The lamb's War and the Just War

Although Our Lord was the focus of animosity from others, He had no enemies Himself. He loved and still loves everything He created and everyone He has created in His own image. He shows compassion even for His implacable adversaries, the fallen angels: "and the demons begged him, ‘If you cast us out, send us away into the herd of swine.' And he said unto them, ‘Go.'" (Matt. 8.31) Jesus, at the Last Supper, at the Jewish Passover, refused to eat and drink at the paschal table, preferring to pray and fast for his brothers and colleagues, the scribes, Pharisees, and priests who had plotted his arrest, trial and death sentence. (Matt. 26.29) After they had mocked him and incited the crowds to turn on him, not allowing him even one moment of rest from their relentless derision, the last request He made to His Father was that He would forgive them for what they had done to him. (Lk. 23.34) "Having loved his own who were in the world, He loved them to the end." (Jn. 13.1)

Jesus Christ commanded His followers to practice what He preached and do what He did. He taught the beattitudes as a saving alternative to the sinful bad attitudes which produced the conflicts and wars that scar the fallen world: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust." (Matt. 5.44-45) The justice of God is the love of God.

In the parable of the Prodigal Son even after the young man wasted his inheritance the mercy of his father was unconditional and lavish. The son's calamity was met by the father's clemency. The fat calf was dressed and served; the music played; the guests dressed up. The father's son, worldly justice would say, deserved hard time, but the father threw a party and everyone had a high old time instead. Love changes hearts and unites; war changes the power arrangement and divides. Like the father in the parable, Jesus waits expectantly and anxiously for our return from the far country; He waits until the last moment and gives us what we don't deserve - the full content of His life-saving sacrifice and death "so that the last will be first." (Matt. 20.16) And if we delay in coming to Him, He looks for us and finds us, the lost sheep, and rejoices. (Matt. 18.12)

We don't have to go to war. Christ has won the war for us. He has freed us from the restraints of sin, and liberated us from the power of the devil, and rescued us from the land of death "with a strong hand and a mighty arm." He fought the Lamb's war. How can a lamb be a lion? How can the One who is slain strike the death blow to the slayer? How can the weak victim raise the standard of victory over the opposing army when He Himself lay vanquished on the deserted hill of Golgotha? If we were to judge the Crucifixion with worldly eyes we would say that the powerful Jewish senate and the tyrannical Roman occupiers won; the devil was more in charge than ever. But Jesus is Lord of the Universe, the source of all created beings, He could easily use power to destroy the puny power of the devil. He had to conquer the spiritual force of sin before He would deal with the sinners, both angelic and human, who use evil to thwart God's love. And only love can beat the power of evil. One of the Lord's disciples figured He would force Him to use His might the way a general would, but Jesus scolded him: "Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?" (Matt. 26.52-53) No, for the powers that were in place Jesus was an inconvenience, not a conqueror. But faith sees with a heavenly perspective: "we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us." (Rom. 8.37)

Christians who share in Christ's victory also wield the weapon of love and are equipped with the battle fatigues of suffering "rejoicing in their sufferings" and "completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church." (Col. 1.24)

Constantine the Great watched as the Christians were killed by his uncle, the emperor Diocletion, because they would not worship him as a god or join the corrupt cult of pagan idolatry. He was spellbound by the courage and self-control with which they went to their deaths, fearing not he who could kill the body, but putting their trust in He who would give them a resurrected body and eternal soul. He had seen courage in battle before but not like this. After the battle of Milvian Bridge when he became the sole emperor of Rome he entered the eternal city to be welcomed as a saving god; instead he refused all claims to deity and bowed his head and got on his knees and turned his kingdom over to the Emperor of the Universe and the eternal Kingdom. Christ wins again through the spilled blood of the martyrs who extended His saving work in the world.

