Other-ness loving justice

Since coming to seminary, I have heard too many anecdotes about women in particular who are pushed toward marrying by religious folk.  I also think of how the Christianity has become so conflated with "family values" in the public realm.  While I surely challenge family values in the exclusionist nature in which Christianity is defined by what it is against (read homosexuality) rather than what it is for (read Jesus), I am not so fond of short pithy phrases on bumper stickers for they often over-simplify (with the exception of "When Jesus said love your enemies, I think he meant don't kill them").  I wondered what we might claim Jesus has to say about marriage and family.  Paul seems indifferent to marriage and counsels others to stay as they are, and Jesus disowned his own family according to some accounts of the Gospels.  He certainly didn't stay in his home and his town, bound up in the influences that helped to form him; rather he uprooted himself from his community and was quite transient...hmmm, maybe Jesus was American after all.  

I think of the reasons why we exclude others, and more troublingly, why it is tied up in Christian language and religious sentiment.  Just think of the force with we push away prisoners, homeless people, and immigrants whether it is b/c of a fear of otherness, out of a misplaced fervor for justice, or most troubling (not just for the sake of the other but for our own salvation though it is surely an articifial split since salvation is wrapped up in the other) a sense of entitlement to what is "ours".

I posit that the connections of family and other-ness are worth noting.  Our country is full of people who practice what Tolstoy refers to as the false ideal of "future love".  We put away money in the bank account for those closest to us IN CASE something might happen to them while something IS happening to the children in the shadows of our inner cities and in poor countries around the globe.  The idea is that we feel a strong sense of attatchment to family, and that is a grand thing in an age in which kids never see their fathers.  It could be that family teaches us how to transcend the self or maybe better to be a more robust self, but I fear that in many cases, family only becomes an extension of self.

The kid down the street plays gets to play twice as many minutes in the rec league soccer game as your kid.  A teenager who is less numerically qualified gets into the college that your son hoped to attend.  Or think of the parents in the movie "Dead Man Walking".  Sean Penn is an accomplice to the murder of their daughter.   Think of the love they feel for their child.  It has not been honored, right?  Surely, they are right to be upset for if they weren't they would seem not to be fully human.  But do theyfind healing in channeling that anger into retribution?  The tragedy is that in a sense, justice is not possible in terms of making things be the way they should be or returning them to the way there once were.  What IS possible is reconciliation, but they great love, being misplaced moves them to retaliation, which appears to not even be in their own interest or well-being.

We use the language of justice to seek what we think is an equilibrium, which often times is little more than vengeance.  We want to get even and restore things to the way they should be.  But problematically, Jesus wasn't so concerned about bringing about certain outcomes (re-pay what is done).  He cared more about how we responded to these tensions and more about a disposition and a way of being, an orientation toward the neighbor that would bring about the kingdom of God, in which justice has a place.  So how do we resolve these seemingly conflicted ideals of justice and the love of the other?  And if we aren't to resolved them, how do we approach them, or perhaps how do we rest in this tension?

Miroslav Volf points us to the cross, more specifically, what he calls "the scandal of the cross".  The scandal of the cross is that while we are surely to seek justice for the sake of the oppressed, Jesus died also for the oppressor.  And not only has he atoned for them, but he calls us to embrace them.  Volf asks us to hold the justice for the oppressed and the forgiveness of the oppressor in tension with each other (or at least in what seems to be a tension to all of us).  Hmmm...hold them in tension, maybe Jesus wasn't so American after all.  Volf goes on to push us a little further than "When Jesus said love your enemies, I think he meant don't kill them" as we are to embrace the ones who have done harm to or killed us and our people.

So let's come back to the family?  Is Jesus really hating on the family?  While I sometimes want to break with certain strands of Christianity that make the family an idol, I think that they are, after all, right to presume that Jesus is not anti-family and perhaps even pro-family.  But only to the extent that it is a springboard.  The family is not an end in itself, but it is where we are to learn to love and to be bound up in the relationships than frustrate us but nonetheless that we are faithful to.  Lisa Cahill (family teaches you to love community, community teaches you to love nation, nation teaches you to love world), Leo Tolstoy (our country is the world and our countrymen are all mankind, Thick Nhat Hahn (in meditation, send your mind in one direction, then another, then another, until it can go in all directions at once), and I dare say Jesus, they all say the same thing in different ways.  The family, or one's immediate community, is a great thing to be faithful to.  However, this identification with a certain people should be a way to learn to be open to the other (and spill over into further extended circles) rather than a reason to be closed to others with other identities.  It is the existence of other-ness that allows us to be us, and it is an openness to other-ness that Jesus calls us to, and not just as trial of self-denial and suffering, but as a journey toward salvation, toward our true self, a self bound up in the story of the cross in which others (Jesus and the Roman world) collide in violence, and in which others are reconciled (God and humanity).  The irony is that if Jesus were to seek justice as we do, we would be the prisoners, the homeless, the immigrants.  Except, that is who Jesus spent his time with.  That is who Jesus identified with.  Jesus was that other.  

"For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.'  Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink?  And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing?  And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?'  And the king will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me."