The Right People for the Wrong Crowd

Luke 15 begins:

1 Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him.  2 And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” 

When you read the gospels, you discover that wherever Jesus was, there were usually a lot of the riffraff of society right there with him. One of the remarkable things about Jesus is that he accepted and even sought the company of people considered socially undesirable. In fact, Jesus once even invited himself to dinner at a hated tax collector’s house. 

Then, as now, the influential and powerful people didn’t like the wrong crowd and they didn’t like the way Jesus hung out with the wrong crowd. They thought there was a character defect in a man who would welcome sinners and eat with them. 

Usually we set up the Pharisees as the bad guys of the gospels. After all, Jesus criticized them frequently. But I will tell you: the closer my children got to high school the more I became like the Pharisees. I examined their friends closely. I wanted to know who they spent their time with and what they did together. I remember my own parents wanting to know these things and warning me not to keep bad company.

None of us would ever say to our children, “Go downtown and hang out with the drug pushers and shoplifters.” And if our kids did so, we’d certainly think they had gone terribly wrong. We are socially a lot more like the Pharisees than Jesus. We try to keep the wrong crowd at arm’s length or out of sight. 

The Pharisees wanted to avoid the wrong crowd. That’s not inherently a bad thing. The Pharisees believed that the separation of good and bad was necessary for the well being of the community. We believe that, too. It's why we have jails, after all.

But the Pharisees went too far. In their eyes, the people Jesus welcomed were beyond the margins of proper society and were to be scorned and rejected. And Jesus even ate meals with them! The Pharisees objected strenuously. So, Jesus told them parables about three lost things: a sheep, a coin, and a father who had two sons. He started this way:

4 “Which one of you, if he has a hundred sheep and loses one of them, would not leave the ninety-nine in the open pasture and go look for the one that is lost until he finds it? 5 Then when he has found it, he places it on his shoulders, rejoicing. 6 Returning home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, telling them, ‘Rejoice with me, because I have found my sheep that was lost.’ 7 I tell you, in the same way there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need to repent.”

A shepherd has a hundred sheep counts only ninety-nine. So, he leaves the ninety-nine to find the lost sheep. He brings it home and calls his friends to rejoice with him. "Just so," Jesus concludes, "there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety nine righteous persons who need no repentance."

Then he told of a woman who lost a coin and tore her house upside down to find it. When she did, she threw a block party to celebrate. “Just so,” Jesus said, “I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” 

This is a play in three acts, and the third act Jesus told was a story of a young man who demanded of his father his share of his inheritance now. Dad gave it to him, and the young man moved far away. But he went broke and wound up slopping hogs for a living, which for a first-century Jew would be as far down the ladder as you could get. He remembered that even his father’s hired men lived better than that. So, he set off for home to ask for a job as a ranch hand. 

But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. 21 Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ 22 But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out the best robe and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 23 Get the fatted calf and kill it and let us eat and celebrate; 24 for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate. 

But the elder son refused to join the party. The father went to him, but the elder son said, 

"Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours came back, who has wasted your property on prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ 31 Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’” 

When we hear these stories, we imagine that we are the lost sheep or the wayward child. Sometimes we feel lost even now since we can still move away from God. We are comforted by the image of a God who keeps looking for us no matter how far we stray. All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. When you are on the receiving end of the God who seeks you out, these parables are good news. 

But we should hear these parables with a cautious ear. Something strange is going on. “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until you find it?” 

Now, our usual reaction to Jesus’ question is a sort of warm, mushy feeling as we envision a kindly shepherd searching high and low and gently bearing the lost lamb back on his broad shoulders. But that’s simply ridiculous! Which of you, having a hundred one-dollar bills in a crowded park, and losing one of them, would leave the other ninety nine on the park bench and go after the one that is lost until you find it? No one!

No shepherd would leave the flock to be easy prey for wolves for the sake of one lost sheep. A shepherd’s livelihood can survive the loss of one sheep, but not the loss of the many which would be killed if he abandoned the flock. It seems silly for the woman to throw a big party for finding her coin. Surely the party cost far more than the value of the coin. 

These parables make no obvious sense. There is no moral lesson for the lost. The sheep and the coin are found not because of anything they do but because someone is determined to find them. A lost sheep doesn’t know it is lost. It’s quite likely to wander away again. The coin is just an inanimate object. The son returns home to a place of honor, which reveals deep rifts within the family. What’s going on here?

Maybe the central point about these stories is not the lost sheep or coin or the wayward son. Maybe the stories tell us practically nothing about the lost ones, but an awful lot about ourselves. Jesus speaks of repentance in the first two stories but not the third. The wayward son is never said to repent, though he does have a carefully rehearsed, syrupy, and probably insincere speech. He starts to give it to his father, but his father interrupts it and tells his servants to prepare a banquet. 

Why does Jesus talk about repentance in the first two parables but not the third? No repentance is even possible for a coin or a sheep. And yet Jesus said at the end of each that all heaven rejoices when a sinner repents. So: who’s the sinner and what’s the repentance? 

For Jews of Jesus’ day “repentance” meant, “a fundamental change.” Who else could that be true of other than the shepherd and the woman? Whatever they had planned for the day got discarded because they lost count of what was valuable to them. So, they made a fundamental change to make the count include everything. Maybe that is what heaven celebrates: those who make a fundamental change about what counts. 

The older son, angered by the mercy of his father and the inclusion of his admittedly dishonorable younger brother, scorns the celebration. After all, the younger brother’s return is not characterized as repentance at all; it might be nothing more than a quest for free meals. The older son followed all the rules, did everything right. He neither asked for nor received dad’s favor. Now he feels cheated. And the father botched being a father because he didn’t remember, apparently, how to count to two sons, not just one. He never tried to find his wayward son, he just waved goodbye and good luck. Unlike the stories of shepherd or the woman, there was no fundamental change by anyone in the third parable. There is no one to admire in this parable. 

Nothing comes together for that highly dysfunctional family even at the end. We do not learn whether the rifts between the father and his sons, or between the brothers, will heal. The only redeeming fact of this story is that the banquet is well justified, because there was one who “was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” 

[All] The parables end with a party. Jesus doesn’t invite us to be rescued by God, but to join God in recovering the things God treasures. The parables reject the idea that there are certain conditions the lost must meet before they are eligible to be found, or that there are certain qualities they must exhibit before we will seek them out [New Interpreter's Bible]. 

