. He snuck into to South Africa illegally and led workshops on non-violence. He thus exerted influence in helping the movement against Apartheid be non-violent and have the basis for that non-violence based in the teachings and life of Jesus.

Walter Wink has not backed away from walking with those who are most oppressed by The Powers That Be. He knows Empire’s cruelty and violence. Yet he firmly holds out hope and participates in a way of living and being that is transformative. He really does believe in non-violence and trusts that the human race will get it. He writes:

“The reign of God means the elimination of every form of violence between individuals and nations. This is a realm and a possibility of which the imprisoned by their trust in violence cannot even conceive.” P. 89

We can, from Wink’s perspective, conceive that the human race could move beyond violence as a program of solving conflicts even at the level of nation-states. He believes that believing that humans will always solve conflicts violently and always have is part of the socialization we have received from the Domination System. For Wink, violence is not innate and inevitable. It is learned. It can be unlearned.

That is why I am spending quite a bit of sermon time with his ideas. I think that radical statement that violence is learned needs a hearing. I am spending valuable sermon time on his book because his ideas have been influential to me and because I think they are important. That doesn’t mean of course that I say, “Yes, yes, yes,” to everything he writes. But I say “Yes” often enough.

When I first read about his analysis of the myth of redemptive violence that I spoke about last week, it changed my way of thinking. I can’t see anything now, whether they be cartoons, movies, advertising, propaganda, orchestrated patriotic spectacles, and so called news reports, without seeing that myth playing itself out before my eyes time and time again. That myth is in short: violence saves. Only by violent means can the good guys beat the bad guys. Our salvation is to identify with the violent--yet good--hero.

His understanding of the Domination System as a translation for the word kosmos in many places in the New Testament helped me make more sense of the Gospels and Paul. It brought the scriptures down to Earth in the struggles that we face everyday with the powers. The Powers are not individual people, for people are interchangeable and expendable within these institutions. The Powers That Be are those personalities, commitments, rules, and forces that lie behind and within institutions.

Wink sees the historical Jesus as enacting a program of non-violent resistance with the emphasis both on non-violent and resistance, not passivity on one hand nor becoming the very evil we deplore on the other. Wink sees this message not just in the historical Jesus but as a thread that weaves itself through the whole witness of scripture.

The myth of redemptive violence is presented to us by the powers as part of our socialization into the Domination System. Whenever a conflict rises, we consistently give in to the argument that is offered as the clincher: the only way to save the world is to stop these bad people with force of arms. It is the only way. The Powers have to do one thing. Repeat the myth and insert the enemy of the day as the bad guy.

The myth is necessary to keep the inequity in place between the wealthy and powerful and those without wealth and power. That inequity is as much within a nation as between nations. As inequities increase within a nation, it becomes by necessity more violent both to people within the nation as well as to those outside of it. Stories of domestic spying and harsh crackdowns on protestors are some examples of this.

One of the ways a violent society keeps the lid on things, is to let out its violence in a ritualized, orderly way by way of scapegoating. French philosopher, Rene Girard, saw this by analyzing myths. Collective violence from the perspective of the persecutor against a particular group served to focus the violence of a society on a scapegoat. Blame the troubles on this person or group of persons and focus ritual, programmatic violence upon them.

Girard in analyzing the New Testament saw that that scapegoating mechanism was turned upside down. The gospels were written from the point of the persecuted. Jesus is the scapegoat. But, his violent death showed that the scapegoating mechanism was wrong. An innocent person was tortured and killed. The powers were wrong to do this. The powers were not keeping order and peace by executing bad guys. Jesus’ death unmasked and exposed The Powers That Be as wrong and needing overthrow.

Jesus’ death did not show that he was the last scapegoat. It showed the end of scapegoating. Throughout Western history, Jesus’s torture and execution has been used successfully to show that scapegoating is wrong.

On the other hand, The Powers That Be have had success in getting us to reinterpret Jesus’ death as some kind of transaction to satisfy a violent God. God kills Jesus instead of killing you and sending you to hell and whatever. That is the interpretation of Empire. When Christianity and Empire are in bed together, that is what you get.

But the original and powerful and liberating interpretation is that Jesus’ violent death exposed the violence of the powers and thus defeated them.

