The Surest Sign of a Grifter

6 May 2024   John 15:26-16:4

“The hour is coming when everyone who kills you will think he is offering worship to God.”  John 16:2

The surest sign of a grifter is someone who says he has an alternative to a time-tested moral truth, something that is easy, that requires little or no effort, and will get you better results than the now obsolete way.

Nothing in the moral universe works that way. Absolutely nothing.

It has become fashionable of late to denounce the decision to use atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 to end World War II as self-evidently evil, to denounce the people who made that decision as evil people, to claim that this conclusion is the easiest ever moral calculation to make, that only true moral idiots would question whether using atomic bombs on civilian populations was diabolical in the extreme.

Easy. No-brainer. No effort required for that conclusion at all.

Grifters.

The bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki together killed about 200,000 people. Had the U.S. conventionally invaded Japan, estimates indicated that there would be over a million U.S. casualties, and several million more Japanese, and the war would have taken another two years, minimum. No one wanted to explain that choice to a million American families, and three million or more Japanese.

Ending the war quickly was considered necessary to keep Stalinist Russia out of the Pacific, the same Stalinist regime that had killed over 20 million Russians for insufficient fidelity to the Revolution, about five million in Ukraine alone by simple starvation during the man-made Holodomor famine. There was no reason to think the Soviets would be any more gentlein the Pacific. No one wanted to explain that choice to the millions of victim families there either.

Every Just War Theory forbids attacking civilian populations. But what if warring nations put legitimate military targets in civilian areas? About a million civilians live in the immediate vicinity of the Pentagon. No country at war with the U.S. could avoid massive collateral damage by attacking a legitimate military target like the Pentagon, any more than the U.S. can avoid such damage in the legitimate targets it attacks. The only way to avoid collateral damage is not to attack at all. Yet every Just War Theory says some wars have to be fought. Some evils can only be eliminated by force, and failure to use force is just surrender to evil.

We don’t always get a choice between good and bad. Most of the time the choice is between bad and worse. The best of us can’t keep our hands clean. The grifters never decide at all and think they keep their hands clean that way. They’re not looking close enough.

Our fallen nature has twisted the moral world into so many knots that there are few clear choices anymore. For a sin to be mortal it is required that you know a deed is wrong, and that is exactly the kind of knowledge we have made it harder and harder to come by. People will kill the righteous thinking they are doing a good deed, something just, even something holy: “The hour is coming when everyone who kills you will think he is offering worship to God” (John 16:2). Even Jesus pitied them. Even with their nails through his hands he prayed, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

The moral landscape of our time is surreal in its absurdity. Night and fog is the inheritance of two, maybe three generations still alive. They don’t know the way, can’t even see the way.

Grifters sacrifice mercy for clarity.

Jesus doesn’t sacrifice mercy for anything. Clarity is downstream from mercy, He said. Things didn’t get this twisted all at once, and they won’t be fixed all at once. Start with mercy.