I have a group of friends who have become Christians. One of their number has recently had someone move into to his flat. This uninvited guest is abusive to him with the result that he has lost all his fragile self-confidence and seems to be spiralling back into deep depression and alcoholism. I had lunch with one of the guys today who said, “But, look how much we’ve all changed, a couple of years ago we’d have just gone ‘round to the house and beaten the guy up and kicked him out. Now that we’re Christians we haven’t done anything to him.”
This is really bad.
We’ve taken away the one effective way they knew how to deal with injustice and now they are powerless in the face of it. We’ve got it wrong. We have saved them from the sin of violence and initiated them into the sin of crossing over to the other side of the road. We should have shown them new ways of tackling injustice before we took the violent one away from them. Must do better.
