Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children.… For if men do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23:28, 31)
By chance, due to a wrong turn off a freeway ramp, I ended up driving through the heart of South-Central L.A. just a week after the Rodney King riots. I had seen the television reports, but no 20-inch screen could do justice to the scene: National Guard patrols, mile after mile of charred rubble, “Black Owned” signs spray-painted everywhere in a desperate attempt to deter looters.
Not long before, I had read this passage from Anglican Bishop John V. Taylor, in which he comments on Jesus’ poignant words to the women who grieved as he dragged his cross through the streets of Jerusalem:
As we read the story again, incident by incident, we must be struck by the hard fact that 2,000 years have not made much difference to humanity.… When armed men get a victim into their hands, handcuffed and alone, they can’t resist the urge to knock him about—he’s fair game in the back rooms of Caiaphas’s house or any other police barracks. Weep for yourselves.… Those who have the power to insist that justice is done, still prefer to wash their hands of the matter, and crowds of ordinary, decent, frightened women and men yell the slogans of the moment rather than stopping to think and stand out against the rest. Weep for yourselves.
Shouting And Blaming
As I drove through South-Central, Bishop Taylor’s words from 1986 seemed eerily prophetic.
Yet what surprised me in L.A. was how few people seemed to be weeping. On the radio talk shows, they mostly shouted—about poverty, about George Bush, about the failed Great Society, about drugs and gangs and everything else that’s wrong with modern America. People on both sides looked for someone else to blame.
The looters themselves certainly weren’t weeping. In a USA Today poll, 35 percent of those arrested said they had “fun in the streets”; 33 percent said they would take part if there were more riots. “It’s not our fault,” I heard one high-school student say. “We’re just victims. We have a right to strike back.”
In L.A. I learned about another side to the “race riots” that got little coverage in the national press. Half the rioters arrested were Hispanic, and 10 percent were white. Loot was even found in dorm rooms at use and UCLA. The Los Angeles Times told of drivers in BMWS, Lexuses, and Cadillacs pulling up to electronics and camera stores and helping themselves to the goods.
Besides bringing to light the problems of the inner city, the riots also uncovered an ominous streak of anarchy that lies just beneath the surface in urban America. Local politicians kept using that word (an-archy means, literally, “no leader”) as they tried to comprehend what had happened.
Ironically, the despair I heard from civic leaders echoed what I had heard from government leaders in the former Soviet Union last fall. One said, “Dostoevsky predicted that if there is no God, anything is permissible—we’re now living with the results of godlessness.” How sad that at this moment in history, when the world looks to the U.S. for moral leadership, we have so little to offer.
The Missing God
Back in Chicago I reread John Taylor, then, read the passion narratives in the Gospels all the way through. In Matthew 24–25 I noticed a pattern I had never before seen. Four parables, among the last that Jesus gave, have a common theme lurking in the background. An owner who leaves his house vacant, an absentee landlord who puts his servant in charge, a bridegroom who arrives so late the guests become drowsy and fall asleep, a master who distributes talents among his servants and takes off—all these circle around the theme of the missing God.
In effect, Jesus’ four parables anticipated the central question of the modern era, asked by the likes of Nietzsche, Marx, Camus, and Beckett. “Where is God now?” The modern answer is that the landlord has abandoned us. We are free to set our own rules.
Now, in places like Russia and South-Central L.A., we have living versions of those parables, graphic examples of how some workers will act when they stop believing in a landlord. If there is no God, anything is permissible.
Reading on, I came to one more parable, probably the last one Jesus taught. I knew well the message of the sheep and the goats, but I had never noticed its connection with the parables that precede it. This last parable answers the question raised by the others (the absentee landlord) in two ways.
First, it gives a glimpse of the landlord’s return, on Judgment Day, when there will be hell to pay—literally. The topic of hell doesn’t come up much anymore; perhaps if it did, the human species would be a little more conscious of how we treat each other on earth.
Second, the parable gives an insight into the meantime, the mean time, the centuries-long interval when God seems absent. Matthew 25’s answer to that most modern question is at once profound and shocking. God has not absconded at all. Rather, he has taken on a disguise, a most unlikely disguise of the stranger, the poor, the hungry, the prisoner, the sick, the ragged ones of the earth. “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it for me.”
Jesus’ final parable leaves the church with a heavy burden, but one that offers the only lasting solution for L.A. and the world. We must oppose anarchy by insisting that there is a leader, a landlord for the entire planet who, unlike some policemen, will dispense perfect justice. Furthermore, until the landlord’s return, it is up to us to demonstrate God’s presence. We reach out to places like South-Central not out of paternalism, but out of love. By serving the needy, we serve God in disguise.