One modern illustration of how this was used was during the civil rights movement. In Nashville students, black and white together, sat illegally at all-white lunch counters. They brought their cameras and the news media. They were treated violently but did not retaliate to violence with violence. They resisted. They were not passive. They didn’t leave. They didn’t acquiesce. They received violence but did not back down. The purpose was to expose the violence inherent in segregation.

To see young students beaten and mistreated by The Powers That Be or the Law, exposed to the rest of the country that the Law was wrong. Eventually, enough people could see that blacks were being scapegoated so that the laws would change. These laws, such as segregated lunch counters, were part of the larger systemic violence against black people.

The students used the symbol of Jesus on the cross, the innocent victim, to expose the powers of inequity and violence. The death of Jesus when interpreted as exposing scapegoating and domination as unjust is liberating. This is a way in which the spiral of violence is named, exposed, and defeated.

The Powers That Be don’t want Jesus’ death interpreted in that way. They want it to be seen as Jesus receiving the torture and death you should get because you deserve God’s wrath. That is an incredibly abusive interpretation. It lets the powers off the hook. In this scheme Church and Empire work together to keep people passive and to continue to scapegoat whoever it is they want to direct violence upon whether they be “heretics” or enemies of the state.

Jesus was a Capricorn, he ate organic foods.
He believed in love and peace and never wore no shoes.
Long hair, beard and sandals and a funky bunch of friends.
Reckon they'd just nail him up if He come down again.


'Cos everybody's got to have somebody to look down on.
Who they can feel better than at anytime they please.
Someone doin' somethin' dirty, decent folks can frown on.
If you can't find nobody else, then help yourself to me.

Kris Kristofferson’s Jesus Was a Capricorn is a great song about the scapegoat mechanism. The song itself shows how Jesus’ death exposed the scapegoat mechanism as unjust and exposed the violence of the powers. The song also demonstrates how the powers continually want to turn it back on more scapegoats. “Everybody’s got to have somebody to look down on…”

The reason we call this a spiral of violence is that everyone thinks they are on the good side. Only in cartoons and in silly movies do people think of themselves as an “evil genius.” Everyone thinks that he is the good guy. Whether these guys live in Pyongyang, Tehran, or Washington DC., each one operates from the myth of redemptive violence.

It is no surprise that weapons and militarization are increasing. It is no surprise that individuals are amassing as many personal guns as they can. There are bad guys out there. We are good guys. We have to stand our ground. If we don’t have a scapegoat, “someone to look down on,” what do we do with our violence?

We need to learn a new plan. As Walter Wink writes:

Either we learn to stop the spiral of violence and scapegoating, or, having been stripped of the scapegoating mechanism as an outlet for our violence, we will consume ourselves in an apocalypse of fire. P. 93

We have to die to the Powers. That is we have to die to the socialization and the values we have received by the Domination System. As Wink writes:

“…we have been socialized into patterns of injustice…[we have] become complicit in our own alienation and that of others…we grew to love our bondage, to rationalize, justify, and even champion it.” P. 94

This dying and rebirth is a part of the symbolism of transformation. But it also must include a social dimension. It is not simply private peace. Wink says:

Many North American Christians die to their privatized egos, but not to the arrogance of American imperialism. Thus, dying to one’s ego can be just another false spirituality unless it involves dying to the Powers. P. 96

So when Jesus' disciples debate among themselves who is the greatest, who is the good guy, who is the one on top, he scolds them. Those are the values of the powers. They lord it over others. That is the foundation of the Domination System. Violence is built on that foundation. This is seen in violence and exploitation against people and Earth. This task of dying to the Powers does not happen once and it is over. It is a lifelong process. Writes Wink:

This means our abandoning egocentricity not only as individuals, but as cultures, as nations, even as a species, and voluntarily subordinating our desires to the needs of the total life system. P. 97

The reason we have Earth Day is because of the violence against Earth by The Powers and our complicity with them. On Earth Day celebrations all over the world today, people are resisting the powers of domination and violence to Earth and to all Earthlings.

Here is the take home:

We can do this.
Violence is not inevitable.

Human beings can and do solve virtually all of their conflicts without violence. In fact, in virtually all of our interactions, violence is not allowed as an option. Violence is not the way to solve conflicts in the home, at school, and at the workplace. The members of the Elizabethton City Council do not bring their six guns to work out budget issues. Violence is not an option. We learn violence.  We learn nonviolence.

