Orphans

I saw a screenshot in the aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt on Sunday. Some academic somewhere saying something to the effect of, “So close!” The gleeful comments obligingly took their place below. Should have had better aim! Dammit, just an inch the other way. What a glorious day this could have been! Etc., etc. The screenshot was captured as a gotcha moment. Look at all these self-righteous “progressive” elites who claim to have the moral high ground, wallowing around in the mud of glorying in an attempted assassination. It was all so wearyingly predictable. And of course, if it had been Biden’s ear that was grazed, the same sad scenario would have been playing out in different corners of the internet that are emotionally invested in being perpetually aggrieved in other directions. We are, it has seemed to me for a very long time now, grossly and terrifyingly invested in who and how we hate.

A few weeks ago, I listened to an interview with Stanford scholar Cynthia Haven on a book she edited on the thought of Rene Girard. I’ve encountered Girard often over the years, but mostly on a very surface level. I have a basic understanding of his work on scapegoating and the mimetic nature of desire, but that’s about it. A lot of the interview kind of sailed past me, but I was struck by one part where the interviewer seemed to be genuinely struggling with Girard’s idea that until we can understand ourselves as “perpetrators” or “persecutors” we won’t really understand much about human nature. How, I wondered, could anyone struggle with this?

Haven seemed to agree. She responded, in part, thus:

Goodness. Isn’t it obvious? We’re perps. I mean, we think of ourselves as the innocents, the people that are put upon. But we don’t have to think very hard before each one of us, I mean, I don’t think it’s presumptuous for me to assume I’m speaking for everyone. Each of us has been a perpetrator of injustices on a bigger, small scale. Whether it’s punishing your kid because you’re mad at someone else at the office, or just turning away from people that need help. I mean, it goes on and on. We’re all guilty of stuff. We’re all guilty of bending the truth. We’re all guilty of rewriting the story to favor our own innocence.

It’s easy to read that paragraph and slap it on to our ugly, polarized cultural moment or the endless tawdry theatre that masquerades as politics. Both sides rewrite the story to favour their own innocence. Both sides bend the truth. Both sides airbrush the public narrative to exclude inconvenient, unflattering data. Etc., etc. This would all be very true. Maybe even useful and necessary. It’s far harder to apply it to ourselves.

But we must. We must drill down into the granular level of our lives, honestly interrogating things like the way we talk to our kids, the way we respond to our spouses at the end of a day, the ways we engage on social media, the content we consume (and the impulses in us that this feeds), the way we criticize or mock other people to justify ourselves or  make ourselves look better than we are, the way we all are so very prone to rewriting the story—big stories, small stories, and every story in between—to favour our innocence. If our politics or our culture are ever to change, we must be honest about who we are. We are all perps. We are not innocent.

I’ve been pondering the story of Jesus’ healing the man born blind for a while now. It’s one of the guys in the jail’s favourite scenes from The Chosen. We’ve also read the actual story from the ninth chapter of John’s gospel. The healing is very cool, yes. But they really love it when Jesus puts the Pharisees in their place. How could those Pharisees be obsessing about days of the week and Sabbath violations when a guy just got his sight?! What is wrong with them? They love it when the guy who was healed essentially says, “Obsess about your rules all you want, all I know is that I was blind but now I can see.”

The punch line of the story is the end. The Pharisees overhear Jesus talking to the man born blind. Jesus says, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” The Pharisees shuffle their feet and look awkwardly around. Surely, he’s not talking about us! Jesus then speaks directly and unambiguously to them. “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”

If you were blind, you would not have sin… Somehow, in the kingdom of God, there is a blindness that is a prerequisite to seeing God, the world, and our selves truly. We must recognize that we cannot see truly unless our vision is refracted through the love and the mercy of God. If we insist on seeing through the categories of our own righteousness, our own innocence, our own moral heroism, our own self-congratulatory categories of identity, or—God help us—by who we hate, then we will remain helplessly and dangerously blind. Our sin will remain.

One of the other things that Cynthia Haven mentioned near the end of the interview was the story of Herod (the Jewish puppet king) and Pilate (the Roman governor) bonding together around the crucifixion of Jesus in Luke 23). These former enemies became friends around the scapegoating of an innocent man. Of this, Haven said,

We bond by joining the persecutors. It’s hard to be an orphan.

Indeed, it is. Perhaps the time has come for the blind orphans to show the way. The ones who refuse to pile on, to stake out territory, to perform their moral and political allegiances for the world to affirm or condemn, to derive meaning and identity from who and how they hate.  The ones who know (or want to know) how very little they see, who refuse (or want to refuse) to join the stone throwers, who look (or want to look) to the Lord of love alone for rescue.

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Image info:

Title: Christ and the Pauper
Date: 2008
Artist: Mironov, Andreĭ