I was away from Twitter, my most wonted time waster and repository of the online ghosts of basically all of my friends, for Advent, hoping that the extra [redacted] hours in my day and the less reactive posture made possible by having no idea what was going on in the world might lead me to longer-form thoughts, which I might then put here. Of course this did not happen, as the daily cares and stressors simply expanded to fill available space, like a noxious gas or those sponge dinosaurs* in little dissolvable capsule eggs. If I did have a moment to think, I thought again about the last thing I got really mad about online, which was some guy with a television show saying… this:
The Biblical response to oppression? Be holy, love one another, submit to one another, and if you are a pastor, shepherd your flock well (1 Peter 1-5). Not a word about fighting injustice.
Of course he was roundly owned and I too did a thread, as one does when mad online, and there are many obvious problems one might skewer without even touching the substance of the tweet: The speciousness of suggesting a “Biblical response” to anything, the speciousness of this guy talking about oppression, the vacuity of the word “holy” without definition, and so forth. But finding my thoughts drifting back to the bad tweet, itself just the most recent formulation of an old and common idea, I finally admitted what was probably obvious to any dispassionate observer, namely that the reason we were so mad was that the old and common idea is partly true—not true enough not to be damnable, but true enough to defend, should one choose to, and to demand a rebuttal. Which is to say, true enough that a well-meaning person who valued scripture might believe it.
I am thinking about this on Christmas Day because the impossibility of Christmas, the vulnerability of God in a way that is not at all metaphor, the Word made flesh in a literal baby, a squalling and helpless infant, seems to have a great deal to say about meekness in the face of oppression, in the sense of commending it. You don’t need to buy into Once in Royal David’s City-style “Jesus was a good little boy” ideas of a non-humanlike childhood for Jesus to recognize how profound and absurd it is for God to become a human baby, and then a toddler, and then a little kid, and then a prepubescent, and then a teenager, exposed without his consent to an oppressive government and the disadvantages of material poverty, not to mention having to do what his parents said. Even the ministry of the adult Christ can be read in a fairly quietistic way, as he healed without much reference to politics and then submitted to execution without complaint.
But it’s the execution and its aftermath that’s really the rub, that is, the resurrection and its shaking of the foundations of the world. Christ was born a tiny crying needing thing and people did for him what he could not and he did nothing for himself; and then, dying and rising, he did for all of humankind what we could not, not for himself but for us, to the glory of God. The impossibility of Christmas is always seen in the shadow of the Cross (it’s even in our hymns, “Jesus Christ was born for this,” “born that we no more may die,” on and on), and what is not done for one’s own self is, crucially, done for others. “In the face of oppression, be meek” is both true and appalling because, having died with Christ to the world, we do not live for ourselves anymore, and as we live in him, we live for others.
Philippians 2 heads the kenotic hymn with the admonition to have the same mind that was in Christ, and to in humility regard others as better than ourselves. Christ who did not defend himself defended all of us from the last worst evil and wages of our sin. It is not that meekness is not commanded; it is: the meek shall inherit the earth, as God’s people we are to clothe ourselves “with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience,” we are to endure all things because of love, yes, all of these things, but for ourselves. Only ourselves.
The prophets, often a more straightforward source for the kind of go-get-’em justice that is the daily bread of angry pietists like me, are incomprehensible held up against some of Jesus and some of Paul unless the object of the justice is brought into careful focus: it’s the vulnerable, those who, again, cannot do for themselves. Rulers are liable to judgment for their exploitation of the poor and the people in toto for their abandonment of the needs of those who cannot provide for themselves; the meekness of widows and orphans is more or less presumed, and the land is their inheritance, but woe to those by whom the meekness is enforced.
The thing that makes the bad tweet damnable is not the call to meekness and submission but its implication that meekness and submission preclude any kind of justice work, when, Biblically speaking, abandonment of those whose burden is heaviest regularly calls down the wrath of God. The Christian is not just called but commanded to be meek and humble as regards herself, but she cannot be meek and humble as regards those in positions of danger, vulnerability, or suffering, in fact is not just called but commanded to provide for and defend, even unto death.
The infant Christ, meek by definition and not choice, was kept alive through the love and protection of Joseph and Mary and, perhaps, the whole village of Nazareth; the dead Christ descended, as the dead do, to hell; and then he tore it wide open and hauled us all out by our uncomprehending wrists. It of course does not do to imagine ourselves, like Christ, saving the uncomprehending by force, but it is necessary, I think, to recognize that meekness of heart and fierceness in defense do not conflict, and the cultivation of both is part of Christian discipleship and living in this hell-world until he returns.
Merry Christmas, never tweet.
* They are a superabsorbent polymer, not regular sponge, but the rhythm of the thing, you know.
NOR ANY OTHER CREATED THING 