A Tale of Two Cultures: Reverence and Violence by O’Neill D’Cruz

God so loved the world, that he gave . . . eternal life

– John 3:16

They will expel . . . kill you [and] think [they are] offering worship to God; they have not known the Father or me

– John 16:2-3

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus states, “no man can serve two masters; for you will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other” (Matt 6:24). In the first century CE, when asked to choose between God and powerful men, the apostles Peter and John chose the power of love over the love of power: “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). For the past two thousand years, we, too, have been tempted to choose between “God, gold and glory.” Culture plays a fundamental and foundational role in forming our choice, conscience, and conduct.

Culture is the matrix that provides societal and historical context to interpret and live the gospel message. A culture of reverence for life is powered by love (amor, empathy), in contrast to a culture of violence that loves power over life (Roma, empire). In this essay, we will explore the worldviews of two cultures—reverence and violence—using story, history, and poetry as tripartite reflections. We begin with a story.

The Parable of the Warlord

Once upon a not-so-distant-time in a not-so-far-away land lived a warlord who amassed a lot of wealth immorally by exploiting and extorting the people of his province. He presided over many businesses, and appointed vice presidents (VPs) to oversee each business. However, the warlord wanted to be their king so he would have absolute power to conduct his unholy business.

Before leaving for the capital city to seek kingship, he instructed his VPs to increase revenue from their business units in his absence. He prepaid one hundred days of wages and promised performance-based incentive pay tied to the growth rate of the business units. Meanwhile, the people who had suffered greatly under the warlord also sent a delegation to the capital city asking for relief from the tyranny of their tormentor. Finding little help and no support from the royal courts, the delegation returned to plead with the VPs for provincial respite.

The warlord was unsuccessful in his bid to be king, and was in a foul mood when he returned home a few months later. He called in his VPs one by one for their quarterly business report. When he found that one had made a tenfold return on his wages, and another a fivefold return, he was very pleased and promoted them to executive vice presidents (EVPs) over multiple business units. Only one VP, who heard the cry of the poor from the people’s delegation and took the time to uncover the social impact of the warlord’s conglomerate, returned his wages. The warlord was furious that, for reasons of conscience, one of his VPs had not provided a return on investment by using banks or tanks.

So he fired the “loser” VP and turned over the business to his most exacting EVP. In a fit of vengeful wrath, he also issued an executive order to eliminate by any means necessary the delegation that resisted his monopoly.

Does this story sound uncannily familiar in our times? It is based on gospel parables, interpreted through the lens of liberation theology. Text without context often becomes pretext for the subtext of the prevailing culture, so let us review the two parables that inform this version of the story: the parable of the minas (Luke 19:12-27) and the parable of the talents (Matt 25:14-30). We are familiar with the standard interpretation of these parables as a call for productive use of our God-given talents and a caution against laziness. When we read into the social, gospel, and historical contexts of the parables, we uncover other insights hiding in plain sight, if we can “see [and] understand [without] hardened hearts” (Mark 8:17).

Let us recall that Jesus constructed parables and social teaching to address the woes and hopes of the Jewish community colonized by the Roman empire. Thus, his audience would find much in common with an interpretation of the parables that aligned with a “people’s history of empire.” A mina amounted to one hundred days of wages, and talent (a bag of gold, in Greek) to fifteen to twenty years of a laborer’s wages. This metric provides a relatable economic indicator for “the wretched of the earth” of all times, who are exploited for the benefit of wealthy imperial forces. No wonder “the tired, the poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free” flocked to Jesus for telltale signs and actions that would provide respite and relief from the heavy yoke of their Roman warlords and imperial colonizers.

The placement of parables in the gospels is informative of how early Christian communities remembered the key take-to-heart messages of the parables. In Luke’s gospel, the anecdote of Zaccheus (Luke 19:1-10) precedes the parable of the minas (Luke 19:12-27). After an encounter with Jesus, Zaccheus, the wealthy man of Jericho, donates half his wealth to provide for the poor and makes fourfold amends for any and all fraudulent capital gains. Zaccheus thus becomes a biblical model for mindsets and methods that provide economic justice and increase social capital. In contrast, the parable of the minas calls out cruel warlords whose behavior is precisely the opposite of Zaccheus. By linking the story of Zaccheus with the parable, the Beloved Community would remember to emulate Zaccheus and the parable’s sole conscientious objector to a corrupt and covetous culture, even if that meant being deprived of the privileges of diabolical empire.

The “people’s history” interpretation of these parables reiterates the message of the earlier Good Samaritan parable (Luke 10:30-37) to “go and do thou likewise” and provide compassionate care out of reverence for all life. The story of Lazarus and Dives in Luke 16:19-31 echoes the theme of the outcast and dispossessed being invited to join the divine banquet. We find that when the parables are interpreted within a culture of reverence, one is called to “seek and save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10). However, within a culture of violence, the same verse is heard as a call to arms to seek and reclaim the glory of a “great” gilded age and fight for the “lost cause.”

Rembrandt van Rijn, “The Parable of the Talents,” n.d.