We don’t believe and act as if our family members are so evil and vile that they must be controlled by violence. I am not saying there is not violence in homes. I am saying that we know that is wrong.
We call on our educators, social workers, and counselors and teach people skills to solve conflicts non-violently so that we can live equitably. We teach people to solve conflicts without violence. We help people leave violent situations. Violence is not an option. At almost every level of our individual and collective lives we know that and live that.

If we can do this at the level of personal interaction, we can do it at all levels of interaction if we want to do so. We could declare and live into the reality that violence is not an option. To do that we have to make commitments for justice and equity. We may have to take risks and make sacrifices because The Powers That Be do wish to keep the violence and the inequity gong.

But we could do this.
We can engage the powers and transform them.
We could decide that violence at any level is not an option.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

I think Earth Day is a fine day to make that commitment.
One Earth.
One beautiful blue ball.
One home.
One family of Earthlings.
Living in peace.
Living in equity.
Living sustainably.
Imagine it.

What a beautiful world.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence--A Sermon

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

John Shuck

First Presbyterian Church

Elizabethton, Tennessee

April 15th, 2012

On that day the Lord with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.
--Isaiah 27:1


All of a sudden one of those with Jesus lifted his hand, drew his sword, struck the chief priest’s slave, and cut off his ear.  Then Jesus says to him, “Put your sword back where it belongs. For everyone who takes up the sword will be destroyed by the sword.
--Matthew 26:51-52

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man,
I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.
I'm strong to the finich
Cause I eats me spinach.
I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.


I'm one tough Gazookus
Which hates all Palookas
Wot ain't on the up and square.
I biffs 'em and buffs 'em
And always out roughs 'em
But none of 'em gets nowhere.


If anyone dares to risk my "Fisk",
It's "Boff" an' it's "Wham" un'erstan'?
So keep "Good Be-hav-or"
That's your one life saver
With Popeye the Sailor Man.

It is clear by the calendar and the leaves on the trees that we are in the season of Spring. At First Presbyterian we have structured our worship services around the four seasons. Each season corresponds with a spiritual path in theologian Matthew Fox’s typology of Creation Spirituality. The spiritual path associated with Spring is the via transformativa, or the way of compassion and justice-making.

The spiritual life is an earthy life. Creation Spirituality is not ethereal. It is not about escaping the body or transcending the body, the earthly, or the material, but recognizing, celebrating, and an engaging the sacred nature of the body, the earthly, and the material.

These four paths
celebrate with awe and wonder the universe in all its vitality and mystery,
honor mortality, limits, struggle, and the need to let go,
welcome creativity as the vital force of change,
and engage Earth and all of life with compassion and justice.

An image for working through these spiritual paths is a spiral danced rather than a ladder climbed.

Creation Spirituality is neither fluffy or spooky in my opinion. It is not about denying reality and substituting pipe dreams in its place. At least as I have adopted and adapted it, Creation Spirituality is a way to engage the contingencies and the mystery of life with awareness, commitment, and possibility. It isn’t about believing dogmatic theologies that control, punish, and reward. There is nothing you have “to believe.” There is no orthodoxy.

There is an acknowledgement that religion is a human product. The stories that we have created regarding God are our stories. They are the stories of our ancestors as they used their creativity to find meaning in this strange mystery of existence. Since our religion is a human product, so are the religions of others. We approach them as we do our own, with curiosity, respect, critique, and engagement.

The fourth path, the via transformativa, or the way of compassion and justice-making is taking that creativity (path 3) which arises from the intersection of wonder (path 1) and struggle (path 2), and directing that creativity toward justice for all earthlings, including our more than human earthlings and Earth itself.

Creation Spirituality embraces science of course. The rise of science is the icon of human creativity. Creation Spirituality also invites humanity to direct that creativity, that scientific and technical knowledge, toward sustainability and justice. Creativity is not a good in and of itself. Not all ideas, not all creativity leads to justice, fairness, and sustainability. Our creativity has created the most destructive weapons imaginable. The challenge of our time is place our creativity in service to humanity and to all earthlings and to Earth, for present generations and to the thousandth generation into the future. No small order.

It is critical that each of us consciously takes up that challenge. The path of compassion and justice is the path of engagement and it is a spiritual path. This path involves awareness and critique. That critique exposes destructive mythologies and values. This fourth path of Creation Spirituality is the path of exposing, naming, unmasking, and engaging those forces that are certainly creative but behaving in ways that diminish the goodness of life.