Here is a true story: One winter when I was about twelve years old, two orphaned brothers walked from their temporary foster home to my neighborhood to ride their homemade sled down the steep hill near my house. My neighborhood group was at the hill riding our store bought Flyers. The two orphans’ sled had wooden runners and it tore the snow up. Frankly, we didn’t want to play with them. They were a rough pair, kind of crude and brash and obviously poor. They were the “wrong crowd” for us middle-class kids. I dropped several hints for them to go tear up some other hill with their lousy sled. Lunch time came, so I went home. While my mother was fixing me a sandwich, there was a knock on the front window next to the door. There stood the younger orphan boy, peering inside my house. My mother opened the door. “Can I have a sandwich?” the boy asked.

My mother brought him inside and took his wet outer clothes and put them into the dryer. She sat him at our dining room table and gave him my sandwich. “I’ll make you another one,” she told me. She heated some chicken soup—which she had not offered me—and set it before him. I wasn’t very happy about all this. I didn’t want to come to the table where that beggar sat. I retreated to the kitchen. My mother followed. I told her, “You gave him my sandwich! You didn’t heat any soup for me, but you did for him!”

My mother said, “Don’t be a stick in the mud! Come have lunch.”

Jesus said, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you…. . For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in.”

Jesus invites us to become shepherds who seek the lost because they are precious to God and are worth being found. Restoration and wholeness become possible when we treat others according to how they are valued by God, not according to what the world says they are worth. The canyons that separate us—good from bad, worthy from unworthy, lost from found—are bridged by a searching love which embraces us all and invites us all to celebrate. 

Jesus asked the Pharisees to join the search and host the party. He wanted them to think about who counts and who’s counting them. He urged them not to write the wrong crowd off, but to be the right people for the wrong crowd. He challenged them to care deeply about all the people they had given up on and to be willing to take risks to find them. We cannot classify people according to what we think they are worth. The value of a single sheep or a lost coin or a wayward child cannot be computed according to conventional market standards. 

We know who the wrong crowd is, but we also need to know, thanks be to God, that we are the right people for the wrong crowd. 

Sinkholes and the Human Condition

John’s third chapter opens with Jesus in conversation with a highly-respected Jewish leader named Nicodemus. Nicodemus came to Jesus to commend him as man of God, but Jesus doesn’t even acknowledge the compliments. Jesus talks about faith and the proper object of faith. Jesus explains that everyone must be born “again” to see the Kingdom of God. It is also possible to translate the words as “born from above,” that is, spiritually, rather than “again.”

In verses 14-15, Jesus explains why he must be crucified to bring eternal life to everyone who believes in him. Then this:

16“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 17Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. 19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.”

We almost always recite only verse 16, then stop. But there is the rest of the story and Jesus told it. It is a blunt, unpleasant truth. Jesus drew a genuine distinction between salvation and its lack.

Furthermore, Jesus said that there is no neutral territory. There is no spiritual space where we are neither saved nor unsaved, there is no halftime where we get to ponder the question for awhile off the clock. Jesus said those who do not believe “are condemned already,” that is, unsaved to begin with. This is a “hard teaching,” as Jesus disciples put it about another subject later in John. Either one believes in Jesus or one does not; there is nothing in between.

Jesus tells Nicodemus that he is himself proof that faith is justified. Jesus is clear that he is the actual embodiment of God on earth. To make that confession about Jesus, to affirm his teachings about himself, is to be born “from above,” that is, spiritually reborn by the Spirit of God, just as Jesus was himself born of God.

To believe in Christ is more than merely acknowledging that Christ was a real person. There is a difference between saying, “I believe I have a neighbor” and “I believe in my neighbor.” It is one thing for us to believe that there was a Christ, it is another thing for us to believe in Christ. To believe in Christ is to place one’s destiny in his hands.

 

The story is told of a husband and wife walking in their town when the sidewalk gave way beneath them. It was a sinkhole, and they fell to the bottom, almost twenty feet down. They yelled for help because they knew that the sinkhole would cave in again and bury them. They were, we might say, “condemned already.”

 

Shortly a philosopher came along. He saw their plight and said, “Let me explain to you the metaphysical meaning of sinkholes.”

Next came a psychotherapist, who asked, “Did you ever have arguments with your mother over sinkholes?”

Then came a self-help, motivational speaker, who jumped up and down excitedly and exhorted them, “Yes! Yes, you can! You can get out of that sink hole. Say it after me, now: I can! I can! I can do it!”

Then Professor Schrodinger walked by with his cat and told them, “In another quantum state you are already buried.”

The next fellow was a congressional candidate who said, “Vote for me and I’ll introduce legislation to outlaw sinkholes.”

Then President Trump came by and said, “I would have built a yuuuuuge wall around that sinkhole!”

A lawyer came by and said, “I will help you sue the property owner.”

Their parents came by and told them, “If you loved us you would move out of that sinkhole.”

The county inspector walked up and asked, “Do you have a sinkhole permit?”

A news reporter asked, “Can I get some video of you in the sinkhole?”

An IRS agent informed them, “Medical expenses from sinkhole injuries are deductible only for the amount that exceeds seven and one-half percent of your adjusted gross income.”

Former President Biden came along and told them, "I will send legislation to Congress to send stimulus relief checks for everyone trapped in sinkholes."

An optimist told them, “Cheer up! Things could get worse!”

A pessimist came along and said, “Don't cheer up, things will get worse.”

A Methodist preacher arrived and asked, “Did you know that sinkholes can be used as metaphors for the human condition of John 3.16-19?”

A Buddhist showed up and told them, “The sinkhole is not real.”

A television evangelist told them, “Send me money and I will pray for you to get out of the sinkhole.”

A Hindu guru came along and told them, “The sinkhole is your karma.”

A Zen master walked up and asked, “What is the sound of a sinkhole?”

A Confucian appeared and said, “Confucius says, ‘In all lives there are sinkholes, such is fate.’”

A Muslim approached and said, “It is Allah’s will for you to be in the sinkhole.”

Then Jesus came to the sinkhole. He did not pause to ponder sinkholes or to explain them to the couple trapped there. He just leaped to the bottom of the sinkhole and said, “Jump on my back and I will carry you out of the sinkhole.” And he did.

We are in the season of Lent, of course, and that is the season that even Methodist preachers really, really like. During Lent we get to really hammer sin and bang on the pulpit about what miserable sinners and reprobates make up the human race. During Lent we have a preaching license to give all the explanations and warnings about the sinkhole of human sin. Well, that or something like it has a place in Lenten reflection. I am pretty sure that a lot of people really don’t understand that the sinkhole problem of the human condition is indeed grave. We may wonder about it in the aftermath of horrific crimes in the news, but even those horrors rarely evoke true conviction of the sinkhole problem of human sin.

