Not long ago, I sat with some brothers over lunch and grieved the way our political debates in the United States affect the church—heightening tensions, compounding fractures, and unleashing words and actions that can only be described as ugly.
Slander sells. Sowing division is popular. Bad actors profit personally or professionally from the ever-changing landscape of newly deemed “heroes” or “villains.” Clouds of self-righteousness and hypocrisy cover the sun and reinforce our tribal impulses.
Danger of Ressentiment
Nearly 10 years ago, I wrote about one of the great dangers facing Christians in North America—the spreading of the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment. That’s the deep-seated envy and hostility that arises in individuals or groups who perceive themselves as powerless, leading them to recast their weaknesses as virtues and project their frustrations onto those they envy or blame for their situation.
Ressentiment, combined with contempt, the silent killer, gives off fumes that suffocate the faith, hope, and love we should be known for. We lack faith when we assume the worst of others, casting opposing viewpoints as belonging to enemy oppressors and taking umbrage at every perceived slight. We lack hope when we assume all is lost unless every injustice is corrected right now, when we can’t see past the urgency of the moment to take a broader view of God’s work in the world. We lack love when all we can do is keep a record of wrongs. We lack grace when our ire grows from the roots of entitlement.
How do we breathe when we inhabit this atmosphere marked by the fog of ressentiment? How do we rightly take a stand for truth without becoming like the world we’re called to counter? In our battles against Mordor, how do we keep from becoming more like orcs than hobbits? How can we resist the suspicion and cynicism that would lead us, like Nikabrik in Prince Caspian, to sacrifice principle on the altar of pragmatism? Especially when everywhere you look, ugliness seems to be winning.
Return to Jesus
After lamenting the state of the church today, my brothers and I stumbled on a solution often derided for its simplistic Sunday-school associations: Jesus. What else do we have but Jesus? What else can we offer a world that needs him? What else can we offer a church that too often forgets or co-opts him? He is the answer. We’ve got to come back, again and again, to Jesus.
When tempted to put our trust in princes, politicians, and parties that are passing, or to excuse respectable sins that further our cause, or to nurse our wounds of bitterness and lash out in fear, or to confuse the fruit of the Spirit with weakness, we look to Jesus just like the disciples after others walked away, and we say, “Lord, to whom will we go?” (John 6:68). Who else do we have? “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart, my portion forever” (Ps. 73:26).
It’s Jesus who approached Golgotha with a prayer on his lips that God would unite his people with such a powerful love that the world would know the truth of the gospel (John 17). It’s Jesus who brought into his closest company both a zealot and a tax collector. It’s Jesus who showed us how to live, how to speak, and how to love. It’s Jesus who said the meek will inherit the earth. It’s Jesus who called us onto the narrow road of beauty, truth, and goodness in a fallen world of sin. It’s Jesus who told us the last will be first and the first last, who defined true greatness in terms of suffering, service, and sacrifice instead of the pomposity of earthly power. It’s Jesus who promised to be with us to the end of the age.
The rough and tumble of earthly politics may depend on anger, wrath, malice, slander, and filthy language, but these are the ugly practices of idolatry we’re called to put away (Col. 3:8). Our new self is being renewed in Christ’s image, and so we’re to put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another, and above all, putting on love, which is the perfect bond of unity (vv. 12–14).
These characteristics are the glorious brushstrokes that God is painting into his portrait of us as his people. The church father Gregory of Nyssa likened the Beatitudes to a picture of purity. “God is the true light,” he said, “the fount of all goodness, the one thing lovable which is always the same,” and so, for Gregory, the Beatitudes become an invitation into a new life of rejoicing without end in infinite happiness. Sin has disfigured us, but Jesus has come to wash us clean of our sins, to restore the painting. He’s working on your portrait, brushing up your soul until, more and more, you look like him, the most blessed one.
In the End, Beauty Wins
If you’re a Christian, you have to believe that Beauty will win. Life will triumph over death. Beauty will overcome the ugliness of the world just as Jesus’s blood has removed the stains of sin in your heart.
Ugliness can only destroy, not create. Slander can only tear down, not build. Selfishness can only fracture, not unite.
The only way we soldier on through seasons of darkness is by maintaining hope and faith that the beauty of Jesus will shine. Jesus is the treasure.
And so we don’t respond to works of darkness as pearl-clutching moralists but as pearl-finding missionaries. We’ve sold all for God’s kingdom, the pearl of great price, because we know deep down the truth expressed by Dostoevsky—the world may think we’re idiots, but beauty will save the world. And Beauty is a person.
If you would like my future articles sent to your email, as well as a curated list of books, podcasts, and helpful links I find online, enter your address.