We can call these forces “The Powers That Be”. “The Powers That Be” are not particular people. They are the unseen forces that determine how the world works. “The Powers That Be” make up the personality of institutions. They consist of the ideology, the mythology, the structures and the rules. I talked about this last week. I’ll repeat it here.

When we speak of things like the “mainstream media” or “Wall Street” or “corporations” or “the government” or “the church” we are not speaking of particular individuals, except as those individuals participate in their role as agents for “The Powers That Be” of the institution in question. The individuals, the managers, the executives, and so forth are interchangeable. Sometimes when speaking of “The Powers That Be” we use the phrase “they”. That is what “they” say. That is what “they” do.

These “Powers That Be” lose sight of their intended purpose and instead become self-serving. Theologian Walter Wink says that the powers are good, fallen, and redeemable, all at once. When they are “fallen” they do not act on behalf of what is good for human beings or for Earth, but for their own self-interest or their own profits or power.

This is not hard to see. The resources of Earth, whether it be fresh water or forests or fossil fuels and minerals, that have been formed from deep time, hundreds of millions, even billions of years, are being processed and used within a few human lifetimes, two centuries perhaps, with an ever-increasing gap between those who have access to these resources and those who do not.

“The Powers That Be” the personalities of our institutions that include, government, corporations, education, media, and religion, act as though this is perfectly normal, that there is no other way to live. We are told that there is this “economy” that must grow indefinitely. Whatever it takes to feed it must be done. It is as though it is alive, like a monster.

This injustice which is another name for unsustainability, against future generations and against those who lose out in this resource race in this generation, is held together by organized violence. Weaponry and militarization on behalf of the powers are needed to keep this inequity and this injustice going. You cannot have inequality without violence. When the media report a violent outbreak among the Palestinians or in Greece, what they are not reporting is the systemic, organized violence that has been present there all along. Just because there is quiet that does not mean there is peace.

Underlying the violence itself is the myth of violence. That is what I want to speak about today.

This myth of violence, or as Walter Wink calls it, this “myth of redemptive violence” is what needs to be addressed at an intellectual and spiritual level. This is part of the work of the fourth spiritual path.

What is the myth of redemptive violence?

Let me put it this way. If everyone on Earth consumed at the rate of the average North American, we would need five planets of resources. Or another statistic. The world currently produces 78-80 million barrels of oil each day. The United States consumes about 18 million barrels of oil each day. The U.S. consumes about 25% of the world’s oil. We are about 5% of the world’s population. That is an inequity. I am not making a judgment, just stating facts.

Here is another fact. The United States spends more on its military than the next 17 nations combined. The U.S. spends six times more than the next big spender, China. We have military bases and a military presence all over the world, especially in those places with prized resources.

Is there a correlation or a connection between those facts? Is there any connection between being the biggest military on the planet by a factor of six and the consumer of resources vs. the rest of the world by a factor of five? Anyone who might look at those facts objectively would say, yes. The military-industrial complex keeps this inequality in place. But, it would not be polite to say that, nor patriotic. More than that, for most Americans it is impossible to see. You are squirming in your pews right now and you are the liberal bunch. “He can’t talk about that. That isn’t spiritual.”

The reason we cannot see it is because we have been trained from childhood with the myth of redemptive violence. Everywhere we look, from movies, cartoons, national celebrations, media editorials, and media reports, reinforce the belief that there are bad guys out there and they can only be stopped by good guys with weapons. We have to defeat terrorism. The enemy used to be communists, and we will use them again if we need to do so. Muslim fundamentalists are the latest incarnation of bad guys.

The myth of redemptive violence is the myth that violence saves as long as it is in the hands of the good guys and not the bad guys. Popeye is good. Bluto is bad. Superman is good. Lex Luthor is bad. The Terminator is good. The Terminated were bad. This myth is as old as civilization itself.

How does good defeat evil?

By recognizing that we all have good and evil within us and if we honestly talk about our feelings, wants , observations, and thoughts, and work together with negotiation and collaboration, we can come to solutions on shared problems?

Ppppssshhh. What kind of movie is that? What kind of entertainment is that? Popeye doesn’t have a conversation with Bluto and work out their problems by using “I” statements and acknowledging feelings. No, after 25 minutes of being pounded by Bluto, Popeye, miraculously finds his spinach, and at last minute biffs him and buffs him and always out roughs him. This continues episode after episode after episode. Neither of them ever learn a thing.

