INTRODUCTION
There is a very well-known principle in western media circles: sex and violence sells. America’s blood-lust is reflected with the surge in ratings and the millions upon millions of dollars made by media outlets that feed images of human suffering to eager viewers, readers, and listeners. Cases in point include the amount of media coverage given to the shooter, their weapons, and how they ended the lives of their victims. These monsters are studied, made infamous, and become the subject of books, made-for-tv dramas, and are characterized in big screen movies.
All of this amounts to media manipulation. The following statement (allegedly made by actor Morgan Freeman) puts the manipulation of the media in the best context. In this statement, he explains the media’s role in why such a tragedy occurred:
“You want to know why? This may sound cynical, but here’s why. It’s because of the way the media reports on it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single victim of Columbine? Disturbed people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he’ll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.”
The media is such an important influencer of a peoples culture that we would be remiss to not place at least some blame for the behavior of our society there. Rather than discouraging such behavior, our media promotes it. Glamorizes it. Commercializes it.
Sex and violence has done much for the media moguls in terms of clout and money, but at what cost to us?
A SOCIETY WITHOUT EMPATHY
The cost that we have paid as a media obsessed culture (when that media is founded on sex and violence) is a decline in our collective morality, a rise in violence, and the fall of empathy. You see, when we consume media, we take it into our consciousness. It becomes a part of our thinking. Our thinking goes on to affect our emotions, and those emotions then influence our behavior, which leads to an event.
OUR YOUTH
Our youth have grown up in a society that has glamorized violence and desensitized them to the loss of life. This week in Springfield, Tamik Kirkland, a 26 year old young Black man is on trial for breaking out of jail, going into a local barber shop with guns blazing and killing an innocent 24 year old and wounding Darryl King, a childhood friend of mine.
Violence among youth in the United States has reached critical mass. More specifically, the African American community is disproportionately affected by violence and crime. A Center for Disease Control (CDC) report confirmed that homicide was the second leading cause of death for individuals between the ages of 10 to 24.1 According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency prevention, African American youth account for a significant number of youth in the Unites States arrested and prosecuted for violent offenses.
How has violence become a staple employed by our youth in resolving conflicts? At what point did the influence of peers, media, and pop culture overshadow the impact and voice of the Church in the lives of our youth? These, as well as others, are critical questions that the Church must contend with if it desires to: (1) have conversations about the issues that are prevalent to the realities of contemporary youth in our society and (2) serve as an alternative space for youth to empower themselves and each other using the message of Jesus Christ.
TEXT
The Gospel of Matthew serves as the first of three Synoptic Gospels, and its authorship is attributed to the apostle Matthew. The Gospel describes and defines a figure named Jesus, whose narratives and ministry are central to the first-century Christian claim of Jesus as Teacher, Messiah, Son of God, and Son of Man. For Matthew, each of these designations serves a unique function within the larger context of Matthew’s interpretation of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. The Gospel of Matthew was written for a community that related to Jesus and his teachings in a specific, predetermined way. Numerous scholars have argued that Matthew was composed after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. This cataclysmic event left the relatively infant Christian community and distinctly Jewish community without a central location of worship, pilgrimage, and spiritual commerce. This tumultuous socio-cultural and religious environment is where one locates the audience of Matthew.
Jesus is presented as Messiah in the Gospel of Matthew and also functions as a teacher usurping the authority of the Pharisees during a time of Jewish spiritual and physical reorganization. Moreover, Jesus as Messiah in Matthew provides a narrative for a community seeking to affirm its identity as one aligned with the salvific agenda of God and establishes its own authority under the scope of Torah.
Matthew 5:44-45 is a smaller passage within a larger narrative of what has been traditionally identified as the Sermon on the Mount, comprised of Matthew 5–7. Today’s text in Matthew depicts Jesus teaching his disciples a series of parables which are encased in lessons regarding righteous living and the model for true discipleship. Jesus begins to teach his audience (beginning in verse 43) a radical conception of love for one another. He says in verse 43: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’” Here he references the Old Testament law to “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18) with the implied understanding of hating the enemy. The terms “neighbor” and “enemy” were specific classifications that the Jewish community would have employed to determine which individuals and groups possessed the prerequisites to be loved and which individuals or groups were to be viewed through the lenses of distrust and contempt.
REGARDING AN ENEMY
To regard one as an enemy during this period would mean that any actions taken towards them would be justified in light of the responsibility to only love the neighbor as thyself. Moreover, if one initiates violence towards their enemy, it is validated by the belief that it is acceptable to hate one’s enemy as long as one loves their neighbor.
