Work well. Speak truthfully. Embody decency.
"There's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter
of common decency. That's an idea which may make
some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague
is — common decency." Albert Camus, The Plague
We hear a lot these days about these being “unprecedented times,” which is for us Americans more or less true. But as the powers and their most fervent supporters continue to bend our society towards so-called “illiberal democracy” while the rest of us wonder what to do, it might be prudent to recall that other societies have experienced similar, often much worse, upheavals, and those who led their societies out of those scary, chaotic times could have things to teach us about weathering our own difficulties. Just so, I’d like to enlist the help of an important 20th-century political activist to reflect on this week’s lectionary texts.
In his 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless, the Czech dissident playwright Václav Havel described the regnant political system in his nation as one that maintained order as much by “permeating the entire society and shaping it” as by actual or threatened state brutality. Havel called this society and others like it “auto-totalitarian,” observing that most people had become passively complicit with “the system” simply by allowing themselves to drift into the relative comfort it made available to them. “In everyone,” he said, “there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudolife.” Such accommodation, he said, was simply part of the comfortably numb indifference typical of the prisoners of consumerism. “A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accouterments of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society.”
In such a milieu, Havel said, effective resistance comes not only from well-organized activism, but from ordinary people of conscience who devote themselves to doing good work, being good neighbors, and reminding one another “that every piece of good work is an indirect criticism of bad politics.” Importantly, Havel explains that such small-scale resistance is neither a substitute for organized activism, nor is it necessarily safer. Even so, he claims, “It is impossible to talk about what in fact ‘dissidents’ do and the effect of their work without first talking about the work of all those who, in one way or another, take part in the independent life of society and who are not necessarily ‘dissidents’ at all.”
To the extent that our society today resembles the consumerist auto-totalitarianism Havel describes, then his account of dissidence born of everyday decency may offer a lens for reading this week’s lectionary texts. For those texts are about the power of working well, speaking truthfully, and embodying decency—all potentially ways of making God’s reign present—as means of resisting chaos and injustice.
Psalm 37, which begins, “Do not fret because of the wicked; do not be envious of wrongdoers, / for they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb,” appears initially to be a song of reassurance written to a people suffering injustice. Yet as the psalm unfolds, the reader begins to see why Walter Brueggemann numbers it among the “psalms of orientation,” written by and for a people for whom the world was working according to their well-ordered expectations, and who attributed that well-working to the faithfulness of God. The psalm is very nearly formulaic; God has faithfully blessed this people with the abundance of the land God has given them, and can be trusted to continue that blessing so long as the people remain faithful.
This is all well and good, one might say, but what work does this Psalm do for people whose experience of the world is decidedly disorienting, who see the world as chaotic, even to the point of coming unglued? One point we may wish to make is that as legitimate as such feelings of disorientation may be, they should not lead us to dismiss or scorn the Psalm 37. For even though it does not immediately resonate with the experience of those whose world no longer makes sense, it nonetheless articulates a fundamental truth about the moral arc of the universe. If we read Psalm 37 through an eschatologicallens, we can affirm along with the psalmist that ultimately, “The salvation of the righteous is from the LORD; he is their refuge in the time of trouble. / The LORD helps them and rescues them; he rescues them from the wicked and saves them because they take refuge in him” (vv. 39-40).
But this is a theological point that is not likely to satisfy those who want to know what to do, on their neighbors’ or their own behalf, in a suddenly chaotic and dangerous world. Their questions may better be answered by the gospel lesson. The text, which makes up a large part of the “Sermon on the Plain” (Luke 6:20-47), parallels and is probably drawn from the same source material as the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:1-7:29). The starkest difference between this text and the psalm is context: Luke’s gospel is written to a people with real enemies, powerful agents of chaos who wield the oppressive weight of Caesar’s thumb. Just so, everything in the text, and for that matter, the entire Sermon on the Plain, flows from the first sentence, “But I say to you who are listening: Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you.”
Here we see an interesting difference between Luke’s Sermon on the Plain and Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. While both revolve around Jesus’s exhortation to “love your enemies,” in Matthew Jesus proceeds almost immediately to explain why we should love our enemies, while Luke’s Jesus offers his audience three concrete ways of doing so. While Luke eventually gets around to telling us why and Matthew scatters practical instructions about how earlier in the discourse, the differences are about more than the ways they order excerpts from source texts. By offering practical instructions for how to love enemies proximate to the command to do so, Luke is suggesting that acts of love can also be acts of resistance.
It was customary in the ancient Near East, including Roman occupied Judea, to use the right hand in one’s dealings with another person, whether offering a greeting, doing business, or meting out punishment. A Roman soldier was permitted by law to strike a non-Roman provincial who disobeyed or otherwise displeased him; the blow was to be struck on the right side of the face, with the back of the soldier’s hand, as an indication of the Roman’s superiority to the provincial subject. Jesus’s telling his followers to respond to being struck by offering the soldier their other (left) cheek to the solider would require the soldier to strike them forehanded, with an open palm, which was the way a Roman would strike a person of equal status. By “turning the other cheek,” the follower of Jesus would be challenging the soldier to treat him as an equal, thereby leaving the soldier with an insoluble dilemma. Jesus’s exhortations about carrying a Roman soldier’s burden, giving up one’s coat in lieu of paying a debt, or refusing to accept collateral or even to expect repayment of a loan made all function in a similar way: they are loving responses to the unjust demands of an enemy that are far less accommodating than they seem.
Examples of such acts exist in our own time, waiting to be discovered, attended to, and imitated. They challenge the status quo through common human decency that speaks volumes without saying a word. Perhaps they will lead us to ask what Vaclav Havel called the “real question” to be asked of his own society, which is “whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?”
Amen.