Spiritual Warfare: The Real Field of Battle

Wars in the world are the expression of the war that goes on in the heart of man. St. James said as much: "What causes wars, and what caused fights among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war." You ask things of God "to spend [them] on you passions." (Jas. 4.1-3) And where do these passions come from. They sprout up from the soil of our souls that are enraptured by self-love rather than God's love. They are the "lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life" (1 Jn. 2.16). A Christian fights in the field of battle which stretches over the pastures of the heart, that spiritual Armageddon, where the soldier must secure the high ground against the devil (Eph. 6.12) and the legion of passions that march to the orders of their dark commander. These appetites, affections and sinful tendencies inhabit the heart and enslave man. The Christian's fight is in the trenches of his own obsessions and compulsions where he must slay the "old man" in order to love all men in personal spiritual freedom, the goal of this inner war. He must practice the life of Christ as is given by the Holy Spirit in the Church to batter down the thick walls that surround the citadel of his cherished selfishness allowing God to take the high place in the altar of his heart and be the guiding light of his life to lead him to the selfless summit of love.

Aggressive and Defensive Wars: The Just War

The Church is not naive. There are grades or levels of spiritual maturity and refinement in moral progress. In His love for us, God does not grade on a curve! Not everyone who is Christian can reach the heights of virtue and live on the peaks of sanctity. But all can stand on moral ground and practice the basics of Christian life.

In the world which has been deformed and distorted by sin, (and the Church is in the world and her members are still engaged in the inner warfare with their own sins), war is a tragic reality, a sinister sacrament of evil that informs us of the invisible dungeons of darkness where the kingdom of the devil is. The ancestral sin of Adam spread the germ of death to his posterity, and through them infected and corrupted the whole universe. Generational sin has concentrated the virulence of that ancient contagion, as St. Cyprian has called it, while our personal sins have poisoned the lives of our immediate families and friends. Fights in families, wars through the centuries, the murder of Abel by his brother Cain, the history of man is one long list of war. It has always been a cynical irony that so much pageantry and pomp has accompanied the march of men to their deaths; its as if their dress uniforms are already their burial suits.

So the Church faces the real facts of war, and prepares her members, especially her beloved soldiers, with her prayers and petitions, with her pastors and patrons, with her love. But the Church greets this horror with a spirit of repentance not acceptance.

To eliminate war entirely is impossible. So how can we approach this bright blight of the human condition? The use of violence makes one part of the problem of war. The very involvement with the passions of violence, blood-shed, death and destruction regardless of a truly good motivation for it is the devil's victory. Even if the right side wins everyone is a loser. If violence is the essential expression of evil how can using it destroy it? Since wars are fought between nations, races and cultures, who can make a bold claim that its motive for war is morally right. Does God cheer for one side over the other? What one side defines as obvious fact and objective, ethical reasons for its right to wage war the other sees as propaganda used to support or legitimize aggressive national interests. When the war is successfully ended with a winner and a loser that does not pacify the passions that produced the war; it demands the use of occupation forces which institutionalizes the state of war. We are confronted with the absurdity that "war is peace," as George Orwell so artfully wrote in his book "1984."

Given the fact that the world is what it is, defensive wars can be just wars, legitimate wars. To save one's neighbors from crude and unrestrained acts of evil and to protect communities from rulers who create social and legal institutions and forms of government which perpetuate that evil, is a moral good, a heroic cause indeed. A soldier's vow of self-sacrifice in defense of the good cultural conditions and religious practices of his country is true patriotism; it is a virtue not a vice. When the Russian Czar ordered the imperial army into battle with the Turks and their Western European allies in the Crimean War in 1853 to help their brothers in Greece keep their religious freedom and keep them from the Moslem tyranny; when Serbian troops stopped the advance of Turkish soldiers at Kosovo on June 15, 1389, securing the eastern border of Europe against Islamic invasion and the destruction of Western Christian civilization, martyrs were made and heroes were celebrated. Closer to our own times we are witnesses of how some wars are just. When the soldiers of the Allied nations in World War II stopped the expansion of Imperial Japan and NAZI Germany, the whole world thanked God. We had to save the world, as Churchill said so eloquently, from "the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science." Sometimes the times demand that we engage the enemy. It is up to us, then, to do all we can to win that war and to do it quickly to minimize the misery of a long war; it is also up to us to make sure that the signed peace of that victorious outcome contains the magnanimous Christian spirit to bless the future and quell the resentment of the present.