In 1998 I went on a study trip to Appalachia as part of a course at the Vanderbilt Divinity School. One Sunday we attended a service in a small up-hollow town in coal country. It was a congregation of the Old Regular Baptist church. That was the name of the denomination: Old Regular Baptist. The service started at nine and ended at noon. Three hours of church, five preachers!

It was an engrossing experience. The first preacher was like the guy with a guitar who plays and sings before a Garth Brooks concert: just starting out. He gave a heartfelt testimony but got sung down by the choir because he went on too long. Then there was another man who had preached before. He was more polished. And so it went, each preacher more talented than the one before. After the fourth preacher sat down, everyone took a short break.

Then the choir sang a hymn and the headliner preacher stepped up to the pulpit. At first he spoke slowly, softly, then he picked up the tempo and the volume. He knew about every sin in the book, and apparently somebody in the congregation had done at least one of them recently. Eloquently, he covered all the bases: the human inability to love God right, the need for repentance and the imperative that we throw ourselves at the foot of the cross and pray for the precious blood of Jesus to cleanse us.

By and by he took his coat off. Then a few minutes later he loosened his necktie. Awhile later he rolled up his sleeves. Before long he took out his handkerchief and wiped his sweating brow. “Though our sins be red as scarlet, Jesus will wash them white as snow. Jesus stands at the door and knocks, but in our pride we won’t answer the door – we should be ashamed to leave him standing there in the cold, the one who suffered and died for us.”

And finally, the expected ending: though no one has any right to ask God anything, and none of us are worthy even to untie Jesus’s sandals, from his infinite and incomprehensible grace and love Christ will accept us if we sincerely beg his forgiveness. Then he sat down, the choir sang another hymn, and everyone left.

We don’t always take God very seriously as God, a God who is as close to us our next breath. For sure the Old Regular Baptists up there in Appalachia take God pretty seriously. They live a hard life and they sometimes know a hard God. Their kind of worship is not for us, but the wind of the Spirit blows where it chooses. 

Yet while we need to be reminded that sin is a serious, in fact fatal, condition, we must not lose sight of the great thing about Lent. Lent is about sin, yes, but how much more is it about love and mercy and forgiveness of sin! We think we are doing pretty well and that God must love us because we are doing well and because we are are pretty good people. I mean, look at us: What’s not to love? Yet those Appalachian Baptists knew what Nicodemus had to learn: God does not love us because of who we are, but because of who God is.

Bishop Will Willimon wrote:

In the midst of our trivial moralizing, our scolding and scrambling for a few penitential brownie points, John reminds us of why we’re here. We are on the way of the cross not because of what we have done or left undone but because of what God has done.

The goriest work of human sin gets sidetracked into glorious divine redemption. The prophet is sent not to scold but to save. It was out of love that he came among us and stood beside us and chided us and died with us, for us, and saved us. Love.

Now we remember. It was for this that we began the journey. It was not for sackcloth and ashes, whips, the sacrifice of a before-dinner martini and empty stomachs that we are here. It was love that put us in this parade. We kneel not as miserable worms but as those brought to their knees by sheer wonder at the gift. It was not to condemn us that our Lord bid us bear his cross, but to save us. We are not here as the lost but as the found.

The cross is heavy and clouds gather, and we shall have more days for honesty, more Sundays to examine our lives again and pray for the courage to be truthful about all, the ways in which we betray so great a love. Lent is not over; “there is still more repenting to be done. But as we turn our steps again” toward Calvary, “let us take these words with us: it was not for condemnation that he was sent to us, but for love. He beckons us on, not to condemn but to save. (Christian Century March 17, 1982, p. 292)

Shall we be born again, be born from above by the wind of the Spirit? Yes, we shall. We shall have faith: we are ready to bet our lives on the Son of God. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. Thanks be to God!

Beware the compassion police

reposted from 2003

links were good at the time of original posting

Why compassion cannot be a basis for public policy

I recall a story in the Washington Post from the early 1990s, when I lived in northern Virginia, written by a Catholic nun. It told of a ministry in downtown DC that she was working, offering free lunches to the poor.

When she and her fellow charity workers had started this ministry they had decided not to require means tests of the people who came to eat. Means tests - requiring the recipients offer evidence they could not afford to pay for the meals - would be degrading, they concluded. The poor were beaten down by life enough without the church adding to it.

Yet after several weeks the sister had changed her mind. The soup kitchen initially attracted diners who were clearly homeless, near-indigent or working poor. But as time went on, she observed the diners were better and better dressed. They were cleaner, obviously more healthy. At first, a large number of diners had walked to the kitchen, but now most drove, and as more time passed, older cars parked outside gave way to newer cars, then expensive cars. The kind of person who first began eating there became rarer and rarer.

The nun concluded that they should have required means testing to protect the poor. It was clear to her that they were now running a kitchen serving free food to people of substantial means, not the poor they intended to serve.

"Which among you," asked Jesus, "when asked by your child for bread, would give him a stone?" Well, none of us, of course. And which of us, encountering someone who truly could not afford his next meal, would fail to buy it for him?

Personal charity and works of compassion are basic requirement of Christian ethics. But Christian people with best of intentions go awry when they attempt to make their personal ethics public policy. Compassion is bad public policy.

I table-talked once with several of my colleagues at a seminar, some of whom insisted that health care should be free for the poor, meaning, of course, that the government will pay for it - meaning of course, the non-poor will pay for it.

As one of the seminar’s presenters pointed out, the non-poor are already paying for the poor’s health care. Heath insurance premiums are padded to cover the costs of treating the uninsured. In 2003, wrote Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Victor R. Fuchs, "the average health insurance premium for a family of four is about $9,000." Make no mistake, the poor don’t receive high-quality care except for emergency-room visits, but that is where they tend to get almost all their health care. Our taxes also pay health care costs. Of the $1.4 trillion the United States now spends about on health care, the government pays about 45 percent. (link)

Individuals exercise compassion, defined by the Oxford dictionary as "sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings and misfortunes of others." Governments and social arrangements exercise justice. Justice is only accidentally compassionate because justice, to be justice, must balance the valid, competing needs of persons and groups within society. Justice attempts to answer, "What is right, what is fair?" Justice is enforced against the will of at least one of the contending parties. Hence, justice is at its foundation coercive.

