Another Post About Enemies.

The Psalms contain a lot of complaints, and bad wishes, aimed at “enemies.”  The most problematic ones are the infamous end of Psalm 137 and most of Psalm 109.  But enemies are all over the place.

Taken literally and historically, of course, the enemies are people.  Either they are personal rivals and antagonists, or threats to the nation.  Psalm writers are reflecting on actual experiences with actual people.  The Psalms are all written from the perspective of the victims of violence.  People being lynched, for example.  The Psalms are great because they offer these expressions of primal and existential fear, pain, rage, and despair.  There is no human emotion that God does not know or accept or even share; none that is not redeemed in the ocean of God’s love.   

But this fact is often overlooked by people who use this language to justify their own violence against perceived enemies, even if those people haven’t actually done them any harm.  The greatest obscenity is a lynch mob or an aggressor army using these parts of the Bible to rationalize violence against invented “enemies.”  Unfortunately, that happens all too often.  (Nazi soldiers had “Gott Mit Uns” (God with us) stamped on their belt-buckles.  Segregationists set up "Christian Academies" to avoid integrated schools.)  

The Church recognized very early that, if Jesus Christ is the Word of God who is both the Source and fulfillment of Scripture, there is much in the Hebrew Bible that could not be taken literally.  Certainly no accurate reading of Scripture authorizes thoughts and behaviors that are utterly contradictory to the life and teachings of Jesus.  The Bible can only be understood in conformity to him.

Therefore, the Church learned to read all this talk of “enemies” in a primarily psychological way.  I pointed this out in an earlier post called “The First Enemy.”  Basically, our real enemies are primarily within us.  They are the thoughts, impulses, cravings, fears, incitements to anger and violence, memories, anticipations, feelings, and other things going on in our minds.  It is these influences that will kill us, and others, and therefore need to be controlled or even exterminated. (This is also how we read a book like Joshua.) 

So when the Psalms are railing against evil enemies, they mainly mean ourselves.  Or, more precisely, our old selves, what Paul calls “the flesh,” and I call “ego.”  We need to root out the limited, delusional, voices that tell us we are separated from God and others, and which lure us into thoughts and actions that are self-centered, sinful, and violent.  Ego is like cancer; it is killing us as individuals, and congealed into Empire it is killing the creation.  We need to remove it from us by any means necessary. 

The whole agenda of the Second Enemy (see my previous post by that title), Empire, is to organize and focus the evil generated by ego and apply it to invented “enemies” in the name of its own power and wealth.  The real enemy, of course, is Empire itself which concocts and feeds us other enemies to hate, fear, and kill, as a way of maintaining its power over us and in us.  

Both enemies are really one in that they represent the entity which Scripture refers to as the Evil One, the Adversary, the Accuser, the Father of Lies, the Devil, or Satan.  Having been unable to displace God in heaven, he has set himself to destroying God’s creation, using humans as his instruments.

Anyway, all this means that spiritual life means rooting out the enemy within us, and by extension within our communities.  The enemy is never human individuals; it is always within us, and that is where it needs to be fought.

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The Second Enemy.

A while back I wrote about the first enemy being ego.  Ego is toxic enough in each individual.  Unfortunately, it is the normal condition of everyone.  When a bunch of ego-centric individuals get together and pool their ignorance, fear, anger, and shame, they manufacture the society characterized by violence and lies into which we all are born.  This conglomeration of blind egos regulated and held in tension by laws and power in pyramidal order is called Empire.  Empire is the collective, mass, macro expression of the narcissistic nihilism of which ego is the individual manifestation.  Motivated by the drive for wealth, fame, and power, the strongest people, class, race, or nation will prevail and impose a self-serving order on the weaker.  

In Scripture this abomination appears at the beginning of the Book of Exodus when a new Pharaoh “who did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8), that is, who did not know the story of God, takes power and reduces the Israelites to slavery.  This collision between the people of God and the Empires of the world becomes a — if not the —major theme of the whole Bible.  It reaches its final destiny in Revelation when Empire’s true nature and identity is disclosed as the Beast conjured by the Red Dragon (Satan, the Accuser) who, failing to conquer heaven, decides to destroy God’s creation (Revelation 13).  

Empire is therefore an inherently ecocidal project in which people are organized for the destruction of the Earth.  This gets accomplished by the application, approval, and spread of practices of ego-centric ideology, like greed, envy, lust, gluttony, pride, vanity, resentment, deceit, and sloth.  

In other words, the Accuser finds within humans the most effective tool in organizing the annihilation of life: the human ego which falsely believes itself to be separated from and independent of creation and acts that way.  Binding such egos into a tight fasces, a weapon of mass intimidation and destruction, Empire proceeds upon its work of reducing the Earth to a lifeless rock.

Of course, that is not what Empire tells itself it is about.  It prefers to spew self-serving propaganda about “prosperity,” “progress,” and “liberty.”  And that is the way it gets sold to people, as a matter of security, comfort, convenience, health, and happiness.  But the end result of Empire’s policies and practices is the abolition of creation itself.

This has never bee more clear than in the last few decades, culminating even in the last few months of overlapping crises.  The underlying catastrophe, of course, is the climate crisis and related ecological depredations.  On top of that we have the current pandemic and the economic disaster it has wreaked, and the awakening of people to racial injustices.  All of these are connected and basically share the same root in Empire’s regime of destruction and consumption.