There is never a moral or virtuous reason for a war of aggression, not anywhere and not against anyone.

Our Church prays for "all civil authorities and our armed forces everywhere." We pray for our leaders because they are put in the position of making decisions that will affect our peace and our opportunity to practice our faith in a holy way; they must also make choices which will determine the earthly, and perhaps the eternal, future of their fellow citizens, choices that are often morally ambiguous but nonetheless must be made. We pray also for their souls because they have taken on the responsibility of many lives and they must bear up under the burden the weight of those lives pressing down upon them.

We have great saints who were soldiers, usually martyred soldiers. Caught in the vortex of violence, sunk in the quick sands of social and national sins, Christian soldiers and all soldiers whose consciences are still alert and sensitive to the voice of God who guides them, must in these dire straights preserve as best they can some measure of modesty and sanctity and some means for the practice of their faith.

God shows no partiality with regard to His love and mercy toward men and women. Each person is unrepeatable and irreplaceable, made in the image of His Son and filled with His Spirit. Each is called upon to attain to the moral likeness of His Son. In the great collisions of hate which fuels the machinery of war, the Church does not take the political pulse of the world, nor does she support a general concept of majorities or minorities of human beings who are loyal to one side or another. The Church concentrates on the unique persons that God providentially brings to her for an encounter with God Himself. As such the Church prays in her petitions at each liturgical service for the persons she knows are in need of her prayers.

No Earthly Nation Is the Heavenly Kingdom

Living in a nation and culture in this world at this time, Christians must maintain a spiritual alertness. They must pursue that enlightenment of the mind which will allow for a high degree of personal discrimination regarding the events that confront them daily. There is an apocalyptic kind of pregnancy about current world history. To ignore or dismiss this reality is to reject the prophetic message God is giving us.

Modern means for conducting war obscures our principle which delineates between aggressive and defensive wars, identifying the former as always evil and the latter as usually just. The involvement of the victims of war, the civilian population, makes all moral arguments stand on doubtful deductions. So called "collateral damage" is a sanitized and abstract term for the death of whole communities.

What is even more dangerous is the publication of an intrinsically careless rhetoric used by government and social leaders of a country to rationalize the need for war and inspire in the people a will for war. Normally this rhetoric mixes patriotic themes with religious legitimation. There is no modern nation that has not appropriated this volatile mix of politics, patriotism and piety to rally its people for war. Secular nations that organize their societies around science and technology and confine faith to private and personal expressions are never so open to religion as when they are preparing or planning for war.

There exists, uniquely in the Western European mind, a strange and recurring utopian sentiment which when welded to technological development and wielded by military might, takes terrible social forms and creates mass misery. It is one thing to use national traditions and religious feeling to motivate aggressive wars; used as propaganda this cynical manipulation of the popular mind is surely evil. It is far worse to actually believe one's own fantasy, to market a version of utopia, whether racial, social or economic, as if it were a realization of the Kingdom of God on earth where one's country is chosen by God and one's leader is the messiah. This is exactly what Hitler's rise to power was based on; this is also what motivated the immoral madness of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent totalitarian state which emerged from it.

The Roman Empire during the time of Jesus saw itself in precisely this way. Its emperors were designated as gods and its control of the civilized world proof of the divine nature of the state. The only argument that moved Pilate to execute Christ was that it was claimed He was King of the Jews - when there could be only one divinely anointed king: Caesar.

Nationalistic fever spread over the land by the sounds of patriotic songs and stamped into the souls of populations by parades of service men, politicians and press corps that rationalize the war effort and stigmatize civil dissenters as disloyal, becomes the mania of religious utopianism: the state is the church. To confuse religious faith and truth with a particular national history with its social plans and goals is a seduction which goes back to Babel.

