Yoder- Who is your Messiah?

"The invocation of violence to support any cause is also implicitly a messianism. Any national sense of mission claims implicitly to be a saving community. One cannot avoid either messianism or the claim to chosen peoplehood by setting Jesus or his methods aside. One only casts the aura of election around lesser causes." Nevertheless p. 138

Death of a Vigilante

People are ugly. Standing on the Bus yesterday I remembered, people are quite nasty pieces of work. One bloke was swearing into the phone, threatening to beat people up, no one would get up for an eldelry man to sit, people pushed and shoved and scowled. Sometimes I feel like taking on the role of a vigilante. Of cleaning this town up by removing some of its scum.
I've been reading Augustine though.
He has this concept of evil as the distortion or privation of good. This makes my fellow travellers even more guilty (me too). It isn't simply that we do wrong, but we fail to do all the good we could with what God has given us. The problem with the guy on the phone isn't simply that he is threatening, but that he isn't building up.
As the confession often says, "we have done what we ought not to have done, and we have not done what we ought to have done".

Which is why wiping out the wicked is never enough. While it may stop the injustice, the world is still deprived of the good these people could be doing. Only the Spirt of God, transforming people and empowering them into the freedom of self-giving work can create the kind of justice that isn't simply the absence of bad, but the presence of abundant good.

This has to change the way I look at people. My question has to stop being, 'how could God restrict them from being jerks?', and start being ' How could the Spirit of Jesus make them life givers for others?'

So, no more Vigilante fantasies.