by Dean Thompson
AS WE PONDER HATRED’S COMPLEX DYNAMICS, Charles M. Blow’s profound picture provides pastoral insight. “Hate is never about the object of the hate but about what is happening in the mind of the hater. It is in the darkness of that space that fear and ignorance merge and morph. It comes out in an impulse to mark and name, to deny and diminish, to exclude and threaten, to elevate the self by putting down the other.”
Today, we experience a grave national crisis caused by persistent unjust and unnecessary lethal acts by police officers upon African Americans. We are stunned by outrage against poor people on food stamps, a fraternity chant about lynching and racist police texts and emails. We have more American homeless children than ever before. Over 600 million women presently reside in countries where domestic violence is legal. An estimated 36 million people (70 percent of them women and girls) are victims of slavery/trafficking. Anti-Semitism’s resurgence is worldwide. In the Middle East, Jews are derided as “rabid dogs.”
Due to our micro-aggressions and “intentional ignorance,” most of us are guilty of participating in some of the persistent prejudices we abhor. Even so, our “better angels” and transcendent virtues also rise to life’s surface in remarkably resilient manifestations.
A humble, unconventional pope signals a winsomely radical shift in ecclesial priorities by welcoming homeless strangers to the magnificent Sistine Chapel. With strange power and authority, he proclaims: “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”
She was shot in the head and left for dead by the Taliban in 2012. Yet miraculously, in 2014, Pakistani education advocate Malala Yousafzai (along with Indian child rights activist Kailash Satyarthi) received the Nobel Peace Prize. “I am Many,” Malala declared. She said her award was “for those forgotten children” yearning for education, peace and change.
Caring journalists, public leaders and educators presently call for educational events, consciousness-raising and “confrontational nonviolence” in locations where hatred of Jews spews forth. Perhaps as a resurt, a recent Pew study reports that Jews are the most favorably viewed religious group in America.
Michelle Alexander has brilliantly exposed “a new Jim Crow,” with her compelling analysis of our horrendous mass incarceration of African Americans and the undermining of black society. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has boldly told a House appropriations subcommittee that “this idea of total incarceration just isn’t working … it’s not humane.” The New York Times reports that many states “have been reforming their prisons and sentencing laws for several years now, with overwhelmingly positive results.”
Surrounded by such encouraging examples of resilient virtue, we are especially fed as we continue to look to Jesus, who is the “pioneer and perfecter” of our faith, hope and love. Indeed, we are fortified with courage as we seek to embody his life-saving promises preached at his hometown synagogue in Luke 4. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor … to bring release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free … . ”
And with the Apostle Paul, we are persuaded to proclaim: “Welcome one another … as Christ has welcomed you.”
DEAN THOMPSON is president and professor of ministry emeritus at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