This plot, this myth, is played out in every cartoon. Our children know this myth simply by breathing the air. It doesn’t end with children. It is provided in adult formula as well in movies, television and in the news reports about war heroes. We are the good guys. We are fighting the bad guys. If you ever have a lingering doubt and have a fleeting heretical thought that connects consumption with war, just calm yourself and say, “We are the good guys. We are fighting the bad guys.” Then go shopping.

When “The Powers That Be” decided that Iraq wanted a regime change, they obliged by pounding the American and British populace with the message that Saddam Hussein was evil, had weapons of mass destruction, and the only way to deal with him was to bomb and invade the country. The heretics said things like, “You don’t think this might need more conversation? You don’t think there might be other ways of engaging this than war? Do you think your own geopolitical interests might be coloring your judgment?”

The answer was, “Of course not. Why do you hate America?”

Why do you hate America? If you question the myth of redemptive violence, that is the answer. What you are hating is the myth that has taken on spiritual depth in our psyches. Violence saves. We are saved by identifying with the hero who God has blessed with victory by his glorious sword. To say anything else is blasphemy.

The answer is from my perspective that I love America. I want it to do right. When it is uncritical of its violence and consumption it isn’t doing right. We need a better guiding myth than the myth of redemptive violence.

This isn’t just about the United States. This myth is as old as civilization.

The Ancient Near Eastern Babylonian version is the Enuma Elish. In this ancient myth, Marduk slew Tiamat the sea monster with an arrow. He took his sword, and cut her carcass in two parts. From her carcass he created the heavens above and the earth below. Her blood became the blood of the gods who in turn created human beings to be their slaves. This myth gave license for the king to control the people with violence because it is believed they were created by violence and that is all they understand.

In the 5th century BCE, the ancient Hebrews were in captivity to the Babylonians. They learned their myths. They took this story of Marduk and Tiamat and rewrote it. I t became Genesis chapter one. They demythologized the story. Tiamat became the deep, or the unordered waters. Same root word. The sun god became the greater light that God turned on. And so forth. The creation itself was not an act of violence but of creativity. God called to be and it was. Humans were created not as slaves but as good and in God’s image. Violence is not part of the created order but an aberration. It could be conquered as YHWH said to Cain, “Sin is crouching at the door, but you must master it.”

There are earlier more violent versions of creation in the Bible. In the Psalms and in Isaiah, YHWH creates by destroying Leviathan or Rahab the sea monster. Those are leftovers from the earlier mythology. The Bible is ambiguous about the myth of redemptive violence. At times it is critical as in the teachings and parables of Jesus and in some of the literature of the Hebrew Scriptures. Sometimes it uncritically embraces it as in the violent stories of Joshua and in Revelation when Jesus is seen as the conqueror at the end of time. We should read the Bible critically as well.

The fourth spiritual path of Creation Spirituality is to engage the powers and challenge them to do justice. Yes it is spiritual work. I am going to be spending the next several weeks talking about this work. Walter Wink and his book, The Powers That Be, will be a conversation partner.

What I want you to take away today is this. Organized violence that we see in the empires of civilization is taught. It has become mythologized. The myth reinforces a lie that humans are either good or evil and that the good must overcome the evil by violence. By violence we are saved and redeemed. This myth of redemptive violence is used to justify inequity. It is legitimated by religion.

I invite you this week simply to observe. Watch the cartoons, the video games, the news reports, the movies, and see if you can identify the myth of redemptive violence.

We can break this cycle. We can embrace a theology that says human beings are not inherently violent. We are a mix of motives. We can do the important work of being self-aware. Maturity and salvation comes from recognizing that the evil is not the other. The evil is the violence. What we do on an everyday level, solving conflicts by conversation, sharing feelings, separating observations from our evaluations, can be done at all levels. Religion does not have to legitimate violence. We have resources within our Christian tradition, traditions about Jesus that can empower us toward a non-violent and sustainable future.

Amen.

Myth of Redemptive Violence

I referred to the Myth of Redemptive Violence in today's sermon. For those unfamiliar with the concept, here is Walter Wink, Facing the Myth of Redemptive Violence.

The belief that violence “saves” is so successful because it doesn’t seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be the nature of things. It’s what works. It seems inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts. If a god is what you turn to when all else fails, violence certainly functions as a god. What people overlook, then, is the religious character of violence. It demands from its devotees an absolute obedience- unto-death. This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today....

