The Enemy Lines are Hard to Find

Christ Church, Covington, Louisiana

THE ENEMY LINES ARE HARD TO FIND^©

Who can tell how often he offends? Cleanse thou me from my secret faults. (Psalm 19)

God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all. (Romans 11:32)

For Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God. (I Peter 3:18)

A friend of mine who is a child psychologist told me about something one of her young patients said. It is common practice to give toys to children in the treatment room so they work out their conflicts through play. This particular little boy was given toy soldiers, which he laid out and began to deploy. After he had done this for a while, he looked across his little battlefield with a puzzled expression and said, “The enemy lines are hard to find.”

In late 1944, while the allies were rapidly advancing across Europe after the success of the Normandy invasion, J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, wrote a letter to his son Christopher who was serving in the R.A.F. (the British Royal Air Force). Tolkien himself, the father, had fought the Germans in World War I; he was in the infamous trenches of the Battle of the Somme. These were not pacifists, in other words. The father wrote to the son that he was very disturbed by the way the British press was relentlessly depicting all Germans as irremediably evil. One of his local papers was seriously advocating “systematic extermination” of the entire German nation because

“they are rattlesnakes and don’t know the difference between good and evil.” What of the writer? The Germans have just as much right to declare...the Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they’ve done”[1]

In other words, whenever a person takes to himself (or herself) the defining of another person or group as evil, he is in more danger than he knows. It is in the very nature of the human being to judge other people and groups as evil. We can then give ourselves permission to treat those others as less than fully human, to ostracize them or persecute them and eventually to destroy them. And once we have begun that game, it takes on a life of its own and it begins to dominate us without our even noticing.

Who decides who is evil and who is not? Two weeks ago, a New York Times article told of some Afghan boys who were displaced by the American bombing. (There will be a TV documentary about this on the Discovery Channel on March 25.) The boys are now living in Karachi, Pakistan¾if you can call it living. The children in this particular news story live in the garbage dumps. They are paid pennies to pick through the rotting food, broken glass and discarded syringes to salvage items to sell. They are indescribably filthy and smelly, and they are hungry much of the time. What is their hope? Their hope is the madrasas—the Muslim religious schools. We all know now, if we did not before, that many of these schools in Pakistan are run by hard-line extremists, and they were the breeding ground for the Taliban.[2] The Times reporter interviewed some of these Afghan refugee boys at the garbage dump. They are thrilled at the possibility of being taken as students by one of the madrasas. They said, “We’ll get free food and clothing. It will make us very happy.” The reporter asked them what they thought of Americans. “They are very cruel to us,” said Muhammed, one of the boys. “They kill our people.” Another boy named Shaheen said, “I want America to be finished. They destroyed Afghanistan. They bombed the whole country.”[3]

It is an easy matter to teach children who is evil and who is not. I have another article in my files from a few years ago when the Albanians fleeing from Kosovo were in Macedonian camps by the hundreds of thousands. A father was catechizing his young son about the Serbs. “Who are our enemies?” asked the father. The child seemed confused, so the father answered for him. “The Serbs are our enemies! They killed our people!” he trumpeted; “and what will you do when you grow up?” This time the boy was ready. “I will kill the filthy Serbs!” he answered. The father was very pleased with his son.

One day it’s the Germans, the next day it’s the Serbs, today it seems to be the French. The enemy lines are hard to find. We should remember that the madrasas were financed in part by the US government during the 80s when the Afghans were fighting the Soviets, and then we left Afghanistan to the tender mercies of the Taliban. The axis of evil lies here, there and everywhere. Václav Havel, recently retired as president of the Czech Republic, wrote that during the rule of Soviet Communism in Czechoslovakia, there were so many everyday acts of compromise on the part of so many people that it became impossible to tell who was a collaborator and who was not. These are his words: “The line [between good and evil] did not run clearly between ‘them’ and ‘us,’ but through each person. No one was simply a victim; everyone was in some measure co-responsible...Many people were on both sides.”[4] Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn says almost exactly the same thing in The Gulag Archipelago.[5]

The season of Lent reminds the Christian community that the line runs through you and the line runs through me. It reminds us to beware of drawing lines between ourselves on the good side and others on the bad side. Those of you who were fortunate to be in church on Ash Wednesday will know what I mean when I say that reading Psalm 51 together on our knees, as we do on that day, is a very powerful act. We are acknowledging the truth about ourselves. In the words of that Psalm, “I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.” In the words of our Psalm for today, “Who can tell how often he offends? Cleanse thou me from my secret faults.”

When we cannot hear such things about ourselves without bristling and becoming defensive, we are in trouble. When we are unable to utter a sincere apology and ask for forgiveness, our primary relationships are in trouble. When a nation treats dissent as unpatriotic, the whole world is in trouble. Repentance, the Lenten theme, is necessary for human well-being. Our leaders in former times seemed to know this. Our two greatest presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, both called the nation to repentance. It is hard to imagine any president of either political party doing that today.

