If there is one thing we know a lot about these days, it’s contagion. I don’t have to remind you about ventilation and masks and vaccinations. Those are just the facts of life. But contagion is not confined to viruses, as this past week has made clear in so many troubling ways. Many things are contagious. And if we hadn’t known it before, we know it this week: violence is contagious.
Consider the many helicopters that hovered over Philadelphia Friday night. Did you hear them? That was the sound of anxiety about the effect of the video of five Memphis police officers brutally beating Tyre Nichols, who of course died of his injuries three days later. According to the New York Times, the decision to release the video on Friday night was made because at that hour businesses would be closed, people would have a chance to get home from work before the reaction to the video began, and the community and the world would have had time to process the fact that action had been taken in the case and the five officers had been fired, arrested, and charged with murder. The release was timed, in other words, in expectation that its violent content would spark a violent response. There were some who criticized this decision, noting that to release the video on a weekend was itself a risky idea, since protestors and potential rioters would have time on their hands, and violence might be more likely then than during the work week.
I don’t know when a harrowing video that shows the forces of law and order taking an innocent man’s life might best be released. What I want us to think about is the apparent fact that we live in an atmosphere of contagious violence and fear of contagious violence, and of course guns. It feels like a given. The fact that there have been protests but widespread violence has not occurred this weekend seems remarkable to many of us.
This was also a week of mass shootings, a contagion that spreads here in our country more than anywhere else. ABC news was led to reflect on the string of shootings in California this week, first in the San Joaquin Valley and then in Monterey Park and then in Half Moon Bay and then in Oakland. The experts were pondering the way one shooting seems to call forth the next. As one put it, “There are mass shootings waiting to happen, so one of them can influence the other.” It’s like something in the air, something that nudges a shooter forward out of hiding. It might actually be the attention we give to mass shooters that moves a troubled soul from the terrible state of preparing to kill over into the dreadful act of killing. They actually used the term “mass shooting contagion.” We have to think now not only about how terrible crimes happen, but about how violence replicates itself to cause more violence.
Surely we can also use the word “contagion” to talk about a six-year-old in Virginia who brings a gun to school and shoots his teacher. We can all be thankful that the teacher is going to be ok physically, but what are we going to do about the pestilence in our environment that infects a six year old? How many school shootings has he heard about? How many safety drills has he been through? And where else will this lead? Who will now imitate that child’s troubled imitation of what school shooters do?
So here we are, in this atmosphere, thick with violence and the fear of violence and the replication of violence. In this atmosphere we fret about how and when to tell the truth about a violent police attack. In this atmosphere we worry that press coverage of a mass shooting will cause mass shootings. In this atmosphere we see that school shootings have become stories that children tell themselves and even perform for others. We live in a world so full of deathly spiritual illness that even to tell the truth about violence may be to spread violence.
In this atmosphere it can be hard to hear Jesus say, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” though we know we need someone to speak a word for peace. In this atmosphere it matters that Jesus understands contagion. Or let’s go further than that. Let’s talk about how the contagion all around us is a corruption and a perverse distortion of the way blessedness spreads. Violent contagion is an inversion of the way that blessedness spreads from the person of Jesus and catches all of us up.
So let’s get caught up in the blessed words of Jesus.
From the beginning, what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount is a condensation, a distillation, of the environment in which he has been moving. He has been healing and teaching, moving through the people and drawing them to God in himself. When he climbs up that mountainside like Moses on Mt. Sinai and turns to give the word of God to the people, he is following a familiar prophetic pattern, replicating prophetic peace. Like the commandments that spread from Moses’s encounter with God to the Hebrew people and to the world all around them, these words of blessing from Jesus feel designed to be repeated, remembered, written on our hearts. They echo through the Gospel as fundamental truths.
And each line of this speech speaks of responsive connection between God and the people. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus says, looking at the poor in spirit who have been moved to follow him. The poor in spirit are lowly enough not to try to own themselves, not to try to lord it over others. The poor in spirit are fundamentally humble. And Jesus looks at them and loves them. Actually, he is one of them. That’s the truth he carries in his body: that God is somehow humble, small, powerful in a way that bears no resemblance to violence. Jesus will show the full power of God by being subject to violence.
So when Jesus looks out at the poor in spirit, he reassures them that he sees them, that God sees them, that in the pure air of the kingdom of heaven their poverty of spirit is answered, reflected back to them. When the poor in spirit are seen in the kingdom of heaven, the King of Heaven himself answers them with poverty of spirit.
God willingly, joyfully, gives himself over to those who give themselves to God. Or better, those followers of Jesus who are poor in spirit have been drawn to Jesus in the first place because they sense in him that same humility, a radical willingness to be poured out for them before they even begin to try to earn it by pouring themselves out and following.
Contagion is paltry by comparison with this mutual giving. Violence is a sick misunderstanding.
And Jesus speaks like this, line by line, repeating the pattern of blessedness and reciprocity. Reward is too small a word to use, here. It doesn’t do justice to the mutual embrace that Jesus is describing. “Be blessed and get your reward” is a poor way of summarizing what Jesus wants to give his followers. What Jesus wants to give us. “If you mourn you will be comforted” is, as any mourner knows, an impoverished explanation for what it feels like if someone actually cares for us in our pain. Mourning isn’t comforted by a shelling out of benefits from some generous person. Mourning seeks embrace. The pain of separation can only be answered by union.
So too the merciful. Think about it. They who have figured out how to give others more grace than they deserve, are not looking for payment for services rendered when they get to heaven, and that’s not what Jesus is offering them. The merciful already live in a world in which love and mercy spread as far as the eye can see. They already live in an abundance that defies description. They already know that God is in the mercy, giving to them as they give to others. They are already in heaven in some sense. Heaven somehow reached them and showed them what mercy was, and now they are reaching back to heaven, mercy following upon mercy. No one is keeping count. That’s what mercy is.
And the peacemakers make peace, too, out of some deep confidence already that violence is unnecessary. Because they are children of God. When we hear Jesus call them children of God we want to make peace, and that peace—even the desire to make that peace—is a sign that God has been sheltering and nurturing us all along. We don’t “start” peace. We receive it. We pass it on. We live in it.
Contagion? Yes, I fear it. But I’m not taking my eyes off Jesus on that mountain, spreading peace. I’m not going to develop an immunity to these words. When violence spreads, when the air thickens and grows noxious, remember that any bit of peace we can make will already be part of an infinite exchange of blessing. To make peace, to show mercy, even to mourn: these will be signs among us that the kingdom of heaven is near. We don’t have to start them or invent them or earn them. God is already close to us. Mercy is already ours. Peace is already among us.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/27/us/tyre-nichols-video-release-time.html?smid=url-share
Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
January 29, 2023
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia