No Bowing To The Inevitable
Trinity Sunday, Year C
But again and again there comes a time in history when
the man who dares to say that two and two make four is
punished with death... And the question is not one of knowing
what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation.
The question is that of knowing whether two and two do make
four. For those of our townsfolk who risked their lives in this
predicament the issue was whether or not plague was in their
midst and whether or not they must fight against it.
Albert Camus
The Plague The more commendable characters in Albert Camus’ The Plague knew that two and two make four. To the “fledgling moralists in those days [who] were going about our town proclaiming there was nothing to be done about it and we should bow to the inevitable,” they responded exactly as the situation, as they understood it, demanded:
And Tarrou, Rieux, and their friends might give one answer or another, but its conclusion was always the same, their certitude that a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and there must be no bowing down. The essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying and being doomed to unending separation. And to do this there was only one resource: to fight the plague. There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical.
And of course, both Saint Paul and the Jesus of John’s gospel, the voices of this week’s New Testament readings, knew that two and two make four, and persisted in saying so in the face of false accusations, threats, and, eventually, arrest, torture, and execution. In contrast to the joyful encomium to wisdom in Proverbs 8 and the awestruck praise of Psalm 8, their words in the week’s epistle and gospel strike a more sober tone, reminding us that even though the Kingdom of God is at hand, the brokenness of the world and the injustice of its kingdoms persist. Just so, both Paul and Jesus acknowledge the difficulty of faithful witness, the surety of suffering, and the assurance that faithfulness will ultimately be vindicated by the God who makes it possible.
The brief gospel lectionary from John merits closer examination in this regard. It is a summative slice from the so-called “Farewell Discourse,” which begins near the middle of Chapter 13, during the Passover meal, and continues through the end of Chapter 17, at the conclusion of Jesus’s prayer for the generations of his followers, beginning with the twelve. The passage begins rather ominously: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now,” which leads me immediately to wonder what unbearable things have been left unsaid, for Jesus has already told those gathered that one of them would betray him (13:2), that Peter would be proven a liar and (thrice!) deny knowing him (13:38), that they would be hated and persecuted by the world for their association with him (15:18-20), and that his (Jesus’s) enemies would expel them from the synagogues. “Indeed,” he declares, “an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God. And they will do this because they have not known the Father or me” (16:2-3). If I imagine myself among the disciples, I suspect I would be unable at this point to refrain from interrupting Jesus: “You mean there’s more? And it gets worse?” Well, maybe.
To dwell on that question, however, is to miss the point of the passage and creamy nougat at the center of the Farewell Discourse. Jesus’s repeated allusions to his own death and admonitions to the disciples about persecutions to come are within the chiastic literary structure of the discourse occasions to subordinate the disciples’ struggles with the world and its rulers to the central assertion (and promise) of the discourse: Jesus and the Father are one, and everything the disciples have heard from Jesus has been spoken faithfully on the Father’s behalf. His disciples must abide in him in order to fulfill the new possibility created by his impending absence; the power they had witnessed in Jesus, which had been given to him by the Father, would be given to the them with the coming of the Holy Spirit, who would equip and inspire them to continue Jesus’s work. They too, would proclaim and bear witness to the kingdom Jesus had proclaimed, embodied, and established. To wit, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love… love one another as I have loved you… When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth… I have said this to you so that in me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution, but take courage: I have conquered the world!”
It might be helpful at this point to return to The Plague. The power of the excerpted arithmetical metaphor with which this essay begins depends on the assumption that those who know that two and two make four and dare to say so live in a world where people of dishonorably wielded power claim otherwise. Since the book’s publication, many readers and critics have considered its eponymous illness an extended metaphor—or even an allegory—for totalitarianism. For its Algerian-born French author, totalitarianism would have meant Nazism—hence Camus’ warning that those who insist that two and two make four stand a good chance of being punished, even with death.
We inhabit an analogous moment today, one in which people of power loudly and persistently declare that two and two do not, in fact, make four. Notwithstanding the temptation to overstatement or the annoying proclivity to call anyone we dislike or disagree with “Nazi,” it is become ever-more apparent in the United States that the current administration and its off-camera supporters are bent toward establishing a totalitarian regime, which, in spite of its talk about “Christian Nationalism” seems largely unconcerned with Christ or the gospel He proclaimed. And this means that those of us who remain convinced that two and two make four, and that the gospel Jesus proclaimed is good news to the poor and the otherwise marginalized, must continue to bear witness to those realities and consider how best to do that in this moment.
Make no mistake, faithfulness in this moment may often and in various ways mean conflict with the powers and their allies, and it is these we must resist, not for the sake of resistance but as an outworking of our prayers for the kingdom to come and our efforts to speak truthfully, love our poor, outcast, and persecuted neighbors, and be, as one of our most faithful friends has said, the partial and oh-so-imperfect presence of God’s reign of shalōm. The situation may well grow worse. The faithful may be persecuted. There will be failures. But make no mistake; whatever happens, God’s reign will come. The question for us is not whether we will “get it right,” but whether we will resist those who wage war on the poor, the sick, the immigrant, and the imprisoned among our neighbors. It is whether we will continue to declare that two and two make four.
Amen.