Did you ever hear a person say “hate the sin, love the sinner”?
That’s right. Usually just before he whacks the sinner in the teeth.
Some Christian leaders in the U.S. said it about Bill Clinton. Yes, they love Bill Clinton the man, and they forgive him, as a man. But as President, he has to pay. He should be impeached.
This strikes me as a little strange. This is their interpretation of Christ’s commandment to his followers that they must be prepared to forgive people, seventy-seven times, or seven times seventy-seven times, if necessary. Jerry Falwell says that Jesus didn’t mean that you should let people get away with things. If a person strikes you on the cheek, you forgive him, of course. Then you whack him on his cheek, to teach him a lesson. This “turn the other cheek” business? Allegorical, I guess. A mere illustration—not to be taken seriously.
But Falwell is mistaken. Jesus did not mean, “forgive those who harm you, but make sure they are punished”. When Jesus said, “forgive”, he meant, forget about punishing them. Forget revenge. Forget “just deserts”. It’s as plain as day. Read it. Read the gospel. This is not an abstraction. It is not a symbol. It is not an option. If you are a Christian, you must forgive.
At the time of Christ’s ministry, there were no prisons for punishment, as we have today. The “penitentiary” is a modern invention. And it is a bizarre invention. It is a complete failure. The U.S. keeps building more and more of them as fast as they can—like McDonalds—but people keep committing more and more crimes.
The purpose of the Roman prison in Jesus’ time was to secure the evil-doer until justice could be done. Nobody was sent to prison as punishment. If you did something really, really bad, you would be executed. If you did something moderately bad, you had to make it up to the person you had wronged. You would be held in prison– fed by your family, hopefully– until you made up for what you had done. And if you were the personal enemy of a person with power—you might be held there until you died, or you might be exiled to some remote island. Nobody was sentenced to a “term” in prison. There was no such thing.
So when Jesus said to forgive those who wrong you, it meant something. It meant that a person in jail for robbing you would go free– because you no longer demanded restitution.
Jesus pointed out that forgiving our friends and being kind to those who are kind to us is not remarkable behaviour. However, forgiving our enemies and being kind to those who hate us is.
That’s a pretty tough demand. Almost as tough as asking people to give all that they own to the poor. Did Jesus mean it? I don’t know. We like to say that when the bible condemns fornicators to hell-fire and damnation, it really means it. When it asks us to give to the poor until it hurts us– it’s only being figurative. And these people– Falwell and Robertson and their ilk–tell you that the bible is meant to be taken literally– word for word.
Some people would argue, well, how could you run a society that way? People would rob you with impunity! They would do drugs. They would pirate software. They would rip those tags off their mattresses!
These people are mistaken. They assume that everyone will forgive, but nobody will be forgiven. Imagine for one minute a society in which everyone really lived according to Christ’s teachings. Imagine that everyone forgave each other. Imagine that everyone sold everything they had and gave the money to the poor. Imagine that everyone acted towards each other with goodwill and kindness and love. Do you still think, in this kind of society, that theft and murder and robbery would be a problem?
If our society took Christ’s approach to sin, everything would be different. Poverty, in which most crime is rooted, could not exist in a society that actually shared its wealth with the needy. Corporations would not close their plants in industrialized areas and move them to Mexico or Thailand. Cities would not have allowed their downtown areas to decay. Schools would be well-funded. Medical care would be provided to everyone equally. Drug addicts would be treated instead of incarcerated.
Ah—but we don’t live in that kind of society. But isn’t that the point? We tell our children not to emulate society, in the way that they fornicate and do drugs and watch perverted movies and listen to perverted music. But when it comes to forgiveness and compassion and love for your neighbor, we act just like everybody else. We’re out there joining the tail-gate parties at the prisons on execution night. We’re out there filing lawsuits seeking damages and laying charges and putting in alarm systems and buying guns. We’re out there demanding more prisons and harsher sentences.
Jesus also tells his followers to love their enemies. I guess Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson must regard Bill Clinton as a friend, because they certainly don’t love him.
If you asked Jerry Falwell, he would probably say, yes, by golly, I do love Bill Clinton, as a Christian, of course. He would be lying. He knows it. You know it. And I know it. The whole world knows that Jerry Falwell despises Bill Clinton. According to Salon Magazine, Jerry Falwell helped finance and distribute a 1994 video called “The Clinton Chronicles” which made numerous wildly unsupported allegations against the Clintons, including that they were involved in drug-dealing in Arkansas, and that they may have murdered Vince Foster.
Some days I am tempted to take at face value the polls that say that something like 70% of Americans are Christians. Other days, I believe that the actual number of people who sincerely try to live according to God’s word is very, very, very small.
Maybe about 10.