John 17:20-26
May 12, 2013
I’ve
often imagined that Jesus’ life was equal parts anguish and hope. I certainly see that in this prayer.
Jesus
says, “God, the world does not know you.”
Think about what that means. The
world does not know grace, justice, peace, holiness, hope. All of the characteristics we think of when
we think of God – the world does not know them, Jesus claims. What does the world know? Well, in Jesus’ experience, the world seemed
to know judgment, oppression, violence, injustice, poverty, and despair.
This
is such a pained prayer. Jesus knew the
sufferings in the world. He had seen
them first hand. He watched as crowds
lined up outside of houses where he stayed, and along the road as he walked by;
all of them hoping he could heal them – change their lives. He saw their pain, and he knew the world was
not helping. He also knew that most did
not understand that he was showing them a way to a world where God’s character
was manifest in each and every person…where all were one with God and with each
other. He knew what was and what was
possible…and that knowledge hurt.
Yet,
Jesus maintained hope. He couldn’t heal
everyone…not before he died. But he
really did think people could and would choose the life he did. “God, The world does not know you,” he prays,
“BUT I know you; and at least these people know that you have sent me.” There is hope because at the very least the
disciples and others who followed Jesus had decided that he was worth following
– that he was a glimpse of God and God’s intention for the world. In
short, he believed in humankind’s ability to change it all, and that gave him
hope.
Norman
Thomas, I think, lived equal parts anguish and hope. He knew the suffering of people – he seemed
to be the kind of person that felt deeply the world’s pains. He also knew what was possible, and that knowledge
hurt. But he was convinced there were
better ways, and that humans were capable of choosing them…he was a man of
hope.
Thomas
was born in 1884 and grew up relatively privileged, and right up through
graduation from Princeton he had relatively little exposure to the world of
suffering. He graduated a staunch
capitalist. But after he graduated, he got
a job as a social worker in a tenement district in NYC. He came face to face for the first time in
his life with the brutality of poverty in the urban slums. It was anguish…and the systems in place
weren’t working. There had to be a
different way, Thomas believed.
After
a couple of years, he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a
Presbyterian minister. He attended Union
Theological Seminary in New York City.
At Union he was immersed in what was called “The Social Gospel,” which
was just beginning to gain a foothold in liberal, protestant Christianity. The social gospel movement tried to move
beyond looking at the bible for individualistic ethics and guidance to
something that addressed the institutional sins of excessive wealth, racial
tensions, child labor, the dangers of war, and oppressive governments. The early thinkers in this movement believed
that God was just as concerned with bringing down these institutions as with
the individual’s salvation.
Shortly
after he was ordained a minister in 1911, he took a position in Harlem where he
was again faced every day with the realities and pains of poverty. It was, to be sure, a world that did not know
God. While there, he and his wife worked
tirelessly to bring a better life to the people in their neighborhood. They planted inner-city gardens, begged from
the rich to feed the poor, and opened workshops to help people train for
jobs. Through all of this, Thomas became
completely disillusioned with capitalism, and he knew there was another
choice. He was drawn to the communitarian
principles of Socialism, and began a life-long connection with the Socialist
Party, believing that somewhere within it lie an alternative to the system that
was destroying and dehumanizing people.
He
continued to be tortured by the sufferings around him, and it hit full force
when our country was in the beginnings of World War I. War pained him and it was, for him, just an
outgrowth of capitalism. He became convinced
war was never the answer – he was “constrained to pacifism,” as he put it. Not only did it cause pain and death in the
present, it ensured violence would be the order of the day in the future. Violence breeds violence. Period.
Thomas
looked around him and found a world where the ends justified the means; a world
that desired peace, but used violence to try to get it. If we want peace, he argued, we cannot kill,
no matter how noble the cause. He wrote,
“The glory of the greatest of our spiritual leaders, of Jesus, of Francis of
Assisi, of Tolstoi [sic], is a certain majestic simplicity of ethical teaching
and practice. To hate and to kill are
wrong. The kingdom of heaven is not for
men of violence but for little children.