Compassion, though, seeks to alleviate shortcoming, suffering or pain, to heal in body, mind or soul. Compassion cannot be enforced. I could not compel a stranded motorist one day to accept my aid, because it would have been literally criminal to do so. In offering aid, I did not have to balance competing claims for my time and money because there were no claims and could not be any. The issue was not what was just or fair, but what was possible.

Compassion is self limiting; one is compassionate to whom one will to the extent of the resources one decides to donate. There are, say, 50 hungry people. You buy lunch for 15, maybe 25, 45 or all. You stop when you can afford to buy no more or simply when you decide you have spent enough and still want to have enough to buy a new DVD. There is no guilt on anyone’s part because no one has done anything wrong. You were under no legal obligation to buy anyone lunch in the first place, so choosing to feed some, not all, is your free choice. The others had no entitlement to your money.

But justice is only roughly self limiting. An employer who cheated his employees of some of their wages for a time, totaling $25,000, cannot plead for reduced judgment because he has only $10,000 in the bank. The court will hold still him liable for all of it, plus lost interest and punitive fines and perhaps prison. The employees have a rightful claim that the employer may not rightfully deny.

Justice attempts to make right or compensate wrongs done by persons or groups against others. Compassion attempts to make more level the relationships of resources or care between persons or groups of persons.

Compassion makes a very poor guide for justice. Compassion can exist only when there is no right to receive it. A judge, for example, cannot be justly compassionate. For a judge to show compassion for one party to a case is to treat another party unjustly. Showing compassion to a burglar by an unwarranted light sentence is to rob the victim’s family of their rightful claim that the burglar will be fairly penalized. And it puts at risk larger society, which has the right to expect that burglars will not soon be turned loose to rob again.

Similarly, compassion for the victim’s family that leads to an overly harsh sentence - life in prison, for example, for a first offense when no one is injured - sets aside the rightful claim of the convict that his punishment will be consonant with the crime. Likewise, society has a rightful claim not to bear the burden of supporting him for a lifetime for commission of one, non-violent offense.

It is impossible for interactions with government to be compassionate because interactions with government are never between equals. Government is always coercive. Interactions with government are always based on unequal power relationships, not compassion.

The fact that different groups have different interests that must be sometimes balanced and sometimes found to be right or wrong is what seems to escape many churches’ proclamations about public policy. The pronouncements tend to be personal compassion writ large, into state policy, then to be coercively enforced.

Case in point: identification cards now being issued by the Mexican consulate in Tennessee, including last year in Shelbyville. Anyone care to guess how many card recipients are in the US illegally? Shelbyville is the center of Tennessee Walking Horses, a major equestrian industry. A man who was senior manager of a large Walking Horse ranch told me that the whole industry would "dry up" if its illegal-immigrant workers were taken away.

From compassion, some people say that illegal immigrants should be allowed to enter the US and work here unhindered. They come here only for economic opportunity, after all, having no prospects for personal advancement in their home country (Mexico, for most of them).

But this argument also exposes the emotional blindness of wishing to make compassion public policy. For when compassion is moved into the large-scale public arena, its focus is too narrow to promote the general welfare. Amnesty for illegal immigrants (whether by proclamation or non-enforcement, which is what we have today) means depriving others of something they to which they have a rightful claim.

I guarantee that the jobs the Walking Horse illegal aliens are working existed before they moved here. Ranchers had to mend fences and shovel barns and bale hay long before Mexicans moved here in numbers. But who was doing that labor before? Not business executives. Not otherwise idle, bon-bon eating housewives. The American working poor made the ranches go. That is who the illegals displaced. But those displaced have a rightful claim to such jobs over persons who are at-large criminals, which is literally what illegal aliens are.

There is a long list of other groups who have rightful claims adversely affected by the issue, but that’s not the point of this essay. My point is that compassion fails as policy because it is impossible to be fairly compassionate, except with one’s own resources. Making compassion into policy or law for society compels others to conform to your idea of compassion, trampling on their freedom to be compassionate according to their own lights or to be hard-hearted as they wish. And compassion that coerces is not compassion at all; it is tyranny.

Systems of justice may be tyrannical, too, of course. That is why Western political philosophy has promoted mercy to temper justice. Mercy is not the same as compassion, though as a personal quality mercy and compassion are closely related. William Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice,

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
'T is mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway,
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s,
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. (Act iv, sc. 1.)

In terms of justice, though, "clemency" is probably a better word, indicating mercy shown toward one who has offended, but whose punishment or rehabilitation is either completed sooner than expected, or earned during the course thereof.

Not only mercy tempers justice. Religion has served that purpose in Western history also, as have Enlightenment philosophies of individual rights and the idea that the locus of state sovereignty lies in the people, not the state apparatus. But justice remains coercive at base, serving no one perfectly but (hopefully) all as fairly and unobtrusively as possible. However, this is what compassion cannot do.

I find, then, that I have arrived at the place theologian Reinhold Niebuhr arrived several decades ago.

Reinhold Niebuhr, a professor of Christian ethics, was one of the most influential theologians of the last century. In his work, Moral Man in Immoral Society, Niebuhr explained that while individual persons live generally moral lives, high morality is difficult, if not impossible, for human societies and social groups as a whole. Very rarely does a group of persons comport itself better than individuals do in personal relationships. When human beings engage in collective activity, Niebuhr said, they are overwhelmed by an inability to be moral. The larger the group, the greater this inability is.

Niebuhr was specifically addressing Just War theory in the works I cite here, but I think the same train of thought applies to issues of justice and compassion within societies.

Niebuhr concluded in "Must We Do Nothing?" in The Christian Century (3-30-1932), "The hope of attaining an ethical goal for society by purely ethical means, without coercion . . . is an illusion" of the "comfortable classes" of society. There never will be enough love and unselfishness among nations [or persons] to resolve the conflicts of history [or societies] only by ethical [or compassionate] means, even though there may be occasional successes now and then. It is part of humanity's "moral conceit" to think that human sin will not overwhelm individual morality [and compassion] when persons act collectively.

Until the return of Christ, wrote Niebuhr, human societies will never be able to conform purely to the ethic of Christian love. In the interim, we must structure our world based on justice, as best we can, even though communities of justice are inferior to communities of love or compassion. The best justice human societies can attain will only roughly correspond to divine justice. Human justice will always involve contests of power because different groups make opposing claims that they consider rightful.

Niebuhr concluded that the ethical goals of human society must not be sacrificed "simply because we are afraid to use any but purely ethical means." Nor, I think, should they be sacrificed because an ethic of love cannot serve as the fundamental ordering of society.