....In short, the Myth of Redemptive Violence is the story of the victory of order over chaos by means of violence. It is the ideology of conquest, the original religion of the status quo. The gods favour those who conquer. Conversely, whoever conquers must have the favour of the gods. The common people exist to perpetuate the advantage that the gods have conferred upon the king, the aristocracy, and the priesthood.

Religion exists to legitimate power and privilege. Life is combat. Any form of order is preferable to chaos, according to this myth. Ours is neither a perfect nor perfectible world; it is theatre of perpetual conflict in which the prize goes to the strong. Peace through war, security through strength: these are the core convictions that arise from this ancient historical religion, and they form the solid bedrock on which the Domination System is founded in every society....

....The Myth of Redemptive Violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has even known. Furthermore, its orientation toward evil is one into which virtually all modern children (boys especially) are socialised in the process of maturation. Children select this mythic structure because they have already been led, by culturally reinforced cues and role models, to resonate with its simplistic view of reality. Its presence everywhere is not the result of a conspiracy of Babylonian priests secretly buying up the mass media with Iraqi oil money, but a function of values endlessly reinforced by the Domination System. By making violence pleasurable, fascinating, and entertaining, the Powers are able to delude people into compliance with a system that is cheating them of their very lives.

(Read More)

The Unforgiven--A Sermon

The Unforgiven
John Shuck

First Presbyterian Church
Elizabethton, Tennessee

October 10, 2010

Gospel of Jesus 7:6-19

Jesus said, “Forgive and you’ll be forgiven.”

And he said, “Father, forgive our debts to the extent we have forgiven those in debt to us.”

This is why Heaven’s imperial rule should be compared to a secular ruler who decided to settle accounts with his slaves. When the process began, this debtor was brought to him who owed ten million dollars. Since he couldn’t pay it back, the ruler ordered him sold, along with his wife and children and everything he had, so he could recover his money. At this prospect, the slave fell down and groveled before him:

“Be patient with me, and I’ll repay every cent.”

Because he was compassionate, the master of that slave let him go and canceled the debt. As soon as he got out, that same fellow collared one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred dollars, and grabbed him by the neck and demanded:

“Pay back what you owe!”

His fellow slave fell down and begged him:

“Be patient with me and I’ll pay you back.”

But he wasn’t interested; instead, he went out and threw him in prison until he paid the debt. When his fellow slaves realized what had happened, they were terribly distressed and went and reported to their master everything that had taken place. At that point, his master summoned him:

“You wicked slave,” he says to him, “I canceled your entire debt because you begged me. Wasn’t it only fair for you to treat your fellow slave with the same consideration as I treated you?"

And the master was so angry he handed him over to those in charge of punishment until he paid back everything he owed.

Robert Funk and the Jesus Seminar, The Gospel of Jesus (Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press, 1999), p. 39, 41. Matthew 6:12-15; 18:23-34; Mark 11:25; Luke 6:37; 11:4.

In 1992 Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the film, Unforgiven. When I first saw it I thought Eastwood was repenting for all his Westerns in which the gunslingers were made into heroes. In Unforgiven, the line between hero and psychopath is blurred.

Eastwood plays retired gunslinger, William Munny, who gave up whiskey and killing and became a pig farmer. He is raising his children as a widower. But his wife is dead. His pigs are sick. Farming is tough. He gets an offer to pursue a bounty.



Some prostitutes in Big Whiskey, Wyoming have offered a $1000 reward for anyone who will take vengeance on two cowboys who disfigured one of them. The local sheriff (played by Gene Hackman) did not administer justice adequately in this case. When the sheriff hears of the bounty he is angry and is determined to make an example of anyone who pursues it.



Clint Eastwood’s character, Will Munny, after at first declining the offer changes his mind and gets one of his old now reformed hired gun buddies, Ned (played by Morgan Freeman) to help him. This is what Will Munny says:

I ain't like that no more. I ain't the same, Ned. Claudia, she straightened me up, cleared me of drinkin' whiskey and all. Just 'cause we're goin' on this killing, that don't mean I'm gonna go back to bein' the way I was. I just need the money, get a new start for them youngsters. Ned, you remember that drover I shot through the mouth and his teeth came out the back of his head? I think about him now and again. He didn't do anything to deserve to get shot, at least nothin' I could remember when I sobered up.

