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Deacon’s Corner
One of the most famous speeches in
Shakespeare is Shylock’s angry outburst in The
Merchant of Venice: “Hath not a Jew eyes?
Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions; fed with the same
food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to
the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and
summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we
not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If
you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong
us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the
rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong
a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a
Christian wrong a Jew, what should his
sufferance be by Christian example? Why,
revenge. The villainy you teach me I will
execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the
instruction” (III.i.54-68) What seems to start off as
a plea for being seen as a human like anyone
else turns at the end into a defiant acclamation
of otherness and almost a declaration of war.
By contrast, in John 15:12-18, Jesus offers a
different path: “This is my commandment, that
you love one another as I have loved you. No
one has greater love than this, to lay down
one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if
you do what I command you. I do not call you
servants any longer, because the servant does
not know what the master is doing; but I have
called you friends, because I have made known
to you everything that I have heard from my
Father. You did not choose me but I chose you.
And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit
that will last, so that the Father will give you
whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving
you these commands so that you may love one
another.”
What those of us graced to be present for the
statements of Jeff Curl, Beth Aletto, and the Rev.
Wooston-Bossert during worship on April 22
heard were the echoes of Jesus’s
commandment that, as W. H. Auden put it in his
great poem, “September 1, 1939,” at the
outbreak of World War II, “We must love one
another or die.” The pain of exclusion, the fear
of being rejected because of who we love, and
the joy of finding love and happiness and inclusion in loving larger groups suggest why
Jesus commanded his followers to love one
another as He had loved them: in our world,
love is the answer to hatred, inclusion is the
response to exclusion, and joy is the reward for
obeying this last commandment Jesus gave to
his followers just before he was crucified. The
Battle Hymn of the Republic at the outbreak of
our Civil War in 1861 and its affirmation that we
should be willing to “die to make men free”
finds a new meaning if we paraphrase it to
something like “let us live to let all love.”
Andy Weiner ~ Diaconate Board
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