I recently read an article about repentance by Frederica Mathewes-Green, a well-known writer on Christian themes. She grabbed my attention with a new definition. “Repentance is not blubbering and self-loathing. Repentance is insight.”[6]

Repentance is insight. Repentance is not groveling. I’m sure you will recall that many people were turned off when Trent Lott seemed to be groveling. Moreover, repentance is quite a different thing from saying “I’m sorry if anyone was offended” a dozen times. Repentance involves trying to understand why people were offended, why people were hurt, why people would like to hear a true and sincere apology, and why we ourselves have been offenders. “Who can tell how often he offends? Cleanse thou me from my secret faults.”

Repentance means insight. That’s what Tolkien meant in his letter to his son when he said “What of the writer?” He meant that the newspaper editor lacked insight. He was so quick to label others as evil that he did not understand his own inclinations. That’s the problem with the headlines that stir up readers to easy identification of Saddam as evil, and his sons as evil. That makes it so easy for us. We relish looking at the evil of others because it distracts us from the need to examine ourselves, a much more difficult task. I wonder if you have seen the movie, The Pianist. In my opinion it is the best movie ever made about the Holocaust. Among other things, it raises the question in the most acute way: What would I have done if I had been there? I have never seen a movie that illustrated so vividly the way that the line between good and evil becomes blurred under pressure. This movie offers insight.

Two weeks ago I was preaching in another church and I mentioned the book by former Senator Bob Kerrey in which he tells how when he was in Vietnam he got swept up into a massacre of women and children. Reflecting on this later, he wrote, “I did not recognize the person I had become.” A man came up to me afterwards and said that he had had the same feeling about himself. He, too, was a Vietnam veteran. He had been a door gunner in a helicopter, a position which, I am told, is very dangerous. He told me that he was sure he had killed as many women and children as Kerry had, though from a bit of a distance. More important, he said he had felt a rage and hatred within himself that he had not known was there. His exact words were, “It scared the hell out of me.” He meant that he was more afraid of his own impulses than he was of being in the door of the helicopter.

The paradox of this is that when a Christian makes a confession like that in the context of the Christian community, though it is deeply sobering, is also liberating. We make our confessions in the secure embrace of the gospel. What is the gospel? Listen to this verse from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans: God has consigned all human beings to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all.

All of us share in the human condition; that is the meaning of Lent. All of us have dark impulses that could have become murderous had we been brought up in a garbage dump or been catechized by a father full of hate and revenge. Who knows if Saddam’s sons are evil? Do you know? How do you know? Who told you? And if they are evil, who knows what influences made them evil? Let me be clear: action has to be taken against evil deeds. But the Christian will beware lest more evil deeds begin to erupt from within as well as from without.

It is God’s plan to have mercy upon us. He has consigned all human beings to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all. The epistle of Peter puts it another way: Jesus Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God. The righteous died for the unrighteous: that is to say, he, the only truly righteous one, died for the unrighteous. And again Paul: While we were still helpless, Christ died for the ungodly (Romans 5:6).

The one great mistake we could make today is to think of ourselves in the wrong category. The Lord Jesus did not die for the righteous. He did not die for the godly. He did not die for the exceptional so that we, the saved, could delight in our own superiority and gloat over others. The Bible teaches us to see ourselves as God sees us. Suppose you and I were at the mercy of what our enemies think of us? Thanks be to God, the ultimate destiny of human beings is not to be determined by enemies. We live and die at the mercy of God, “to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” “Cleanse thou me from my secret faults, O God.”

God sees you as you really are and he loves you. God sees those parts of you that you hide even from yourself and he loves you. God sees us all dividing up the world into good and evil but he, the only One entitled to divide the evil from the good, the One who could have remained enthroned above our struggles, out of his love came into the world to be “numbered among the transgressors.” (Isaiah 53:12). Through his Son Jesus Christ he has entered into our condition, bowing his head under the onslaught of human vengefulness, indifference, cruelty and hate in order to show mercy to us all, especially to the perpetrators.

He died the death of an outcast, he died the death of a condemned man, he died the death of one who was declared an enemy of all the righteous of the state and of the church. With the last breath of his body and the last drop of his blood he has wrought the salvation of his enemies, that is to say, the salvation of each and every one of us.

AMEN.

Copyright Fleming Rutledge, 2003

[1] The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 93.
[2] According to the article, about 40 percent of the 10,000 madrasas in Pakistan are moderate. 60 percent are run by the hard-line Deobandi sect.
[3] David Rohde, “A Dead End for Afghan Children Adrift in Pakistan,” The New York Times 3/7/03.
[4] Quoted in article by Timothy Garton Ash in The New York Review of Books, date temporarily misplaced.
[5] “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either¾but right through every human heart....This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts there remains...an uprooted small corner of evil.” (Part !V, Chapter 1)
[6] “Whatever Happened to Repentance?” Christianity Today, 2/4/02.