As you can imagine even if you haven’t seen the film, a lot of killing ensues. Munny does go back to the way he was. In fact, we discover that the only way Munny can shoot straight is when he drinks whiskey.

The film won a number of academy awards including Best Picture. It has been called “the eulogy for the American Western.”

Part of the film’s genius is that it messes with our sense of justice.

It is a critique of the Myth of Redemptive Violence. The myth of redemptive violence is a myth that we live by most of the time. We find it played out in film and literature and in the way we determine right and wrong.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence says that violence can be redemptive, and at times it is the only redemptive act against evil. Violence is redemptive when used by the good against the bad.

We are initially on the side of the prostitutes who seek redress both from the crime done to them and from local law enforcement that did not do not justice. And we are on the side of Will Munny who is rather lovable in a weird way. He gave up drinkin’ and gun slingin’ for his wife. He is raising two kids. He is going on just one last job and to the audience it is a just cause, a righteous kill.

He is Clint Eastwood after all. The righteous killer. He was often the Christ figure in his previous films.

We know how these films are supposed to work. The bad guys are ruthless and their ruthlessness builds up. The good guys are beaten down, but finally draw from a well of heroism and righteousness and in a final scene kill the bad guys and we feel good because justice has been done. That is how these movies work.

That is the game.

That is the myth.

And that has been the formula for Clint Eastwood's films. Until this one.

We are manipulated. As the film unfolds we find ourselves rooting for the the good guys to give the bad guys their just reward and then when they finally do, it is so over the top in terms of violence that we feel soul-sick. There are no heroes. No good guys or bad guys. It is mixed up. It isn’t clear. It is just violence. That I think is what the film wants to communicate. The genre of the Western had lost its innocence. The myth of the Western film had died. Unforgiven was its eulogy.

Perhaps not only the American Western but the myth of the American West itself is being turned upside down. Making heroes out of gunslingers who were nothing more than psychopathic killers perhaps wasn’t such a great idea. In the end it is mostly greed and violence.

Will Munny summarized the entire genre:

He didn't do anything to deserve to get shot, at least nothin' I could remember when I sobered up.

This leads us to our parable.

Maybe the parable of the king’s accounting is a eulogy for the myth of redemptive violence.

We know what is supposed to happen. We know the game. The King is supposed to be God and God is good and so whatever God does is right. The parable is simply an illustration of the truism:

Forgive others as God forgives. If we don’t forgive, God won’t forgive us. Let that unforgiving slave be a lesson.

That is how we are supposed to read it. That is how we have read it. That is how the Gospel of Matthew reads it.

Or mis-reads it.

Matthew’s gospel adds a commentary at the end of the parable by putting on the lips of Jesus this warning:

That is what my heavenly Father will do to you, unless you find it in your heart to forgive each one of your brothers and sisters. 18:35

But is that really the character of God? Is God really as fickle as the king in this parable?

In Matthew’s Gospel just before this parable, Peter asks Jesus how many times he should forgive his brother, seven times? And Jesus says no, seventy-seven times, or seventy times seven. In either case, the exaggeration means,

“Don’t calculate, just forgive.”

That is what we are supposed to do. We are supposed to forgive seventy-seven times. OK, fine.

Then he tells the story of God, the king, God, who only can manage to forgive once. Then he takes it away and actually tortures the poor schlep who he originally forgave.

Now the poor schlep is no saint. After being forgiven a debt of 10,000 talents which should be translated a zillion bazillion dollars, he goes and shakes a guy down for a couple hundred bucks. He is certainly no role model.

But neither is the king.

If God is like the character of this king, then the whole notion of grace and mercy is a sham. I don’t know about you, but if I were to be truly honest there are brothers and sisters who I have not forgiven. I guess God won’t forgive me then. Even if God did forgive me, I can’t count on it, because God could take it back.

This is a religion of terror. This is a religion upon which fundamentalism thrives. That is the religion of empire. God is not about forgiveness but punishment and torture. That is God’s real nature.

This parable is like the film Unforgiven in which the audience is drawn into a cycle of violence. By rooting for and expecting justice through vengeance we find ourselves complicit in the violence that ensues, so hearers of this parable are drawn into a cycle of unforgiveness.