In verses 44 and 45, Jesus seeks to break the cycle of violence by advancing the characteristics of a new love ethic; a love ethic that captures an essence of righteousness that embraces the personhood of “the other” amidst strife and derision. The type of radical love Jesus describes in verses 44 and 45 requires an evolved interpretation of the Law. In verse 44, Jesus commissions his audience, comprised of his disciples first, and then the larger crowd, to not only love your enemies, but to also pray for those who persecute you. Jesus commends that love be extended to all individuals irrespective of differences in class, gender, race, clan, ethnicity, political affiliation and religious affiliation. Jesus presents an alternative way of being in community that is simple yet challenging. He calls for his audience to relinquish the steadfast, divisive ethos of their society in order to embrace a distinct way of living in a community that encourages wholeness and values those that are characterized as other.
The power associated with valuing the other increases and also diminishes in light of the violence in contemporary society. Youth violence happens as a result of an absence of love between youth in diverse communities, and this lack of love is taught to youth by adults in so many arenas. Once youth are taught to classify the “enemy,” this voids the weight of harm enacted towards the other. Furthermore, after the violence has been committed, it cripples the capacity of the community as a whole to propagate love towards one another. In short, violence begets violence and paralyzes the capacity to love.
NEW LOVE ETHIC
What is the impetus that is motivating Jesus to command this new love ethic? He confirms that we must embrace this radical form of love as a path towards our rightful position as God’s children (v. 45). We are to love our neighbors and our enemies precisely because that is how God loves. Verse 45 states that God makes the “sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” God’s indiscriminate love for God’s creation is our example. As children of God, we are called to emulate the characteristics of the Creator in our thoughts, words, and actions.
The Church can be much more proactive in sermons and church programs and in partnerships with parents, schools, and social service agencies in lessening youth violence. Too few in number are the churches that INTENTIONALLY promote nonviolence. A sermon on the subject after another child dies due to gang or drug-related violence is so inadequate. Youth programs that mainly concentrate on teaching Bible verses and abstinence-related behaviors are woefully inadequate. We need to get real and get serious because, as Harry Belefonte stated, the streets are being bathed with the blood of our babies.
Our God is a God of action. God did not teach love of the other as some abstract concept and expect the world to catch the vision. Instead God acted. Loving us enough to send us a Savior for our redemption in spite of our constant inhumane acts one to another, God continues to extend mercy to us when our acts and thoughts of violence merit justice. This is our clarion call to give what we have received. So, whether as young adults, parents, pastors, teachers, elders in the village, members of the media, athletes, or blue-collar or white-collar professionals, it’s our time to stand up in our corners of the world and help stop the violence. This is our day. This day we get to decide what will we do with INTENTIONALITY from this point forward to be part of the Jesus army that saves children from being instruments of violence.
CONCLUSION
Jesus uses his radical love ethic as a conduit for transforming communities through reconciliation and love. As Howard Thurman notes, “the concern for reconciliation finds expression in the simple human desire to understand others and to be understood by others.”3 Even in light of contemporary youth violence, hope still abides in the power of an informed and intentional love ethic. This dynamic of love empowers us to move beyond the division that violence creates towards the power to uplift and the ability to see the other through the same lenses of love through which God see us.
For God looked beyond our fault and saw our need. If God hadn’t loved us: we would be lost, we would be down and out, destitute and despondent, we would be drifting like a ship without a sail, but he loved us to life, He loved us to wholeness, he loved us in spite of: in spite of our ways, in spite of our habits, in spite of our proclivities, in spite of our attitudes, in spite of our lies, in spite of our slothfulness, in spite of our unfaithfulness, in spite of our wickedness…He loved us.
We deserved to die, we deserved to be cast aside, we deserved to be locked up, we deserved to be walked away from, criticized…but He loved us. When we were yet sinners, He loved us. When we were liars, He loved us, when we were thieves, He loved us, when we were cheaters, He loved us. When we were sinking deep in sin, far from the peaceful shore, very deeply stained within, sinking to rise no more….the master of the sea heard our disparing cry, from the water He lifted us and now safe we are…….Love lifted me….Thank God he loved us:
Jeremiah wrote:
Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. His mercies, they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. Lam 3:22-23, NIV
You don’t have to be pretty or tall, you don’t have to have a lot of money or a big name, God loves you. And that love, if you will let it, can lift you from the gutter most to the uttermost. That love fills your life with dignity and meaning. That love makes you somebody. God’s love lifts us up and lifts us out of the past, out of our mistakes, and out of our hurts and into His grace and mercy. Oh if we could only comprehend and know the love of Christ which passes knowledge.
This love, this all embracing, eternal, soul cleansing, life lifting love cannot be put in a test-tube or extrapolated through hypothesis, or reduced to a mathematical equation. It can only be received, duplicated in our hearts and reciprocated back to the source from where it came. This is the gift that keeps on giving. Thank God for the power of His love.