Yet works of compassion can indeed take on orders of magnitude that project them into the arena of justice, just not judicial justice. When acts of compassion come to affect so many persons that the order of society is changed, so is the nature of the society’s justice. Justice is, after all, only the "right ordering of things" in human affairs (said Aristotle, as I recall).

I have in mind the work of Bangladeshi economist Muhammed Yunus. Banks in Bangladesh refused to loan impoverished women money so they could begin their own businesses. The average loan refused was 62 cents. Yunus reached into his own pocket and loaned 42 men and women in one village a grand total of $27.

Every borrower paid Yunus back with interest. The banks still refused to write loans. Reports "Vanderbilt Magazine," Fall 2003, p. 49:

Village by village, district by district, Yunus proved conventional bank lenders wrong. Twenty-seven years later, his pioneering approach to micro-lending has spawned nothing short of a credit revolution.

His Grameen Bank . . . has disbursed roughly $3 billion to more than 2 million borrowers in Bangladesh alone, allowing many thousands to lift themselves up from the most abject poverty. 

His bank has been imitated by more than 7,000 other organizations around the world, including some in America. This is compassion writ large and well. It is personal; Yunus used his own money, not someone else’s. Yet its effects are transforming the social order of societies.

As for me, though, whenever I hear a politician tell weepy anecdotes about some unfortunates, then declare that "America is better than that," I lock up my wallet. I know he wants to make his personal sense of compassion into public policy, by coercion, using my money.

As it turns out, US Congressman David Crockett had some things to say about this topic about 171 years ago.

I should also point out that some of my Christian friends will take offense at my claim that, "Compassion can exist only when there is no right to receive it." I say again: works of compassion are a duty of Christian disciples. But they are done in gratitude for and imitation of the saving work of Christ. Hence, they are unenforceable by human agency and are voluntary. Compelling others to perform one’s own idea of compassion is the very opposite of compassion, for compassion cannot coerce others and remain compassion. Even so, the Scriptures are clear that we will be judged by Christ according to our works of compassion.

Another thought by Neibuhr: In February 1941 Niebuhr wrote,

Love must be regarded as the final flower and fruit of justice. When it is substituted for justice it degenerates into sentimentality and may become the accomplice of tyranny. Looking at the tragic contemporary scene within this frame of reference, we feel that American Christianity is all too prone to disavow its responsibilities for the preservation of our civilization against the perils of totalitarian aggression. We are well aware of the sins of all the nations, including our own, which have contributed to the chaos of our era. We know to what degree totalitarianism represents false answers to our own unsolved problems - political, economic, spiritual. Yet we believe the task of defending the rich inheritance of our civilization to be an imperative one, however much we might desire that our social system were more worthy of defense. We believe that the possibility of correcting its faults and extending its gains may be annulled for centuries if this external peril is not resolutely faced.

This is a critical point. Niebuhr was saying that if Christians refrain from maintaining justice, even by force if necessary, because they substitute love for justice, then the love they wish to promote actually becomes the handmaiden of tyranny. And of course, that is no love at all.

"I stand with Ukraine" means what, exactly?

Ukraine has only two choices

I am not going to dwell on the now-infamous, televised meeting that Ukraine's President V. Zelensky had with President Trump last Friday in the Oval Office. It is the outcome of the meeting that matters now. Why the meeting went the way it did does matter, but it is not my subject here. 

There are now only two paths forward for Ukraine, and therefore for the United States, NATO, and the EU nations who have supported Ukraine. I note that very quickly after the Oval office meeting adjourned, many progressives and Democrat figures posted memes like this one. 

Yet no one who posted this meme explained what exactly it means. As I asked at one such post, "If a Ukrainian in the war zone read your post, 'I stand with Ukraine,' what exactly would you want her to think you mean? How would you describe the ways her life and future will be better?" 

So let's take a look at the two - and only two things "I Stand With Ukraine" can mean. There are no other choices. 

First, though, I want to explain my creds in what I will write. I am a retired Army artillery officer with command and war-planning experience and responsibilities from battalion level to corps level and at the Pentagon, including at the Army Operations Center there. I have written operation plans and planning documents for actual shooting wars. I had the highest security clearances, including for nuclear and chemical target analysis, custodianship of actual atomic weapons, and decryption of Nuclear Control Orders. I am a graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College. During part of my Pentagon tour I served on the personal staff of the Secretary of the Army. Now to continue:

Here are the only two things "I Stand With Ukraine" can mean:

ONE. I want the Ukraine war to continue on indefinitely in the same way it is going now. That means that I want more and more Ukrainian military and civilian personnel to die, more Ukrainian infrastructure to be destroyed, and countless more Ukrainians to refugee out of their country. 

TWO. I want the combat and killing to end and an enduring peace to be achieved, even if it means the status quo antebellum is not reestablished. 

The first thing operations and strategy planners do when going to work is to ask one simple question: "What is the status quo?" That is, what are the realties that exist now that we have to take into account? What is the situation and its implications? Regarding the Ukraine war, here are the important realities:

First, Russian forces have taken control of considerable Ukrainian territory (map source: BBC):

Zelensky has said - over and over since the war began - that he will accept no end of the war that does not include ejection of Russians from the territories they occupy in eastern UKR. In fact, he stated that point strongly in the now-infamous Oval Office meeting with Trump

Putin, however, insists that those territories are Russian home soil, not Ukrainian. In fact, it is true that they are large majority, ethnically Russian. Putin either does not know or does not care that the reason for that is that Stalin ejected and murdered Ukrainians living there and moved Russians in. Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons to keep possession of those territories (although he has not repeated the threat very recently). 

Both sides have lost enormous numbers of personnel and military equipment. I would say that if Putin and co. are both willing and able to suffer even more such losses, they could push westward enough to set the terms for an armistice. That is a big if, though.

As for UKR, it simply does not have the human resources to recover the occupied territories, no matter how well armed they may be in the attempt. They did attempt it in 2023, when their military was much better manned (and womaned) and they failed miserably. After four months of a weak offense against Russian positions, UKR's army was on pace to recover the occupied territories - in 16 more years. Even Time magazine reported that UKR insiders near Zelensky said they all knew this, but that talking to Zelensky about it was a waste of time. 

That is the status quo, meaning both sides will continue to attack each other, but with no real changes on the map resulting. Again: this is what Zelensky stated very specifically he wanted to continue. And that is what Trump was trying to end and what Democrats also want to continue, apparently forever.

