undercovernun: It is a strange betrayal, isn’t...

It is a strange betrayal, isn’t it? I’m going to go on a little bit of a journey before I circle back to this.

A couple years ago, I noticed something strange about Christian belief. I was looking at biblical mentions of hell and the devil, and what I discovered surprised me: We have made hell so much scarier than what is in the bible. Instead of being an Adversary or God’s prosecuting attorney, we’ve turned Satan into a monster and given him much power. We’ve created this incredible landscape for hell, filled with demons and torture, when the bible points instead to a place of sleep or rest for the dead.

At the same time, we’ve tamed God’s angels and turned them mostly useless. Every time an angel appears in the bible, the first words out of his mouth are don’t be afraid. Would any of the angels that appear in popular art have to say this? The ridiculous babies or the gentle, beautiful women? No, we’ve stripped the angels of their power and majesty, leaving nothing left that would make us afraid.

In reflecting on this, I realized something really strange about us humans: we fear goodness far more than we fear evil. We are threatened by good. Goodness paralyzes us, because we don’t understand it. So we undermine it. We pull its teeth, and we ascribe selfish motives, and we plug our ears and sing the la-la-i-can’t-hear-you song so that when goodness speaks, we can hear only ourselves. Because if goodness exists — if God exists as a being of pure goodness — then we know we fall horribly short of the mark. We know we are not good. We may try to be, or we may claim we try to be, but we’re selfish and manipulative and vengeful, and we know it.

So we imagine up hell as a place of punishment and torture, the place we believe we deserve to be. We try to make God as selfish and vengeful as we are, sending us forever away from God’s presence to this place of punishment and revenge. We turn God into an oppressor rather than a savior. We turn God into a being of violence and vengeance rather than of goodness and love and light. And then we worship this ugly and tarnished version of God, because we know in our heart of hearts that we are not good and we deserve punishment.

This is my answer to the question posed in the original tweet:

Everytime a group gets oppressed, some of those oppressed will side with their oppressor. I never understood what motivates that betrayal.

The motivation is simple, though it may not be immediately obvious. These oppressed people who side with their oppressor, they believe that they deserve to be oppressed. They know that darkness lives in the deep places of their soul, and they know that they are flawed and unlovely and un-good.

Dimerdji is right to label this as betrayal. We are called not to dwell in our awfulness, but to abide in the infinite love and mercy and peace of God. We may never see true goodness in this world, or pure love, or pure mercy, but we can aspire to them. We betray ourselves, we betray those who are oppressed, and we betray God as well.