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The Human Stain
By David G. Duggan
Special to Virtueonline
www.virtueonline.org
October 1, 2014
I returned from an annual vacation last month to learn that a woman whom I had known many years ago in Episcopal church circles had been murdered while vacationing with her daughter on a tropical island halfway around the world from our Chicago home. Though this story garnered some local media coverage (perhaps because the daughter is suspected), it was eclipsed on the national scene by the frenzy surrounding the police shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, MO, and by the accounts of NFL players beating those whom they supposedly loved.
The unifying theme of these events is the violence that wracks our society, even by those who are sworn to protect us, or who profess their love for us. In an era many years ago that likewise featured a foreign war, racial unrest, and fractured politics, a militant said that violence is as American as apple pie, but no society is immune. Estimates of domestic violence peg its incidence at 25 percent, and if remotely true, it suggests that somehow violence is hardwired into our DNA.
Jesus shunned violence as a solution to His dilemma: how do I prove God's love for humanity without forcing our obedience. Yet curiously, Jesus never intervened to stop violence when inflicted on others and even cooperated with the Roman authorities who ruled by force over the local population. The centurion whose servant Jesus healed (Matt. 8, Luke 7) was an officer of that empire of control, and expressed no remorse for his station or the polity which he represented as a condition of his request of Jesus. Nor did Jesus require it.
We can only speculate why Jesus expended His powers to heal one outside His culture. While Luke states that the Jewish rulers interceded with Jesus because the centurion had built their synagogue, that detail is absent from Matthew's account. But if Jesus' ministry and message of love against all is valid, it must be valid as against even the evil that ruled the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago.
The legal process will ultimately decide whether those accused of these recent acts of violence in tropical paradises, apartment complexes and casino elevators will pay an earthly price for them. But as Christians we must proclaim that God loves the repentant transgressor as much as the transgressed, and welcomes him into His kingdom without accounting for his misdeeds.
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