What was the reaction from Europe? Occupy Democrats posted this on Feb. 28:

Note that most of the Euro leaders simply said, "We stand with Ukraine," without saying exactly what that means. By default, it means they are choosing Option One: continuing, inconclusive warfare with more death and destruction and no end in sight. The relatively few nations that stated they wanted peace did not define what steps are necessary to achieve it or what acceptable terms are for peace. For example, Prime Minister of the Netherlands Dick Schoof: "... We want a lasting peace and an end to the war of aggression started by Russia." 

Well, duh. We all want peace, even Zelensky has said that. It is worth noting, however, that Zelensky demands peace with "security guarantees," but he has never addressed what those guarantees would be, how they would be accomplished, or who would guarantee them. 

I wonder, though, how aware these national leaders are of their own populations' attitude toward supporting Ukraine, which is both (a) Ukraine needs more support, but (b) not from my country:

So, to those who insist they "stand with Ukraine," please choose which option you mean. Do you mean you want the war to continue indefinitely? If so, why? Is there a time limit for supporting the status quo that once expired would turn you to wanting an end to the war? Or is there a limit to how many more Ukrainians may be violently killed that would change your mind? Or do you just want the combat to continue with no end? 

Or do you want the war to end as soon as possible? If yes, how? What would be your plan to end it? I echo what the Army Chief of Staff used to remind us at the Pentagon when we made plans: "Hope is not a method and wishes are not plans." What actions would Ukraine, the US, and Euro/NATO nations need to take to bring UKR and Russia to at least an armistice/ceasefire, even with more permanent details to be worked out afterward? President Trump did at least state them while no one else has. 

Finally, hating Trump is merely cheap virtue signaling. It is neither a method nor a plan. But if you feel better about hating Trump than you feel bad about Ukrainians getting killed with no end in sight, then you are morally bankrupt and God forbid you have any say in what happens. 

Links and pertinent info:

NATO's empty promise to Ukraine

Ukraine: Zelensky is a true hero, but does he have a clue?

What if Putin nukes Ukraine?

Ukraine on Fire documentary

 From Oliver Stone in 2016, so obviously not including recent events. But it does explain that no one's hands are clean, including America's. As for its sub-head, "Russian Aggression or American Interference?" well, as the saying goes, embrace the power of "and."

NATO RIP - Ukraine, Europe etc. Ukraine is probably going to RIP NATO into bits

10 Hard Facts About Ukraine and NATO, by retired Colonel and Army War College graduate Kurt Schlichter. 

Ten bad takeaways from the Zelenskyy blow-up, by renowned historian Victor Davis Hanson.

A view by the German editor-in-chief of Asia Times: Europe’s dangerous delusion of defense without the US - Europe can dream about strategic autonomy but the reality is it wholly lacks the military means to defy Trump’s Ukraine peace plan

Transfiguration Sunday

 Moses led the children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt to a Promised Land in the east. They were pursued to the sea by Pharaoh’s army. But God rescued them across the sea. The people went to Sinai where Moses ascended the mountain to receive from God the Sinai covenant and the Ten Commandments, inscribed on stone tablets.

While waiting for Moses to come down from Sinai, the people decided to worship idols. They persuaded Moses’ brother, Aaron, to make golden calves for them. He caved in and did what they demanded. You may remember this scene from Cecil B. DeMille’s epic, The Ten Commandments, with Charlton Heston as Moses.

In the movie, when Moses returned with the Commandments and saw the people’s idolatry, he threw the tablets at the people. The tablets exploded and made a huge sinkhole that sucked down all the unfaithful people but spared the faithful ones. It was great cinema, but what the Bible says actually happened was that a civil war broke out that claimed the lives of three thousand people. Moses’ side prevailed.

Then God told the people to leave Sinai and go to the promised land, but he, God, would not go with them. “If I were to go with you even for a moment,” God said, “I might destroy you.” Moses asked God, “If you are pleased with me, teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favor with you. Remember that this nation is your people. The LORD replied, ‘My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest’” (Exod 33:13-14).

Moses asked God to show him his glory. God did, but only a partial glimpse. Showing Moses a place to stand, God said, “When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand, and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen” (Exod 33:21‑23 NIV).

God then required Moses to chisel out stone tablets like the first ones that Moses had broken when he had seen the golden calf. Moses was to bring the tablets to the top of Sinai where God would restore the Commandments on them. Moses did so.

   29 Moses came down from Mount Sinai. As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.

   30 When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face was shining, and they were afraid to come near him. 31 But Moses called to them; and Aaron and all the leaders of the congregation returned to him, and Moses spoke with them.

  32 Afterward all the Israelites came near, and he gave them in commandment all that the LORD had spoken with him on Mount Sinai. 33 When Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil on his face; 34 but whenever Moses went in before the LORD to speak with him, he would take the veil off, until he came out; and when he came out, and told the Israelites what he had been commanded, 35 the Israelites would see the face of Moses, that the skin of his face was shining; and Moses would put the veil on his face again, until he went in to speak with him. (Exod 34:29-35).

It is not wholly clear what the Scriptures mean by saying that Moses’ face was shining. We use expressions like that ourselves, metaphorically. Remember the children’s song, “We’re all in our places with bright shining faces”? Brides are sometimes said to be “radiant” on their wedding days. An old country expression for being attracted to someone romantically was that you “took a shine” to the other. So perhaps that’s what Aaron and the others saw in Moses’ face, just a special look. Perhaps.

But perhaps not. A close, personal encounter with the creator of the cosmos is simply an experience of a different quality than anything else. Besides, Moses’ own brother and the others were afraid of him when they saw his shining face. Something unique must have been going on.

Moses had gone deeply into the presence of God with all its dangers. “Show me your glory,” Moses asked of God. “No one may see my face and live,” God told him. Narratively, the glory of the Lord had been on Sinai until then. But God had just promised to send his own presence to go with the people. In making Moses’ face to shine, the glory of God is narratively brought from Sinai to the tabernacle built by the Hebrews. “Moses’ descent from the mountain” with shining face “is a [narrative] device for the awesome coming of heavenly glory to dwell in the midst of Israel” (NIB).

The most important events in stories of Jews and Christians alike concern the awe-inspiring entry of God into human history. The Bible struggles to find ways to speak about this awesome entry, and one of its preferred ways is “glory.” The apostle Paul used this story of Moses to buttress his own claim that the glory of God has become visible on the earth in the person of Jesus Christ.

