Radical
Radical. The word can mean “new and innovative” or it can mean “extreme.” The violence that unfolded at the U.S. Capitol last week was most definitely extreme, and it was deeply disturbing to see the name of Jesus and his cross used as a rallying cry for aggression and anger. I still shudder to think that so many people around the world witnessed this gross misuse of the symbols of the Christian faith. But there was one scene in particular that troubled me even more.
Moments before the capitol building was breached, a reporter stepped into the crowd and stopped a young man who appeared to be in his early twenties. She asked him what he was hoping to accomplish. “They are going to kill us.” He said with genuine fear. “Who?” the reporter asked, but the young man couldn’t clearly identify of whom he was afraid. It was just “them.” He went on to say that he had seen someone in a window of a government building filming the crowd and “laughing at us.” This young man was utterly consumed by paranoia and fear of the “other,” though he wasn’t exactly sure who the other was.
A crowd can be dehumanized and viewed as the faceless embodiment of their collective purpose – good or bad. But it’s hard to separate individuals from their humanity when they exude a raw human emotion like fear. The man in that video clip was radically afraid, and he didn’t even fully understand the source of his fear. It was evident that this young man, a person created in the image of God, had been radicalized.
I was surprised when a feeling something like compassion jabbed at me as I watched that clip, and I haven’t been able to shake it. I can’t stop contemplating what it took for this man to become caught up in the grip of irrational fear. It must have taken a steady diet of misinformation magnified by the collective opinions and emotions of his peers or in-group for him to get to that place. I wonder how many half-truths and false statements he ingested before he began to be driven by feeling rather than reason. And I wonder what it would take for me to end up there.
When we begin to focus on anything other than Jesus and his teachings, we are in danger of being radicalized by false hopes. Human institutions, no matter how well they were constructed, are flawed, and putting our hope in them leads to disappointment at best and radicalization at worst. Our socio-political ideologies and our governments do not have the power to save us. Simply put, Christian Nationalism is an oxymoron. Followers of Jesus identify first and foremost with him and not with a political leader or party.
The way of Jesus is the way of creative non-violence. It’s love for the “other” and blessing for the “enemy.” On the cross Jesus allowed evil to empty itself violently out on him while asking God to forgive the individual humans acting as channels for evil. In refusing to answer violence with violence, Jesus emptied evil of its power to enslave and radicalize us. We are free to choose because of him.
I long to be a radical disciple of Jesus, and that requires a steady diet of him and his teaching. It requires that I read all of Scripture through the lens of Jesus and resist the urge to soften his words or tone him down a bit and reason away his radical call to love. It also requires finding peers who have the same desire to follow him and know him as he is. Jesus doesn’t just tell the truth, he is truth, and following him means being driven by love rather than fear.
Christian leaders and influencers who urge others to put their trust in a political leader or party are not following the way of Jesus. Jesus’ way is not the way of fear and divisiveness, and those who use their platform to manipulate others and incite anger, hatred and violence do so at the peril of their souls. The litmus test of Jesus is love for God and love for others, and any rhetoric to the contrary is clearly not of him.
Fellow followers of Jesus, we must wake up. There are many of us on both sides of the political aisle who have drifted and are being deceived. Like the young man in the angry mob outside the Capitol, we are becoming radicalized by half-truths and lies, and we are looking less and less like the one we claim to follow. Our fear of the “other side” is a growing chasm of paranoia into which we will fall if we do not recognize it and choose to walk away from it.
Because of what Jesus did for us, we have a choice to live differently. May we choose to examine the world around us through the lens of Jesus. May we hold him high above all other allegiances, and may we have the courage to choose his radical love.