The way of life is the way of love.”
Thomas
was a minister, but when he looked at the church all he saw were people who praised
Jesus as Lord of the battle. “Here is a
man,” he wrote, “who bade his followers love their enemies, and pray for those
who persecute you, who himself died on Calvary opposing wrong by no force save
a martyr’s death. How can the church
justify war in any cause?”
Thomas
was a pacifist, but he was not naïve. He
experienced anguish in the trade-offs in addition to the violence. He didn’t back away from the reality in which
he was making these claims of nonviolence, nor did he ignore the horrific
consequences of what he was saying.
“Wars and bloody revolutions,” he wrote, “have ended ancient oppressions
and given freedom room for nobler growth; but is it not the outstanding tragedy
of history that the results are so out of proportion to the unselfish idealism
of the heroes who have perished sword in hand?”
History, he says, shows us that the wars, though successful in some
ways, are never worth the cost of the violence of war and the nurturing of the
mentality of war. He was convinced there
was a better way.
In
1918, Thomas wrote a letter to the press endorsing a socialist candidate for
mayor of New York. In that letter he
wrote:
“I
believe that the hope for the future lies in a new social and economic order
which demands the abolition of the capitalistic system. War itself is only the most horrible and
dramatic of the many evil fruits of our present organized system of
exploitation and the philosophy of life which exalts competition instead of cooperation. I am convinced that the hope of peace lies
not so much in statesmen, who have already shown themselves bankrupt of ideas,
but in people of all countries who demand the cessation of war in which they
pay so horrible a price.”
This
was when the church left him. Some say
he left the church, and technically he did.
But not because he didn’t believe in God or following Jesus, but because
his stance on pacifism caused contributions to his church and its charitable activities
to decline sharply. It became clear to
Thomas that the poor his church was helping would not be fed unless he
resigned. So he did, and never returned
to serve the church that had lost, he thought, the true meaning of Jesus’ life.
Thomas
continued to anguish over the state of the world and war, and with the rise of
totalitarian dictatorships in the 1930’s, he became conflicted in thought and
action. He always believed war was wrong
– never the solution. Yet he couldn’t
stand to look at what these brutal dictators were doing, and then as the
reality of Nazi Germany hit him, he came to believe the U.S. must enter this
terrible war. The pain of this decision
is so evident in his writings. He
contemplates the evils of both decisions.
Eventually, he wrote that “it does not make for the triumph of justice
or peace to preach a political program of pacifism which practically would mean
surrender to brutal totalitarian might.”
People were being slaughtered, and he could not stand that. I can only imagine the anguish he felt
abandoning his pacifist beliefs, which were not arrived at trivially.
Whether
one agrees or disagrees with his conclusion, what I think we must learn from
him is that these decisions must be pained, and we must painstakingly make them. He knew these things mattered – were matters
of life and death. He wasn’t just
playing at Christianity, or engaged in intellectual exercises for their own
sakes. He knew it was not a simplistic
choice between war or not, and he models for us that such decisions should never
be without pain and sorrow because both decisions are wrong because both allow
violence. As Thomas said, “I, the hater
of war, chose as between circles of hell.”
Though
he reluctantly supported the United States entering the war, he never stopped
his criticism of the war – namely the way it was waged. He abhorred the dropping of the atomic
bomb. He was utterly opposed to the
internments of Japanese and German Americans.
He spoke out against the attitude of imperialism that he saw in the
allied forces. He was appalled by segregation in the army.
Even
his politics were carefully considered, and decisions and positions were never
taken lightly. Thomas may have been a
significant member of the socialist party, running as their presidential
candidate six times, but he was never one to tow the party line for the sake of
politics. Not about war, not about
economics, not about organizational structure and operations. He stood as much a critic of his own friends
and party members as he did of others.
He would not accept things the way they were because there was still
suffering and so things needed to change.
He somehow steered clear of letting his identity be formed by ideology, which meant he didn’t cling to
ideas and systems just because they were
socialist, or pacifist, or whatever.
