Here’s a question I hear everywhere I go, including from fellow Christians: Why are so many Christians so cruel?
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard someone say something like: I’ve experienced blowback in the secular world, but nothing prepared me for church hate. Christian believers can be especially angry and even sometimes vicious.
It’s a simple question with a complicated answer, but that answer often begins with a particularly seductive temptation, one common to people of all faiths: that the faithful, those who possess eternal truth, are entitled to rule. Under this construct, might makes right, and right deserves might.
Most of us have sound enough moral instincts to reject the notion that might makes right. Power alone is not a sufficient marker of righteousness. We may watch people bow to power out of fear or awe, but yielding to power isn’t the same thing as acknowledging that it is legitimate or that it is just.
The idea that right deserves might is different and may even be more destructive. It appeals to our ambition through our virtue, which is what makes it especially treacherous. It masks its darkness. It begins with the idea that if you believe your ideas are just and right, then it’s a problem for everyone if you’re not in charge.
In that context, your own will to power is sanctified. It’s evidence not so much of your own ambition, but of your love for the community. You want what’s best for your neighbors, and what’s best for your neighbors is, well, you.
The practical objections to this mind-set are legion. How can we be so certain of our own righteousness? Even if we are right or have a superior vision of justice compared with our opponents, the quest for power can override the quest for justice.
The historical examples are too numerous to list. Give a man a sword and tell him he’s defending the cross, and there’s no end to the damage he can do.
There’s also a theological objection to the idea that right deserves might. In Christian theology, Jesus was both God and man, a person without sin. I’m fallen and flawed. He is not.
And how did this singular individual — this eternal being made flesh — approach power? He rejected it, by word and by deed. And it all began with Christmas.
If a person is going to look for a coming king, the last place you’re going to start is in a stable. But that humble birth presaged a humble life and the establishment of what my former pastor always called “the upside-down kingdom of God.”
Christ’s words were clear, and they cut against every human instinct of ambition and pride:
“The last will be first.”
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
“If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
Those were the words. The deeds were just as clear. He didn’t just experience a humble birth; Jesus was raised in a humble home, far from the corridors of power. As a child, he was a refugee.
And when he began his ministry, he constantly behaved in a way that confounded every modern understanding about how to build a movement, much less how to overthrow an empire.
He withdrew from crowds. When he performed miracles, he frequently told the people he healed not to tell anyone else. When he declared, near the end of his life, that we are to “render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” he not only rejected the idea that he was Caesar, he also rejected the idea that Caesar’s domain was limitless.
And then, faced with the ultimate test — an unjust execution — right yielded to might. The son of God allowed mortal men to torture and kill him, even though he could have freed himself from Rome’s deadly grasp.
When Jesus did triumph, he didn’t triumph over Caesar. He triumphed over death itself. When he ascended into heaven after his resurrection, he left earth with Caesar still on the throne.
My own attitude about Christmas has changed over the years. A day that was once purely celebratory is now also profoundly humbling. In many ways, the facts surrounding Christ’s birth are as important as the fact of Christ’s birth. How he arrived was a signal of why he arrived: to redeem hearts, not to rule nations.
It’s remarkable how often ambition becomes cruelty. In our self-delusion, we persuade ourselves that we’re not just right but that we’re so clearly right that opposition has to be rooted in arrogance and evil. We lash out. We seek to silence and destroy our enemies.
But it is all for the public good. So we sleep well at night. We become one of the most dangerous kinds of people — a cruel person with a clean conscience.
The way of Christ, by contrast, forecloses cruelty. It requires compassion. It inverts our moral compass, or at least it should. We love rags-to-riches stories, for example, so if many of us were writing Christ’s story, we might begin with a manger, but we’d end with a throne.
But Christ’s life began in a manger, and it ended on a cross. He warned his followers that a cross could come for them as well. An upside-down kingdom began with an upside-down birth. When Jesus himself is humble, how do we justify our pride?
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