The Gospel of John is clear that the glory of God is found in Jesus. God’s glory is located most precisely in the cross. As the events unfolded that led to his death Jesus told his disciples, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (John 12:23). In the shameful, shattering instrument of the cross, God’s glory shines as an instrument for Christ’s resurrection. In the cross and the empty tomb, the so-called glory that was Rome and all earthly powers became minutely dim. Here indeed is the real transfiguration: that by the body of the one crucified and risen, the glory of God is seen by his suffering, death, and resurrection. And for the church, the present body of Christ in the world, God’s glory can be seen in nothing else but the way we live together as the physical body of Christ in the world today.

I have often wondered how Moses coped with his singular experience of beholding God’s glory so intimately. It was no life of sweetness and light to lead the children of Israel. Moses and the Lord alike frequently observed that the people were “stiff-necked,” obstinate and stuck in their ways. It turned out to be so apt that they called themselves the children of Israel. They were not mature, as a group, in the ways of the Lord.

They complained a lot, starting barely after they reached the sea. They saw Pharaoh’s army coming after them and yelled at Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, leave us alone?” (Exod. 14:11-12a). How quickly the days of slavery became treasured as the “good ole days!”

They complained about lacking water. When they got good water, they complained about not having enough to eat: “In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron,” Exodus 16 relates. “The Israelites said to them, ‘If only we had died by the LORD's hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death’” (Exod 16:2‑3 NIV). So God sent the people manna in the morning and quail in the evening. They still weren’t happy.

It was rough being Moses. He occupied an office political as well as religious, but none of the people he attempted to lead had elected him. Moses was called by God and appointed as their leader. He was often fiercely opposed. He suffered all the criticism, rumormongering, hostility, and opposition that today’s elected officials know. Even after God gave the people bread and meat, it didn’t let up. At one place things got so heated Moses told God that he feared for his life (Exod 17:4). Just to be fair, Moses was not very diplomatic in his speech; people never had a problem knowing where he stood. He seemed to have had a demanding edge about him that irritated people. Well, so did Jesus. Just read Matthew 23, where Jesus called some people “sons of hell,” not something calculated to win their admiration.

Quite clearly, most Israelites didn’t want Moses at all. His standards were too strict, perhaps. After all, Moses gave them Law, but what they really wanted was license – anything goes. Eugene Peterson wrote that the people really wanted Aaron, not Moses, because Aaron was compliant. He gave in to their demands. If you wanted a golden calf, Aaron’s your man. Just wait until Moses isn’t around, then see Aaron. Golden calves abound in religious life, Peterson wrote, in times both ancient and modern. He cautioned religious leaders against yielding to the pressure to become “quality-control supervisors in a golden calf factory.”

I wonder whether Moses ever sent out his resume to neighboring nations instead of putting up with all the petty backbiting and outright hostility that he got for trying to do his job. It must have been tempting. He’d had a professional life before he saw the burning bush. He was unusually qualified for positions in civil government or business. Job offers there would have been. But he stayed. Why?

It could only have been because Moses had been to the mountaintop. It can only be because he had beheld in some special way the glory of God. And that experience never let him go. At the end of the day Moses must have understood that neither complaints nor compliments of others could primarily determine his course. He could only do his best to do what God wanted. No doubt Moses often felt severely incapable of doing so; in fact, he tried very hard to argue God out of his call. I don’t see how Moses ever actually felt adequate to his vocation. But he had been to the mountaintop and that experience had changed him for good. “What was it like?” people must have asked him, then waited while Moses groped for words. Finally, he might have managed only to say, “It was glorious.”

Walter Brueggemann wrote that the glory from God is carried by odd, strange persons, Moses and Jesus being two prime examples. (Remember that when Jesus returned to his hometown and declared that the messianic prophecies were fulfilled by him, the people exclaimed, unbelievingly, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”)

So, Brueggemann wrote, “This [fact] is not [so much] a summons that all should be ‘carriers,’ for those carriers are chosen only in God’s inscrutable power and freedom. It is, rather, an invitation . . . to notice the glory of God in those who refuse the golden calf, who stand in the breach to see the glory, and who bring the tablets and let life begin again. God’s glory is never far from God’s command, which authorizes the revamping of all of life. There is dread in the coming of this glory, but there is also inordinate, practical possibility. For all of his shining, Moses’ work is on earth,” with his people (NIB).

“If you are pleased with me,” Moses prayed, “teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favor with you. Remember that these people are your people.”

Transfiguration Sunday is about the glory of God and asks us individually and collectively a pointed question: Does we shine with the glory of God? When the world sees us does it know that the presence of God is with us, imperfect as we are?

Epiphanies may come, and then they go. Rarely does God slap us upside the head with flashes of lightning and voices like thunder. Usually, God quietly simply beckons us, tantalizes us, and sometimes God pulls back the curtain between heaven and earth just barely enough to give us a peek, and then only fleetingly. If ever such a such a glimpse is given to you, cherish it but don't try to capture it. It’s a snapshot gift, just a glimpse, an intuitive grasp of reality through an illuminating discovery.

We treasure our glimpses of glory. But afterward we must go back to the valley to follow Christ, because we can’t build shelters for Christ’s glory, we have to live it out. Glimpses of glory do not answer all our doubts or tell us what to do next. We can’t build our whole faith on sporadic glimpses any more than we could compose a symphony from notes picked at random. There is more to Jesus’ story than that transfiguring night on the mountain. But it does make a difference to have seen, even for a moment, the future, to have heard the confirming, reassuring voice out of the silence.

This week is the beginning of Lent, the season of the cross. We shall begin a Lenten walk with Jesus down the narrow way of obedience, a way which leads on Good Friday to pain and death. Leave here today and you are on your way to that cruciform valley.

But as you go to be a disciple wherever you make your home in the valley, know this: In Jesus Christ, God's past has come to fruition, the law and the prophets are fulfilled in him, God's Beloved. When we walk out those doors, it will be an ordinary March day, with nothing visibly different from when we came in.

But we should be different. We might tell no one, though our faces may be shining since we have, in a manner of speaking, come from the mountain. You will be different, having seen God's future, having heard the words that keeps you going as you take up your cross and follow Christ: “This is my son, my chosen; listen to him!” 

Let us pray:

Lord of life and light,

before your humiliation and shame, on your way to the cross, you were transfigured before us, the veil was lifted, and we saw your glory.

In all the dark, difficult places of our lives, show us your glory. Give us the grace to see you walking beside us, comforting us in our struggles, encouraging us in our sadness. Take us to the mountaintop, help us to see.

