Jesus was targeted as an enemy by rulers and executed. His friends are shocked and depressed by his murder. They are not, however, angry vowing payback nor riled up plotting revenge. Nothing in the behavior of disciples shows a targeting of enemies. Their friend Jesus then returns in the Resurrection. They enjoy 40 more days of friendship until, once again, Jesus departs in his Ascension, today’s feast day. Again, nothing after the Ascension shows Jesus’ friends decide to act as soldiers and target other people as enemies to hurt them. Their mission is to live on in the witness of their friend and be a friend to others.
Living as a friend, including toward those who treat us as an enemy, is a counter-cultural disposition in this world controlled by soldiers. Soldiers are members of the cult of Militarism and they are disposed toward and proselytize enemy consciousness. Soldiers are so enemy conscious as to be enemy absorbed. It is as Sun Tzu famously asserts of all those who fight, “To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.” Thus, in the process of defeating their enemy, soldiers take on the enemy’s thinking, tactics, values – the worst of them. Soldiers are soaked in the violent milieu of warfare and are not free to live in the witness of loving enemies. Among those people who did live in the witness of loving enemies were Christian Trappist monks of Tibherine, Algeria, whom we remember in these final days of May. A violent civil war was destroying Algeria during the years 1991 to 2002. The Militarist rulers and their soldiers were fighting against rebel soldiers as their enemies who were in turn fighting against them as enemies. In the midst of the enemy making lived common people trying to live together as friends. They included the Trappist monks who tended a great garden and did their best to live and love as friends. They fed themselves and their neighbors physically and spiritually. They practiced and trained persons in the surrounding community in helpful agriculture practices and joined them in ever enduring friendship practices. When the enemy making and violence of the civil war worsened, the monks did not join one of the soldier’s camps and fight enemies. They remained in solidarity with their friends; Muslim brothers and sisters doing their best to live and love as friends. Then, on a spring night in 1996, rebel soldiers entered the monastery and kidnapped seven of the monks. After 2 months in captivity the monks were killed. It was at first thought they had been executed by their rebel captors after their severed heads were found May 31. It was later learned that in a military raid on the rebel soldiers’ camp government soldiers had killed the monks and then, in true Sun Tzu fashion, beheaded them to make it look as though their enemies, the rebel soldiers, had executed them. Under Militarism, soldiers know their enemy and become their enemy and thus murder loving people who befriend their enemy. Our call as lovers of enemies is to befriend soldiers.
“If it should happen one day—and it could be today—that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to encompass all… I would like my community, my Church, my family, to remember that my life was given to God… I ask them to be able to associate such a death with the many other deaths that were just as violent, but forgotten through indifference and anonymity. My life has no more value than any other. Nor any less value… I should like, when the time comes… to forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down. I could not desire such a death… My death, clearly, will appear to justify those who hastily judged me naive or idealistic… For this life given up, totally mine and totally theirs, I thank God… In this “thank you,” which is said for everything in my life from now on, I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today, and you my friends of this place… And you also, the friend of my final moment, who would not be aware of what you were doing. Yes, for you also I wish this “thank you”—and this adieu—to commend you to the God whose face I see in yours.” (Last Testament: A Letter From The Monks Of The Tibhirine – Christian de Chergé)
Prayer: Spirit, keep us living as friends to all we meet.
Question: Who do I regard as an enemy and need to hold dear as a friend?
May 24, 2020 Gospel Matthew 28:16-20 Seventh Sunday of Easter / Ascension