Pastors cannot fight: that’s the general rule.
Christians are not (usually) pacifists. We know the police are needed, because people are broken, including us! A good long-standing rule has said that clergy cannot be cops or practice violence. They have a particular role in the drama of our life and that is to be a special image of God.
That’s a special job for which many of us are not fit. Men like my Dad or Father Richard have a unique vocation and have lived lives worthy of the calling. Exceptional circumstances breed exceptions to this rule, but generally what we have thought good reasons to let the clergy let battle have not held up well over time. Fighting priests are not what the world needs. The rule has held in most traditional churches to this day and the long standing role in the USA Armed Forces of chaplain is reflects what these servants of God are to do in time of war.
Fighting (almost always) comes with anger and our Fathers in Christ should not turn faces of anger to us. God help us, most of us need mercy not wrath* from our fathers. We honor the police and fire chaplains who died on 9/11 with the first responders bringing grace and mercy in an ugly day: heroes all with different roles.
There is an exception that has held up well to the rule: Saint Nicholas. He is not Santa Claus, but there would be no Santa without him. He is the giving person at the heart of the legends embellished by story tellers and Coke into a marketing myth. Saint Nicholas was a pastor with a heart for the poor (as have all good pastors), a scholar, and a capable leader. When the Church wanted to study an hard issue, nobody questioned whether Nicholas of Myra should attend. He would be a leader!
If you have ever been to an academic discussion, you sometimes find the stubborn man who refuses to follow the argument where it leads. He will hold out for his idea regardless of the arguments, evidence, or the consensus of the experts. This is frustrating, but as Socrates demonstrates with wretched students like Alcibiades patience is the reaction good teachers have to frustration.
Sometimes stubbornness goes further, denying the facts, proclaiming that a man prefers his personal lie to the truth. This is a heretic, the person who declared that reality must bend to his desires and that God Himself could not change his “mind.” Such a mind is dark and flees logic, revelation, and discussion. Given to speeches, power plays, and relying on charisma over reason, this is man is dangerous.
If you love the truth, then such lies are as hard to hear as a flat note is to a person with perfect pitch. If you are a pastor, you also see the man mired in his error and you love him. You would jolt him out of his mental self-absorption. You are not angry, but in love with truth and people. Rare, passing rare, is the man who can hear willful, stubborn, lies and react without passion yet act. Nicholas was this special kind of saintly pastor. The story is that when he heard an ass continuing to bray, refusing to listen to the truth or follow the argument where it led, Nicholas struck the man.
He hit the heretic.
God save us, he did not do so, because we should go about hitting people in error. This is so far from the truth that the first reaction of his friends was to press charges against Nicholas. We are told that only divine intervention convinced them that Nicholas had acted out of love and not sinful anger.
This story reminds me how rare even striking a person should be. You better be Saint Nicholas to do it. That leaves (and should have left for all time) no room for a Christian to support torture in the name of finding the truth. Truth almost always vanishes in any violence, however mild, because violence comes from passion.
Thinking, or the deeper mental revelation of God in our noetic capacity, is impossible when we are overwhelmed with our passions.
Finally, however, I am struck (as if by Nicholas!) by how much I should love following the argument and finding the Divine Logic, Jesus. My stubbornness should repulse me. My desire to be “right” or “win” should always be nothing compared to my earnest longing for finding the truth about a subject.
Some suggest the story is a legend about a legend and that may be so. Perhaps, the holy man never really smote the stubborn fool, but instead the story is designed to strike us. It hits me. Do I love the truth beyond all passion? When the stubborn desire to win my point rises up, do I strike it down? By God’s grace, like Nicholas in the story, we should not cease from mental fight or let the sword of the Spirit rest in our hands until in our minds we have found goodness, truth, and beauty.
Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.
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*All of us who are fathers should recollect that our role is mercy, gentleness, and care first and formost. There is a place, I suppose for righteous anger, but not usually toward the children God has given us. I love you Lewis Dayton, Mary Kate, Ian, and Jane!
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