We are impressed that the King would forgive such a huge amount. What a great guy. See the game is good! Then we are disgusted that the man who is forgiven much cannot forgive a little amount. So we are on the side of the slave who was not forgiven and on the side of those slaves who were watching. Like them, we want vengeance. We want redress. We want justice for our fellow slave who was not forgiven.

That is how the game is played.

So as hearers of the parable we cheer as the slaves tell the king what happened. We are expecting justice. The bad guy is going to get his. But then as the king calls the “bad guy” on the carpet and reverses the forgiveness and exchanges it for torture we may find ourselves wondering if we as hearers were rooting for the right thing after all. Has justice been served? Is God’s kingdom a place in which no one is ultimately forgiven but only tortured?

That is what my heavenly Father will do to you, unless you find it in your heart to forgive each one of your brothers and sisters.

As hearers we find ourselves implicit in this. Bernard Brandon Scott writes:

Thus the parable catches everyone in evil, not intentional evil, but implicit, unanticipated, systemic evil. …A wholly other system is needed, a system outside empire, outside honor and shame, outside patron-client, outside royal power. Pp. 106-7.

The God of Jesus is not the king in this parable. The kingdom of God is not the king’s accounting system. God is outside this parable. This parable is a spoof or a critique. Whatever God is and whatever God’s kingdom is, this parable is not it.

Jesus Seminar Fellow, Ed Buetner offered a great illustration for the phrase, “kingdom of God” or “empire of God.” When someone tells you that they went to the school of hard knocks, you know that they aren’t talking about school as we normally think of school.

The school of hard knocks is a metaphor that points to something very different from Elizabethton High or ETSU or any other school we might bring to mind. The school of hard knocks is not a school, even though people might have learned things from the school of hard knocks.

When Jesus says empire of God he is not talking about empires or God in the way we normally think of empires and God. I think Jesus used empire of God to at once bring to mind Roman Empire and at the same time to spoof it.

When we find a parable in which a king appears to stand for God, it is good to suspect that Jesus is messing with us. It may mean that the real character of God and the kingdom is closer to the opposite.

As Brandon Scott writes:

The parable paints a bleak picture of every effort to organize the world on the model of the empire. Whatever the empire of God might be, it cannot be that. P. 107.

Let’s move from parable to real life.

Let us not forget the obvious.

This parable is about money.

It is about stuff and who has the stuff and who controls the stuff and how the stuff is controlled.

In the end, finally by means of torture, the king gets the stuff.

We live in a world of strict accounting like that of the kings and slaves. In that system there are winners and losers, good and bad. We know that the world in which we live, people are piled with debts. Well…they should have known better. Too bad for them.

We know the world in which we live the “too big to fail” banks and corporations and power brokers have their debts forgiven. That is normal. That is the way the world works. Don’t blame the game. Blame the players. The men in their suits and ties and their Harvard MBAs (and Princeton M. Divs) are so smart and so authoritative and they know what is best for all of us.

This past week was educational for me. We had our international peacemaker visit us from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On one afternoon he spoke at Emmanuel School of Religion. Dr. Elolia and Dr. Perkins set up a tea with international students. A couple of folks were there who live in the U.S. now but are from the Congo.

Our peacemaker, Rev. Mukendi, showed us his presentation and a video of his children and wife and neighbors walking two kilometers to get water from a spring. The women carry 40 pounds of water on their heads, three, four, five, six times a day. They get electricity from a generator. He wasn't complaining about any of this. He was showing us his life..

Rev. Mukendi is not one of the poor ones. He is a big deal in his area. He is like our executive presbyter or synod executive. He has a large church and is responsible for important programs and ministries in the DRC.

At the presentation at Emmanuel School of Religion, one of the guys who live in the U.S. now but is from the Congo said:

“It is possible that all of us here have a piece of the Congo in our pockets.”

He was referring of course to our cell phones. It applies also to our computers. Many of the valuable minerals that make our cell phones fast and cheap are from the DRC. But the people who live in the DRC, who live on top of this wealth, don’t have cell phones or laptops. Some of the wealthier do of course. But most folks don’t even have electricity or running water.

But that is the way the world works, isn’t it?
It is normal.
One wouldn’t think to criticize the system.
It is not the game that is fault, we say, just the players.

I think if Jesus were with us today he might say:

“No, the players are all children of God.
Whether in the Congo, China, West Virginia, Johnson City, or Wyoming.
The players are fine.

Join with me and let's change the game.”

Amen.