FAST FOOD (2018): Tenth Helping
“If we know anything at all about the words of Jesus, we know that he was not indifferent to human pain. Fear of compromising his divinity has often kept Christians from seeing how deeply human pain entered into his soul. Jesus never said that suffering is not real, or that it does not hurt much, or that it passes quickly, or that it is good for you. He seems to have recommended something too simple, which does not touch the theoretical, philosophical problem of suffering. His response to suffering was this: stop hurting each other. That much anyone can do; if you cannot do that much, do not form a study group. If one believes anything about Jesus, one knows that he was deeply and personally involved with people, more deeply than anyone who ever lived; it is blasphemy to suggest that he was cold or unfeeling or could ever have thought that people, like eggs, had to be broken for a good cause.”
–Rev. John L. McKenzie
Catholic Biblical Scholar
Gospel Nonviolence insists that Christians and Churches stop being agents of pain. Simple enough. But there are very few Christians and no Churches willing to relinquish whatever degree of pain-inducing power they possess. In fact it would require a watershed change of mind, aka metanoia, to commit and to persevere to not being an agent of pain in this world. One of the perennial issue of philosophical ethics is, “Who should suffer and why?” It is a critical question within the mystery of human existence, but it is a question that is seldom to never heard asked among Christians or any other people. Jesus answers the question. But few like His answer whether communicated in the Sermon on the Mount or in the Sermon from the Cross. And so, they make up answers to the question, which they say are just as good as Jesus’—all of which permit Christians to be voluntary agents of pain, to be perpetrators of pain on other human beings, to break a eggs to make a beautiful and delicious omelet.
-ECM