Jesus said: "My kingship [kingdom] is not of this world." (Matt. 18.36) The Kingdom of God, already spiritually, mystically and sacramentally present in the Church where Christ reigns as the Messiah from heaven with the Mary, the Mother of God, the Apostles, saints and holy angels; this Kingdom ruled by Christ and served by Him as its High Priest from the "heavenly, holy, and ideal altar for us men and for our salvation" is not of this world. In the Last Times, at the Second and Glorious Coming of Our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ it will come out of Heaven to earth. (2 Pet. 3.11-12; Rev. 21.2)

For Christians the nation they live in is their temporary home; they are to be good guests, good citizens, but they prepare for their eternal place in the Kingdom of God were they will take up residency in permanent palaces. They cannot be caught up in believing their earthly nation has a "manifest destiny" apart from the general destiny of all God's children. They cannot believe that they are an elect of God chosen for some special role in a future paradise. That paradise is the Church and those chosen people are believers who practice the faith as has been revealed to them by Christ and His Apostles and maintained in this world by the Holy Spirit.

To confuse the earthly state, any state, with the Kingdom of God, worshiping it and serving it, and believing it is divine is idolatry. The Bible prophetically treats the history of idolatry by including in the sweep of salvation history, the history of the Jews, great world empires whose pretension to divinity and claims to deity eventually led to their complete collapse and to eventual oblivion. Each of these empires at the time were invincible: Egypt; Assyria; Babylon; Persia; Greece; and Rome. They are contrasted repeatedly with the ideal Kingdom of God.

In the New Testament, in the Book of Revelation, worldly empires and worldly ideologies that claim to be the Kingdom of God but are actually the kingdom of men are given the name of "Babylon", standing for all tyrannical and idolatrous governments that enslave the world. St. John sets up a symmetry of symbols to teach us the sin of idolatry, of imagining a nation to be a religion and to demand worship from its citizens.

Of course, Rome in Revelations is the Babylon that is depicted. But Babylon stands for any and all dominant world cultures. Because it legitimizes the use of power and force for its policies and activities, undergirding its decisions with religious sanctions, prostituting true faith by turning it into propaganda, it is the opposite of God's Kingdom. The Antichrist, the great demonically inspired world ruler who will come at the end times according to the Bible, is called the "beast" (see ch. 13 of Revelations). Because his Babylon, (the kingdom of Antichrist will be the personification of the idolatrous state - the empires written about in the Bible being types of this demonic kingdom) uses power and tyranny and force as a substitute for faith, he is called the "beast" in contrast to Christ who uses love to conquer - He is the Lamb.

Babylon has always forced the world to serve it. St. John gives a startling portrait of Babylon's arrogance and fall in chapters seventeen and eighteen of Revelation. Babylon is depicted as a harlot who seduces the world into participating in her wickedness. It is interesting that St. John contrasts the harlot with the "woman clothed with the sun" who fled into the desert to remain holy and prophetic during the end times (Rev. ch. 12). This is a clear message that St. John is giving us: the Church is the real Kingdom - the woman clothed with the sun; and the deceitful, counterfeit kingdom of man is the harlot of chapter seventeen. The one Kingdom is legitimate, being God's Kingdom; the other kingdom is fake, being the worldly state that claims deity - Idolatry.

The idolatrous kingdom convinces men that earthly prosperity, material well-being and heedless consumption is the godly way to live, that personal indulgence and the wealth to satisfy it is a blessing of God: material paradise, earthly Eden, being a facsimile for true paradise and the Kingdom of God. In characterizing Babylon this way, St. John is reiterating what the Old Testament prophets had said about the empires that enslaved the near East during their lives: thus the "Rome" in (Rev. 18.1-24) "echoes from the taunt songs in Is. chs. 23-24; ch. 47; Jer. chs. 50-51; Ezek. chs. 26-27." [notes from RSV. The New Oxford Annotated Bible] The fate of the last Babylon, the great Babylon of the Antichrist, as is the fate of any human state that claims to be divine, is dramatically displayed: "And the kings of the earth, who committed fornication and were wanton with her, will weep and wail over her when they see the smoke of her burning; they will stand far off, in fear of her torment, and say, ‘Alas! Alas! Thou great city, thou mighty city, Babylon! In one hour has thy judgment come.'" (Rev. 18.9-10)

Note: Rick Michaels is a graduate of St. Vladimir's Theological Seminary, currently residing and writing in Ironwood, Michigan. He is also founder and member of the popular Orthodox group, Kerygma. For the "Best of Kerygma" CD, contact Conciliar Press.

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