HEAPING COALS OF FIRE

A SERMON FOR THE 3RD SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY

The question of how we should act towards our enemies is always a difficult one.  When we are attacked, whether physically, verbally, emotionally, or however, it may be, we experience certain feelings, usually of anger, resentment, depression or something similar.  Now, I can’t say often enough, and I’ll say it again now, that we can’t help how we feel—only how we act.  In other words, no matter what we might feel about the injury done to us, what’s important is not how we feel about it, but what we do about it.

As usual, when we’re not sure, we look to the Scriptures for guidance.  Today’s Epistle is unambiguous—“Avenge not yourselves,” says St. Paul, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay.”  So it would seem that any time someone attacks or hurts us in any way, we should just sit back and let them do it…  Even our Lord tells us to forgive our enemies and turn the other cheek.  This kind of passive response, however, goes completely against those ‘feelings’ we have, doesn’t it?  And we can even justify a more aggressive reaction sometimes.  For example, do we not teach our sons that if they are being bullied they should punch the bully in the face rather than just taking his beating like a little wimp?  And if we’re never going to fight back, why on earth do we feel the need for a Second Amendment that permits us to carry a firearm?

The truth is that we have a natural—and therefore God-given—right to self-defence.  However, let’s remember a ‘right’ is not the same as a ‘duty.’  Just because we have the right to defend ourselves doesn’t necessarily mean that we have the obligation to fight back.  We still have to figure out when it’s okay to retaliate, and when should we turn that other cheek?  That’s where prudence, common sense, charity, and a whole host of other virtues need to be factored in.  I can give one or two pointers, but ultimately we have to use our own judgment and try to do what we think God would want us to do.

Pointer number one is that any retaliation must be proportionate.  Even the civil law upholds this standard.  For example, if someone stops us in the street and demands our wallet, we’re not allowed to whip out our .38 and blow him away.  Lethal force, they tell us, must only be used if our life is endangered.  This makes sense, and is the same principle by which parents don’t beat their children with a baseball bat because they have the TV too loud.  The whole point is not to escalate the situation.  There’s no telling how far it might go, and it’s always better to try and calm things down if possible.

Secondly, the threat must be imminent.  You must be actually under attack.  Try and avoid the idea that revenge is something that’s best served cold.  We’re supposed to be defending ourselves from imminent harm, not getting our own back.  The vengeance part of things is not for us to deal out.  God’s justice is quite sufficient and we may comfortably leave it to him. 

We may legitimately wonder whether it’s okay to use pre-emptive violence to prevent an attack that we know is coming.  That’s a tricky one, as there are so many possible variables, not to mention room for mistakes.  If a nasty-looking man approaches us on a quiet street in the middle of the night, we can’t attack him just for looking nasty.  Maybe he wants to ask us what time it is.  So we must be extremely careful in pre-judging the actions of others.

Our Lord himself gives us various examples of how to act towards our enemies.  In today’s Gospel, we see such an enemy in the person of a Roman centurion.  He’s a soldier in the army occupying the Holy Land and persecuting God’s chosen people at the time, so how does our Lord act towards him?  When the enemy beseeches him to come and heal his servant, our Lord replies simply, “I will come and heal him.”  He sets the example of which St. Paul will later write that “if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst give him drink.”  Later on, when soldiers like this centurion arrest our Lord in Gethsemane, scourge him, and crown him with thorns, he does not resist.  He goes to the Cross like a lamb to the slaughter, as Isaiah prophesied, not fighting back, not calling out any words of anger or resentment, but only of forgiveness.  He did point out, though, that God could have, and would have sent a whole legion of angels to defend him if that had been his will.  The circumstances changed how God wanted to handle the situation.

Take another occasion, for example, when our Lord reacted in a completely different manner.  When he saw his Father’s temple being desecrated by the money-lenders, he took a whip to them and drove them out.  It’s not clear if he actually whipped anyone, or whether the whip was merely a way of showing them he meant business, but it was certainly a different reaction than the one he showed on the road to Calvary. Here, the attack was in the process of being made, financial transactions were being made in God’s holy house, and God’s Son intervened to protect the home.  His actions that day were all the more remarkable for being so rare, and his example is clear—we may use physical force, but only in certain circumstances, and it should not be our normal reaction to acts we feel are hostile.

Holy men and women through the ages have been persecuted, even tortured and killed, for the sake of God and his anointed Son.  For their patience in suffering, they were crowned as martyrs.  But there have been other men and women, who literally fought, violently fought, for the rights of God and his Church.  These have never been canonized as saints.  We have only to think of Guy Fawkes and his famous Gunpowder Plot: he planted barrels of gunpowder in the cellars of Parliament, with a view to assassinating the Protestant king and his ministers, enemies of the Church, enemies of God, certainly.  But with his violent ideas, perhaps motivated more by politics than his love for God, Guy Fawkes brought the whole Catholic Church into disrepute, and ended up doing more harm than good.  He was executed for his attempt to kill the enemies of God, but he has never been recognized as a martyr.

In more recent times, the Irish Republican Army used similar tactics against what they perceived as the Protestant enemies of England.  However, they went far beyond mere self-defence, planting bombs in crowded public places, killing and maiming hundreds of innocent civilians, including children.  They may have seen themselves as crusaders for the faith, but in reality they were nothing but murderers.  One of my fellow-seminarians back in the 1980s took it into his head to attack John Paul II with a knife.  Fortunately, he was prevented from making actual contact, but we have to wonder what he was thinking!  “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord!”

In our own lives, we’re usually not confronted with gunpowder plots, Irish terrorists or crazy seminarians.  More likely, we have to put up with bad-tempered bosses and lazy employees, nagging wives, grumpy husbands and cheeky children.  And our own response is usually not going to be violent.  But guess what!  If we’re a boss with lazy employees, we’re going to be bad-tempered.  If we’re a wife with a grumpy husband, we’re going to nag.  The man with a nagging wife is going to be grumpy.  And so on it goes, forming a never-ending cycle of unpleasantness.  We must learn to stop this cycle by improving our own behavior and our tolerance of other people’s faults.  The lazy employee must work harder, and maybe his boss will treat him a little better.  The husband must work on his bad moods, and maybe his wife will appreciate him more.  The children must learn respect and how to cooperate within the home, and maybe their parents will be trust them more and be able to relax the rules a little.

Always think in terms of de-escalating the conflict.  Break the cycle.  “Live peaceably with all men,” as St. Paul says.  For if you try not to be overcome with evil, and try instead to overcome evil with good, you will take away the motivation of your adversary to do you harm.  How can you be angry at someone, let alone attack them, if they are being kind to you, smiling, showing God’s love?  And if this tactic does NOT work, then, says St. Paul you’ll be “heaping coals of fire on their head.”   It won’t be you throwing those coals of fire at them, though.  You will remain guiltless.  “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”  God is merciful to the repentant sinner, but he is a just God also, and the time will come when he will judge all those who fail to show mercy and keep the peace.  All those—including ourselves.