Amnesty

Amnesty’s sure been in the news a lot lately.  Conservatives in Congress shout it about anything not guarantying the swift deportation of anybody that don’t belong here (especially the brown ones).  ”What they’re talking about is AMNESTY!” … “It’s not amnesty!” … ” IT IS TOO!”. “WE SPEAK ENGLISH HERE!!!”.  It’s mystifies me the scurrilous way some folks say amnesty. Seems the more they profess Christian values, the broader they snarl at the thought of it.

Amnesty is letting people off the hook, granting them pardon. Except for maybe Richard Nixon, you got to say what Jesus’s did with that woman at the well was the be most widely publicized pardon ever. He just up and let her go scot-free. In fact, He went on and pardoned every single one of us for every crime we have ever committed, in one quick swoop – just like that. I guess that means we’ve all been given amnesty. Pretty nice, huh?  Makes you want to act better, don’t it?

This week, amnesty has come up in another context. Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri Al-Maliki has announced a plan which includes amnesty for insurgents – even those who have killed U.S. troops. Outrage in Congress is expected, but curiously it is coming from the left, while the right seems to want to  accommodate it. There’s no figuring politicians, is there?

Well, what I do know is that amnesty’s well founded in Christian principles. Our Lord washed the slate for us and expects us to do the same. If necessary, seventy-seven times for each offense. To be truly OK with amnesty, we have to actually forgive those who transgress against us.  We certainly don’t do that very much these days.  But we’ve got to, and even more.  We’ve got to learn how to love our enemies.  It’s one of the first thing He told us to do and He didn’t make it optional.

Dr. Martin Luther King understood the hidden power of this.  With it, he accomplished a great miracle in America.  As a rambunctious southern whiteboy who’s  teenage years were in the mid 60′s, I can tell you just exactly how great.   Thru Christ’s simple principle of love, the lives of millions of Americans were changed forever, and the hatred that comsumed millions more was quietly broken.  Something I never would have thought would happen in my lifetime – not in a million years.

Dr King planted some of the seeds for this miracle in a sermon to a little congregation in Alabama.  The year was 1957.   I post this great sermon in it’s entirety here, and conclude with this excerpt: 

“….Now let me hasten to say that Jesus was very serious when he gave this command; he wasn’t playing. He realized that it’s hard to love your enemies. He realized that it’s difficult to love those persons who seek to defeat you, those persons who say evil things about you. He realized that it was painfully hard, pressingly hard. But he wasn’t playing. And we cannot dismiss this passage as just another example of Oriental hyperbole, just a sort of exaggeration to get over the point. This is a basic philosophy of all that we hear coming from the lips of our Master. Because Jesus wasn’t playing; because he was serious. We have the Christian and moral responsibility to seek to discover the meaning of these words, and to discover how we can live out this command, and why we should live by this command.

Now first let us deal with this question, which is the practical question: How do you go about loving your enemies?  I think the first thing is this: In order to love your enemies, you must begin by analyzing self. And I’m sure that seems strange to you, that I start out telling you this morning that you love your enemies by beginning with a look at self. It seems to me that that is the first and foremost way to come to an adequate discovery to the how of this situation.

Now, I’m aware of the fact that some people will not like you, not because of something you have done to them, but they just won’t like you. I’m quite aware of that. Some people aren’t going to like the way you walk; some people aren’t going to like the way you talk. Some people aren’t going to like you because you can do your job better than they can do theirs. Some people aren’t going to like you because other people like you, and because you’re popular, and because you’re well-liked, they aren’t going to like you. Some people aren’t going to like you because your hair is a little shorter than theirs or your hair is a little longer than theirs. Some people aren’t going to like you because your skin is a little brighter than theirs; and others aren’t going to like you because your skin is a little darker than theirs.  So that some people aren’t going to like you. They’re going to dislike you, not because of something that you’ve done to them, but because of various jealous reactions and other reactions that are so prevalent in human nature.

But after looking at these things and admitting these things, we must face the fact that an individual might dislike us because of something that we’ve done deep down in the past, some personality attribute that we possess, something that we’ve done deep down in the past and we’ve forgotten about it; but it was that something that aroused the hate response within the individual. That is why I say, begin with yourself. There might be something within you that arouses the tragic hate response in the other individual.

This is true in our international struggle. We look at the struggle, the ideological struggle between communism on the one hand and democracy on the other, and we see the struggle between America and Russia. Now certainly, we can never give our allegiance to the Russian way of life, to the communistic way of life, because communism is based on an ethical relativism and a metaphysical materialism that no Christian can accept. When we look at the methods of communism, a philosophy where somehow the end justifies the means, we cannot accept that because we believe as Christians that the end is pre-existent in the means. But in spite of all of the weaknesses and evils inherent in communism, we must at the same time see the weaknesses and evils within democracy.

Democracy is the greatest form of government to my mind that man has ever conceived, but the weakness is that we have never touched it. Isn’t it true that we have often taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes?   Isn’t it true that we have often in our democracy trampled over individuals and races with the iron feet of oppression? Isn’t it true that through our Western powers we have perpetuated colonialism and imperialism? And all of these things must be taken under consideration as we look at Russia. We must face the fact that the rhythmic beat of the deep rumblings of discontent from Asia and Africa is at bottom a revolt against the imperialism and colonialism perpetuated by Western civilization all these many years. The success of communism in the world today is due to the failure of democracy to live up to the noble ideals and principles inherent in its system.

And this is what Jesus means when he said: “How is it that you can see the mote in your brother’s eye and not see the beam in your own eye?” Or to put it in Moffat’s translation: “How is it that you see the splinter in your brother’s eye and fail to see the plank in your own eye?” And this is one of the tragedies of human nature. So we begin to love our enemies and love those persons that hate us whether in collective life or individual life by looking at ourselves.  [more ...]

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