FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Eight Helping
To justify an evil is to promote the evil. To name an evil good is to assure that an evil will propagate itself. To sanctify an evil is to energize it with self righteous religious zeal.To accept an evil as justified, good and/or holy is to also accept the network of logical implications, conclusions and obligations that flow from that just, good and holy evil.
When Church leaders, bishops, priests, ministers and pastors, tell a Christian in their spiritual and moral care that he or she can be a faithful Christian, a faithful follower of Jesus, and join the military, go through military training and fight in war, they thereby weaponize Jesus. They make Him part of the homicidal military reality that motivates a Christian, empowers a Christian, to pull the trigger or press the button that will kill other infinitely loved sons and daughters of the “Father of all.”
How do bishops, priests, ministers and pastors who weaponize the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and put Him at the beck and call of homicidal military operations live with themselves? Weaponizing Jesus! What an atrocious agenda to have as part of your ministry!
It is universally understood that the first casualty of war is truth. The individual men and women who start wars lie because they know if they told the truth they could not get people to go to war. Jesus for Christians is the truth, “I am the truth” (Jn 14:6). For Christians then, the first casualty of war is always the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels who teaches a Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies. He is a casualty—in principle and in practice, theologically and morally, metaphysically and physically (Mt 25: 31-46, Acts 9:4-5). All possible efforts are expended by Church leaders to bury Him out of sight in some place inaccessible to the consciousness and conscience of ordinary Christians. To have the Jesus of history intentionally erased from Christian memory, by Church leaders, precisely in the area that the war makers need His memory erased in order to be unimpeded in securing Christian cannon fodder, makes the true Jesus of history who is thetruth a casualty, a victim, of war and of Church leaders/rulers who have some other agenda than the task Jesus explicitly gave them: “And teach them to obey all that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:20).
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
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