The apotheosis of Empire is the one under which we now languish: global consumer Capitalism.  The sole purpose of this Empire is to annihilate God’s good creation by means of feeding the infinite desire of individual human egos, especially those at the top of the economic food chain.  It is the most perfect and effective manifestation of the Beast/Empire yet concocted by human ego-centricity.  Capitalism, along with the other characteristics of Modernity, has succeeded in largely neutralizing and coopting any spiritual/moral dimension of human community, which had served for millennia as societal control-rods hopefully regulating and mitigating the violent reactions of ego and Empire.  It is the supreme example of “a new king who did not know Joseph” (and therefore God) assuming hegemony over people.  Modernity, in short, reduced reality to what was empirical, measurable, and sellable, and rejected as superstition and subjective anything else, including faith, hope, love, beauty, and any understanding of truth that did not meet Modernity’s criteria for objectivity.

Modernity’s values, which undergird Capitalism, are thus unmoored from what is actually true and real, the depth of Reality which can only be approached interiorly by faith/trust, hope, and love, described in myth, story, poetry, song, ritual, and parable, in community with others.  This means that Modernity, like all Empires, is based on lies and falsehoods invented by fearful egos, and cannot stand in any encounter/collision with Reality.  It will crumble and fall into chaos and nothingness, which is all it ever was.  This is what is going on poetically in most of the Book of Revelation.  It is always happening.  Disintegration is the basic story of Empire.

The role of the Church, the ecclesia, the people called and gathered by God, is to witness to the story of Jesus Christ, who embodies and fulfills the “Joseph” that Empires don’t know.  That is, it is to bear witness to the Truth of God in creation, and live according to Christ’s life, poured into their hearts by the Spirit of God.

The church does this by addressing the problem at its core, which is our ego-centricity, and healing that through Sacrament and story, in community, and sending them into the world to practice justice, non-violence, inclusion, forgiveness, compassion, equality, and love.

Jesus Christ, in and through the Church, is the antidote to ego and Empire.  He is the medicine that heals the world, and delivers creation into the shalom for which it was created, which is himself.

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The Way of Jesus: Self-emptying and Uprising.

The life of Jesus is a self-emptying (Philippians 2:7-8) in which he, the Word of God, by whom the universe is spoken into being finally emerges in creation as a mortal human.  He participates in the creation as an individual human, sharing every aspect of our natural life.  He even makes the point of entering this existence at a common and ordinary place, being laid as a newborn in a feed trough for animals (Luke 2:7).  

While here Jesus encounters and identifies with the most common, ordinary, and indeed broken and suffering among us.  He intentionally relates to “tax collectors and prostitutes,” “sinners,” the marginalized, and the excluded.  Eventually, he is arrested, tortured, and executed by the Empire for blasphemy and sedition. 

This self-emptying is the Way of Jesus.  It is therefore also the Way of his disciples and the gospel community he calls.  To follow him is to follow him on this specific Way.  There is here no sense in which “he does it so we don’t have to.”  That would make us spectators, not disciples.  Discipleship means he leads us and we follow in his footsteps.  We go where he goes.  We do what he does.    

We see that his Way is first a movement in which we let go of that which is self-important, self-righteous, self-preserving, and self-gratifying in us.  Jesus let go even of his “equality with God”!  We let go of our delusions of equality with God, in which we identify God with our own ego.  In doing so we choose to follow Jesus in encountering life at its most basic, common, immediate, physical, sensory, and particular.  We go to the broken places and the broken people and share in the brokenness.  We self-empty, which is to say let go of our fantasies of importance, power, wealth, popularity, and independence.  Following Jesus means following him “down;” it is to lose, fail, surrender, renounce, and divest.

   

But the Lord also Jesus speaks of his mission in terms of “being lifted up” (John 3:14, 8:28, 12:32, Acts 1:9).  This culminates of course in his being lifted up on the cross, and its continuation in his being lifted up in his resurrection, and finally in his ascension.

Thus the movement of Jesus’ mortal life is characterized by a kind of reversal.  In his self-emptying he also commences an uprising, a movement from low to high, from earth to heaven.  It is an opening to the most inclusive, comprehensive, whole, and wide vision of reality.  He brings people from brokenness and death to healing and life (Matthew 11:4-5).  “Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11).  

It is only by following this Way of relinquishment that we become light, light enough to participate with Jesus in the second movement, which is the uprising, the resurrection, our filling and shining with the light — and the expansive lightness — of God. 

It is like a hot-air balloon.  It yearns to ascend.  It is designed and equipped to rise  But it cannot until it loses enough of the weight that is keeping it on the ground.  The riders have to off-load the bags of sand that are holding it in gravity’s grip.  Only then can the balloon’s true nature and purpose be realized.  Only then can it ascend.

In order to ascend into our true nature we also have to let go of what is holding us down.  These are the thoughts, stories, ideas, habits, loyalties, and practices based on our egocentric way of understanding ourselves.  The more of that we relinquish the more we become lighter and begin to emerge into our true selves in Jesus Christ.

And I want to emphasize that this relinquishment is not limited to changes in the way we think; it has to be expressed in action, as it is for Jesus.  In other words we experience letting go in acts of humility, service, compassion, and empathy.

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