People

          Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord. (Leviticus 19:18)    
     
          “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. ... (Matthew 5:43-48)

          For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. (Matthew 5:14-15)


          There have been at least four incidents in the pats month or so that have involved media (or social media) coverage of evil men doing evil things. In at least two of those incidents resulted in the death of the victim. I haven’t heard whether the riot and looting resulted in any deaths or injuries, but there was destruction and loss of property. Again, evil people doing evil things. 
          Ahmaud Arbery did not deserve to die. George Floyd did not deserve to die. I was tempted to not provide their names because they are among many who don’t deserve to die. But the reason that they didn’t deserve to die wasn’t that they were Black men, or members of a collective called “black men.” The reason they didn’t deserve to die was because they were human beings, individual people with the names Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. I don’t care what color their skin was. I don’t care what color their religion or politics are. I don’t even care that they happened to be males. None of that matters. What matters is that they, as individuals, didn’t deserve to die. 
         I didn’t know either Mr. Arbery or Mr. Floyd personally, so I’m not going to presume to first-name familiarity. But they shared the planet with me, which means that we were neighbors, albeit distant ones (a thousand miles away?) We are commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves. 
          We aren’t told to love one sort of neighbors better than others. As long as our focus is on Black/White/Yellow/Brown, Pink/Blue/Rainbow Hued, Red/Blue/Green… we are doing precisely what the killers did: hating, judging. If we are doing precisely what they did, we are no better.
          But there’s more to the “love your neighbor” passage above. We’re also commanded not to seek revenge or hold a grudge. Jesus later tells us we’re to love our enemies, and that our being forgiven is contingent on our forgiving others. And that brings us to Gregory and Travis McMichael, William Bryan, and Derek Chauvin and the officers who stood by. I didn’t want to list their names, either, because I don’t want to glorify them for what they did, but they are also human beings, individual people by those names. They don’t represent all white men any more than Mr. Arbery and Mr. Floyd represent all black men. They, too, are my neighbors and we’re not to hold grudges against our neighbors or seek revenge against them. 
          Notice the language. We aren’t to seek revenge. For all the talk of justice, what I hear is a desire for revenge. We want to punish these men. Some friends of mine actually claimed personal victory when the McMichaels were arrested. They had gotten justice. No, they haven’t. They are like the arm-chair quarterback who screams at the TV on Sunday afternoon, then announces to his coworkers they next day that he won. There won’t be justice until sentences are issued to the men responsible for Mr. Arbery’s death and Mr. Floyd’s death. And my friends will have had nothing to do with those sentences being passed down. 
          And what should those sentences be? It really shouldn’t matter whether the crime is labeled a “hate crime.” Who the victim is shouldn’t matter. Who the criminal is should matter. I don’t know the history of the McMichaels or Mr. Bryan. From what I’ve learned about Mr. Chauvin, this is far from his first brush with the law. I submit that he has proven himself to be a predator, and as such, the death penalty seems a reasonable sentence. 
         But if one – or even all four of these men were to be  put to death for their crimes, that would not constitute a victory for any of us. It’s a practical necessity, but one of today’s passages tells us to “Love your enemies.” Another says that we will not be forgiven if we do not forgive. Forgiving the McMichaels, Mr. Bryan, or Mr. Chauvin doesn’t mean what they did wasn’t evil. It doesn’t mean that they should not be punished, even to the point of the death penalty. What it means is that we must not become like them in response to what they did. It means that we stop seeking revenge and allow justice to take its course – praying for justice at every step along the way, but also praying for the McMichaels, Mr. Bryan, and Mr. Chauvin. It means not sewing a white hood to every Caucasian’s shirt and coat because that is just as evil as sewing yellow stars on the garments of Jews, or hating Blacks.
          The moment you deny any human being personhood – the moment you bring in identity politics and change them from a person to a representative of this or that identity group, you hate that person because you have made them into something less than they are as a human being. The moment they become your black neighbor, or your LGBT friend, or whatever other special category into which you want to put them – you’ve moved from greater to lesser. These people are people. They are your neighbors. Even if they are your enemies, you are commanded to love them, pray for them, and forgive them. You’re not doing any of those things if you put them in prison cell on which you’ve hung your judgment of them: Black/White/Yellow/Brown, Pink/Blue/Rainbow Hued, Red/Blue/Green…