‘I feel good when I fire someone’ … our spiritual crisis

All those who had any who were sick with various kinds of diseases brought them to [Jesus]; and he laid his hands on each of them and cured them. Demons also came out of many, shouting, ‘You are the Son of God!’ But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak, because they knew that he was the Messiah. (Luke 4:40-41)

I could never produce a convincing reason why Jesus told the demons to shut up when they shouted his identity. But the times we live in suggest an answer. More on that in a minute. First, a dinner party.

Nearly 20 years ago, Dixie and I sat in a suburban living room with several other church members, sharing a glass of wine before dinner. When conversation turned to work, one of our evening companions said he had to fire someone that day.

So sorry about that, another said. The response was immediate, ‘Don’t’ be. I feel good when I fire someone.’  

Two women in the room gasped and objected when he said it, including his wife, but he doubled down. ‘It makes my business more successful.’

That night had not occurred to me for years until the evening news assaulted my consciousness with the sight of Elon Musk prancing across a stage wielding a chain saw.

Gleefully delighting in dismantling government programs, he celebrated throwing talented, dedicated people on the street, all while a roomful of well-heeled sycophants cheered him on, utterly oblivious or willfully blind to the pain of those they’d repeatedly slandered.

Nor did they see, or have the spiritual capacity to see millions of people, in this country and beyond, who are served by the programs being trashed, people like my friend’s son who needs exorbitantly expensive medication to work and stay alive, or veterans who struggle to get health benefits, or special ed kids whose programs are disappearing, not to mention hundreds of thousands … who will die … because of the death of USAID.

But let’s go back to the dinner party. It is a relatively small step from what I heard years ago in that suburban living room to what hits us in the gut every day on the evening news. The only real difference is one of scale.

What is happening in our country has everything to do with the lack of empathy so evident in my dinner companion. Even with further conversation, he evinced no willingness or ability to see or consider the impact of his actions, even if they were necessary, on the mind, heart and well-being of another human soul.

He understood power and how to use it, sometimes employing it to bring people to heel, bending them to his will, a trait evident and celebrated in the MAGA movement in which being dominant is the most important value, trumping all others.

And this may be the great spiritual crisis of our day, the valorization of power, the ability to make others bend the knee, to get your way, to gain advantage or take revenge, to make America great.

And if others are injured or destroyed, killed or just waste away (and make no mistake, they are and will), well, that’s just the cost of doing business. Most of them are just parasites anyway. After all, empathy is a bug in the system of greatness. It just gets in the way.

But power without empathy, power untutored by faith and human values, is blind, deaf and dumb. It makes no friends, builds no relationships and cures no ills as it splinters societies. It sees, hears and attends to its whims and wishes, as utterly oblivious as those cheering Elon Musk’s chainsaw dance.

And this brings me back to Jesus and the demons, who always seemed to recognize who he was when others did not. Jesus wouldn’t let them spill the beans, and now I get it.

They only knew his power. That they recognized, but they didn’t see him and therefore didn’t really know him. For knowing him requires seeing, feeling and knowing his compassionate willingness to suffer in order to free the hearts and lives of those the great ones … would have us ignore.