Flutterings

In late 1944, while the allies were rapidly advancing across Europe after the success of the Normandy invasion, J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, wrote a letter to his son Christopher, who was serving in the R.A.F. (the British Royal Air Force). Tolkien himself, the father, had fought the Germans in World War I; he was in the infamous trenches of the Battle of the Somme. These were not pacifists, in other words. The father wrote to the son that he was very disturbed by the way the British press was relentlessly depicting all Germans as irremediably evil. One of his local papers was seriously advocating "systematic extermination" of the entire German nation because "they are rattlesnakes and don't know the difference between good and evil." What of the writer? "The Germans have just as much right to declare...the Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they've done" (The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 93).

... All of us share in the human condition; that is the meaning of Lent. All of us have dark impulses that could have become murderous had we been brought up in a garbage dump or been catechized by a father full of hate and revenge. Who knows if Saddam's sons are evil? Do you know? How do you know? Who told you? And if they are evil, who knows what influences made them evil? Let me be clear: action has to be taken against evil deeds. But the Christian will beware lest more evil deeds begin to erupt from within as well as from without. ...The Lord Jesus did not die for the righteous. He did not die for the godly. He did not die for the exceptional so that we, the saved, could delight in our own superiority and gloat over others.

- Fleming Rutledge (an Episcopal priest), "The Enemy Lines Are Hard to Find," 16 March 2003 (Third Sunday in Lent)
In Sermons from Duke Chapel, ed. William H. Willimon, 2005, pages 342-43, 346