What mattered to him was that the world did not know God, and until that
changed, he would use his prominence to foster new ideas and challenge current practices
that obviously were not working.
In
the midst of all of this, Thomas was a man of hope.
He
believed in humanity. “Despite all the difficulties,” one author wrote, “Thomas
was confident that human nature could be changed; and he placed his hope in
Christianity as the vehicle through which such a change can be
accomplished. He saw in its call for a
new social order based on Christ’s teachings the means to abolish violence. Christian pacifism was the basis of Norman
Thomas’ search for peace.” In other
words, he found hope in the way of Jesus, and like Jesus he thought people
could and would follow that way.
Thomas
lived what he preached – his means did match the ends he so desperately
sought. Though he was critical, he
wasn’t angry, and that made a difference.
He was critical, but not angry. One
author mused about how he could be so critical of almost every aspect of
American life, be a part of a party that many scorned and disliked, yet rise to
such a highly respected and esteemed position in the eyes of his fellow
Americans. It had to do with his hope –
his hope that the people he was talking to did not need to be chastised, but
rather reminded of what they already knew.
In
his 1974 book, James Duram wrote, “He was the conscience of America. He spoke to the feelings that most Americans
have about themselves: that they are a
fair people; that it is somehow wrong for poverty to exist amid plenty; that it
is a perversion of justice to be jailed for political reasons; that Constitutional
rights should be respected regardless of race and creed.” He believed in the goodness of people, and
while what he saw the world doing pained him, he never stopped appealing to people’s
better selves. He never gave up hope
that things could change if people of good will reminded others of the
suffering our actions were causing, and if viable alternatives were given.
We,
too, should be anguished by the world.
It seems like too often we are casual about things that deserve the kind
of tortured thought and wrestling Thomas went through. It seems like there are times politics gets
in the way of taking stands and being out in front of people with unpopular
ideas and actions. This world should
anguish us, and our thinking about it should probably be appropriately
anguished as well. Issues of war,
violence, poverty, injustice – the answers to these things are not simple, and
we should not assume they will take care of themselves.
It’s
hard for me to not think of Syria as I read about Thomas. We do need to face the decision about whether
to use violence to stop the actions of a brutal dictator that has caused 70,000
deaths and a million refugees. But this
decision should be excruciating. The
conversation should be of great depth in this country about the suffering, and
the futility of using violence to secure peace.
There should be no easy answer – and it most certainly should cause us
anguish. Christians should find violent solutions to violent problems an
anathema. Even if we decide that the
circle of hell we choose is using military power, we should mourn…deeply. But, I feel like any conversation about these
things lacks a moral center, and is calculated purely in political terms.
When
I look at the conversation taking place about such things as how to respond to the
horror of Syria, I don’t see this pain – the anguished decisions. I see politicians calculating, and then
people falling in line behind their party because that’s who they identify
with. Breaking ranks is forbidden, and
identity politics takes priority over ethics and faith. And no one is claiming that any decision is
the wrong one because violence is never right.
Things
like Syria are impossible – there is no good answer, and people are suffering
beyond what we can even take in. Yet, we
also need the hope. We do have Jesus. We
believe he was something we can look at to see the face and way of God. We can
be one with God, and in that bring hope and oneness to this world. And the hope is found in the anguished
deliberation if we follow the one who suffered for that oneness.
When
we struggle, we remind ourselves that it is
up to us – and we can make compassionate choices that bring God into the
world. We do have the capacity for
knowing God and God’s intentions, and that alone should bring hope to us and to
those places in our world where people suffer.
We are not lost causes, destined to pile suffering upon suffering. We are not hard wired to ignore people’s
pain, and we are not hopeless narcissists.
We are disciples, and we know God sent Jesus – that Jesus shows us the
face and intention of God – and in that we can connect to the love that will
heal this world of pain. Jesus thought
it was possible. His prayer – in his
prayer of anguish and hope – we see he believed that it was possible that, in
his words, “all may be one with God and with each other.” Amen.
