A group of Scandinavian women recently made a pilgrimage for peace by walking to Minsk, in the Soviet Union. All along the way they talked to Soviet people who characteristically responded to their pleas for peace with words like these: "We want peace. But you know how the Americans are, we can't trust them. We can't let down our guard. If we showed weakness they would overwhelm us. The only thing Americans understand is power."
Another group of friends sat in at the Soviet embassy in New York as a witness for peace last summer. They were told the same thing: "We desire peace too, but the Americans are seeking military superiority over us. We have no choice but to continue to build up our military strength."
The words sound like a tape recording. Substitute "Russians" for "Americans," or vice versa, and you can hear it played over and over in every American and Soviet city.
Our respective national fears have become mirror projections of each other. Like most fears, some are real and some imagined. Both sides have behaved in ways that cause the other side to legitimately be afraid. Both sides have allowed their fears to escalate far out of proportion to reality. Both sides paint "worst-case scenarios" of the other and make the necessary preparations to meet them. Our fears have now made us contemplate ultimate violence against each other, and unless dealt with, they will surely destroy us all.
While the arms race has many complicated political and economic causes, its root cause is fear. The bomb is the political result of fear, the logical, social extension of our personal anxiety.
Desiring to be saved from all the things that frighten us, we bow before our nation and its military might, which literally promises us salvation. We have allowed our faith and security in God to be overcome by fear, the greatest enemy of faith and its final contradiction.
But our Lord has some direct and simple words for us in this historical moment. Jesus said, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44).
For many the admonition to love our enemies is believable only as long as the enemies are general and unspecified. But when they are identified as Russians, Iranians, Cubans, or whomever the government names as our adversaries, the statement becomes outrageous. "Love your enemies" is admired as the word of the Lord until it is suggested that it means you can't simultaneously love your enemies and plot their annihilation.
"But what about the Russians?" continues to be the most commonly asked question when one begins to talk about the nuclear arms race. Even in the churches, the Soviet threat gets more attention than the words of Jesus. The question may indeed be the right one, but it is being asked in a tragically wrong way.
What about the Russians? What about the Russian people and their children? What would become of them in a nuclear war? They are among the hundreds of millions of God's children whom we seem quite ready to destroy in the name of freedom, democracy, and national security.
The question we should be asking is, "What has become of us?" What does it say about a people when they are prepared to commit mass murder against "enemy populations," whatever the reason? For some things, there are no reasons good enough.
For 38 years the Japanese have tried to get us to see their pained faces since the atomic bombings. But we have been afraid of what we might see: agony, shock, horror. To look is to have to face up to what we have done. To look is to see our future and our children's future written on their faces.
The devastation and horror we wreaked on Hiroshima and its sister city of Nagasaki are beyond imagination. The agony lives on in those who lost family members in the bombings, continue to lose them to cancer and radiation sickness, and discover the legacy of the bombings in generations of children who suffer genetic defects.
We have the capacity now to create 1,600,000 Hiroshimas, and every day we add three more bombs to our arsenal. We have come this far by not looking at the faces of the people of Hiroshima and by not looking at the faces of those we now call our enemies.
An Israeli soldier in Lebanon said of the people he was ordered to kill, "It's so hard when I'm up close. When I can see their faces, I can't bring myself to kill them. But when I'm farther away and am just shooting artillery shells, then I can do it."
A young American in a missile silo, one of many with his finger on the nuclear button, said, "I don't know if I could kill anyone up close. This way I never have to see who my missile hits."
Our missiles are aimed at the Soviet threat, the Russian system, godless communism. It is certainly true that the Soviet system is cruelly oppressive. But missiles don't kill systems, they kill people--hundreds of millions of them. They will hit churches and kill millions of sisters and brothers who are one with us in the body of Christ.
It is a great historical irony that there were Catholics in the bombing crew that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, the first and largest Catholic city in Japan. The ground zero target for the bomb was the Catholic cathedral. Among its victims were hundreds of worshipers and three orders of Catholic sisters.
The faces of Hiroshima and Nagasaki look at us quietly, patiently, earnestly, to show us the human face of nuclear war. They refuse to turn away from our eyes as we have turned away from theirs. They say, "See what you have done. See what is the fate of the earth unless you stop the mad race of nuclear weapons."
The words of Paul speak right to the heart of our problem:
But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end.
(Ephesians 2:13-16).
At the time that these words were written, it was the Gentiles who were "far off." But today, when we think of who is farthest away from American Christians, we think of the Russians. They are the most feared, caricatured, unknown, inhuman to us. But the Russians have been brought near to us by the blood of Christ. The hostility which God has put to death our government would stir up, and in so doing has directly set itself and our nation against the work of the cross of Jesus Christ.
The arms race will not end until we come to terms with the Russians. The nuclear freeze won't be enough; arms control won't be enough. Mutual fear and distrust will destroy us unless we overcome it.
Jesus never said that we would have no enemies nor that they would never be a threat. There is no lack of realism here. Jesus offers us a new way to deal with our enemies, a different way of responding that has the potential to break the endless cycle of retaliation that now threatens us all with ultimate violence.
In the past, Jesus' simple exhortation to love our enemies has been given a place of reverent respect and then summarily dismissed as politically irrelevant. Some theologians have called it "a necessary but irrelevant ideal." But the "realistic" approach has not worked so well. To continue to think that both real and imagined threats can be successfully countered with nuclear weapons is the height of unreality and naivete. Nuclear weapons cannot defend us; they can only destroy us. In a time when all other solutions have brought the world to the brink of destruction, Jesus' plan for reconciliation may be our only viable option.
With the growing prospect of nuclear holocaust, Jesus' long-ignored teaching is revealed to be supremely relevant and vitally necessary. If we fail to see a neighbor in the face of our enemy, the consequences will be unthinkable. To ignore Jesus now, in the name of political realism, will allow our realism to destroy us.
Our perilous situation makes clear the mission of the church. We must step out, walk around diplomatic channels, ignore the obstacles, break the laws, and make friends of our enemies--American churches to Russian churches, American families to Russian families. We must build the bonds strong enough to defend both sides from nuclear weapons. And in so doing, we could make the words of Paul a prophecy for our future.
Our hope in this issue of Sojourners is to present the human face of the Russian people, and especially, the faces of our brothers and sisters in Christ who are the Russian church. May we look long and hard at this human portrait and turn from our present course before it is too late.
Jim Wallis was editor-in-chief of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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