With you beside us, we are able to face evil and injustice with courage. With you walking ahead of us, we are able to walk with confidence. Show us your glory,

....in our sickness and pain,

....in our bereavement and loss,

....in our confusion and doubt,

....in our loneliness and solitude,

....in our temptation and weakness,

This we pray in the confidence that you are indeed God's only begotten Son, the light of our lives, the one to whom we are to listen and follow in all the moments of our lives. Amen.

The aftermath of Hamas murdering children

On Feb. 20, Hamas handed over to Israel the corpses of four dead Israeli hostages, including two small children, but only after using them for propaganda. 

Before handing over the remains, Hamas staged a parade of the bodies through streets of Gaza, proudly and cruelly displaying them  to cheering Gazan crowds. As the Wall Street Journal observed, 

Hamas put their coffins on a stage in front of a huge propaganda poster of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A crowd looked on and milled around, and “triumphant music” played, according to one news report. Mr. Netanyahu was depicted with fangs, dripping blood above the faces of the four dead hostages, smiling in photographs from happier times. “The War Criminal Netanyahu & His Nazi Army Killed Them with Missiles from Zionist Warplanes,” the poster claimed.

The coffin propaganda underlines the challenge of deradicalization for any postwar plan for Gaza.

Israeli medical staff conducted autopsies on the returned hostages. One was Oded Lifshitz, 84. The other three were Kfir and Ariel Bibas and their mother, Shiri. The Israeli government then announced: 

A. The bodies of the two children, one taken hostage at 4 years old and the other at 9 months, are injured in ways completely consistent with being brutally murdered, mainly by manual strangulation, and inconsistent with being killed by an air strike, as Hamas claims. 

Update: It is also confirmed that after the two boys were strangled, their bodies were pounded with rocks to make them appear to have been killed by an air raid. Details here, if you can stomach them.

B. The body of Shiri is in fact not Shiri at all. Hamas gave a corpse to Israel of a dead woman whose identity is unknown. 

Update: Hamas has now returned the actual remains of Shiri, whose identity has been so confirmed by Israel. 

What Hamas did drew sharp rebukes from very senior Arab Muslim authorities. 

And in yesterday's WSJ, author Bernard-Henri Lévy had this and other things to say about Hamas. 

Once, children were gassed as they descended from the trains. Hamas waited. Damn those who try to drag us into the false game of moral equivalency. These two breaths cut short, this double death of innocence, is Hamas’s abomination alone—and it is unforgivable.

Were the two muftis sincere in their condemnations? I think so. The muftis know very well that Muhammed specifically forbade the intentional killing of children, even in warfare. (That is no doubt why Hamas lied about Kfir and Ariel being killed by an Israeli airstrike. Hamas openly celebrated that they were dead but lied about how they died. Why one and not the other?)

Islam holds that there are two inarguable sources of commandments that must be obeyed with no exceptions. One of course is the Koran. The other is the Hadith, which is a collection of sayings of Muhammed. The Hadith is equal in status to the Koran. 

In a well-known hadith, Muhammed instructed his companions during military expeditions, "Do not kill children, women, or the elderly, and do not attack those who are not fighting." (Reported in Sahih Muslim, Sunan Abu Dawud, and other collections)

Another narration states, "Do not kill a child, nor a woman, nor an old man, nor destroy crops, nor kill those who are in their places of worship." (Sunan Abu Dawud)

Islamic jurisprudence distinguishes between combatants (those actively engaged in fighting) and non-combatants (those who are not involved in hostilities). Children, by their very nature, are considered non-combatants and are protected under Islamic law.

The deliberate targeting of children, whether in warfare or otherwise, is considered a grave sin and a violation of Islamic law.

The looming question now is, "In light of these Hamas atrocities, what happens (eventually) to Hamas and the future of Gaza and its people?" 

On Feb. 4, President Trump raised a lot of eyebrows by declaring that Gaza should become an American protectorate, the Gazan people should be resettled elsewhere, and then the US would rebuild Gaza as a sort of "Middle East Riviera." Political and media commentators scornfully denounced the idea right away. On Feb. 6, I commented on Facebook:

When the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in (IIRC) 2004-2005, they actually offered to do much the same thing as Trump said, although on a smaller scale. Hamas seized power shortly afterward and killed every Gazan who got in their way.

But could it happen now? I think this is less a real proposal than Trump's way of signaling to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states that the status quo antebellum must not be restored. Trump's real message, I think, is, "The perpetual warfare between Israel and Hamas stops now." And yes, it has been perpetual; I visited the southern Israeli town of Sederot in 2007 on the same day it received a rocket bombardment from Gaza.

What Trump did was describe a wealthier, peaceful future for Gaza and the next step is to simply ask, "If not that, then what? Because more years of war is not on the table."

The Wall Street Journal's editorialists said much the same thing, but with more historical context and detail. 

President Trump’s idea that the U.S. might remove and relocate some two million Palestinians from Gaza and then “own” and rebuild the strip isn’t going to happen soon, if ever. But the idea, however preposterous, does have the virtue of forcing the world to confront its hypocrisy over the fate of the Palestinian people.

What was the Arab powers' reaction? It was that they got Trump's message, at least in part. 

Egypt led the response, probably because Hamas was a child of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian Islamist, insurrectionist movement dating to the 1920s. Egypt's government finally defeated the Brotherhood only in 2013, although the Brotherhood cannot be said to be fully neutralized yet. That Hamas and the Brotherhood are so closely linked is doubtless the reason that when the present war between Gaza and Israel began, Egypt publicly announced it was sending a tank battalion to its border with Gaza with orders to shoot on sight anyone crossing the border without prior permission. Egypt also strongly reinforced its border wall.

So it is no wonder that Egypt's immediate response to Trump's declaration was that it would refuse to resettle any Gazans, even temporarily, and that Hamas must have no role governing postwar Gaza. 

And now the rest of the Arab world understands that Hamas has committed atrocities that directly violate the commandments of Muhammed. Of course, the Arab elites already knew that, but Hamas handled the return of the dead hostages, especially the two dead children, so stupidly that it could not be ignored or shrugged away. 

I think a corner has been turned. If, as I wrote at the time, Trump's real message was "this is the last war Hamas will fight, ever," then I think the Arab powers are taking it seriously, regardless of the rest of what Trump said. The stupid parading of the four dead hostages to celebrate their deaths and the obvious lie that Hamas did not kill the children have forced Arab elites and rulers to take Trump's declaration seriously, even if not literally. 

So has a corner been turned? We can hope so, but at this point only the steering wheel has moved. The war is not over. But at least the Arab powers are finally confronting the fact that when it ends, the ending must be permanent this time. And that is progress.