Matthew places the parable of the talents (Matt 25:14-30) just before the story of Judgment Day (Matt 25:31-46) At the end of the parable, the “one who does not have, even what he does have is taken away [and] cast out into outer darkness, weeping and grinding teeth” (Matt 25:29-30). At this point, when all hope is lost in the outer world, the plot thickens and the narrative takes an unexpected twist. The very next verse begins with the telltale phrase, “But when the Son of Man comes in His glory” (Matt 25:31, NASB). The story goes on to describe how those who cared for “the one who does not have, was taken away, weeping and frustrated” as well as all those marginalized (“the least of my brethren” who are “cast out” by the proud and the powerful in the diabolical empire) receive the gift of eternal life for their efforts at securing justice and peace.

We find that in Matthew’s gospel, these themes from Jesus’s final parable align with the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount at the beginning of his ministry. His Jewish community would easily identify the parables and story of Judgment Day as endorsing a culture of reverence for life. Both were reminders of Isaiah’s prophetic message (Isa 58), which called the faith community to be “repairers of the breach and restorers of ruined streets and dwellings” and thus reestablish human dignity lost to a culture of violence.

It is noteworthy that both Matthew and Luke place the parable of the warlord right before Jesus enters the capital city to face lethal backlash from the privileged. Has this not been the lot of prophets and peacemakers of all times?

In the next section, we review historical expressions of this story-parable congruent with cultures of violence. Let us begin with the history behind the parable of the warlord.

History: God and Country

The historical context of the parable of the warlord was common knowledge to first-century Jews under Roman rule. Herod Archelaus was a much-despised and feared governor of Judea in Jesus’s time. Provincial authorities reported Archelaus’s brutality to Augustus Caesar, who appointed Archelaus as governor over Judea rather than the kingship he sought after his father King Herod’s death. Archelaus also slaughtered the people’s delegation who reported his extreme policies and practices to Caesar. Jesus had good reason to remember Archelaus, whose tyrannical rule over Judea was the reason the Holy Family could not go back to their ancestral lands after their exile in Egypt (Matt 2:22). In addition to acknowledging historical trauma, constructing the parable around Archelaus provides a memorable link to the violence of all tyrants and the economics of empire in all ages.

After being persecuted and marginalized for three hundred years, Christians were mainstreamed into Roman society under Constantine’s imperial patronage. A hundred years later, with Gothic invasions of Roman strongholds, the empire entered into a period of decline. As happens so often, peace-loving and compassionate Christians were scapegoated and called to demonstrate their patriotism by fighting for the republic. Enter Augustine, bishop of Hippo and august Doctor of the Church, whose writings reframed Christianity’s emphasis and relationship with Christ and country, mercy and military, worship and war.

“In mercy . . . even wars may be waged by the good.” Augustine formulated this reflection in his Letter 138 in the fifth century CE. Augustine also formulated the two-worldview framework in The City of God, contrasting the divine with the diabolical in human affairs. Furthermore, Augustine postulated that unholy actions were justified if one’s intentions were holy. In Seeds of Destruction, Thomas Merton follows the logical sequelae and historical consequences of policies and politics informed by these Augustinian postulates. These include theological justifications for just war, holy wars (Crusades), and inquisitions in the pre-Columbian Old World.

A thousand years after Augustine, the same theological justifications in the Doctrine of Discovery papal encyclicals enabled the first, and aptly named, Christ-bearing Colon-izer—Cristóbal Colón, who we know as Christopher Columbus—and his successors to bring both Word and sword to the New World. Thus, while preaching the Word based on John 3:16, devout Christians permit, promote, and practice acts of the sword based on John 16:1-3! Augustine also bequeathed us “original sin,” and, as part of the Augustinian legacy, we have our own version of America’s original sin. In Faith and Violence, Merton contrasts the historical gaps between Christian teachings and Christian practices in the New World.

Blaise Pascal wryly observed, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” All religions have devout followers who interpret key tenets of their faith tradition through a preferred cultural lens of reverence or violence. When reverence for violence is theologically justified, conscience remains silent and unmoved in the face of crimes against humanity. If a faith community soaked in the culture of violence uses fifth-century Augustinian postulates to justify expelling and exploiting minorities, withholding just wages, and waging war, then these become acts of “mercy . . . waged by the good” as well as ways and means of “offering worship to God” (John 16:2). 

In Peace in the Post-Christian Era, Merton exhorted Christians to eschew violence. His message of peace as the societal goal of a culture of reverence echoes the theme of the papal encyclical Pacem in Terris. However, as illustrated by the parable of the warlord, “when the culture itself is corrupt and objective truth and universally valid principles are no longer upheld, then laws can only be seen as arbitrary impositions or obstacles to be avoided” (Laudato Si #123).

History also provides countless examples of those who lead by example. “My life is my message,” said Gandhi, whose ahimsa (based on non-violence) and satyagraha (based on moral truth) movements led to Indian independence from the British empire. Gandhi employed nonviolence as a moral force and means for seeking justice. He drew inspiration for social justice and political activism from Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom is Within You, based on the Sermon on the Mount. Tolstoy, in turn, was influenced and motivated by the work of William Lloyd Garrison, the American activist who campaigned for the abolition of slavery. A hundred years after Garrison, Martin Luther King Jr. utilized the principles of the Sermon on the Mount in his effort to help fellow Americans realize their large collective blind spots and tunnel vision in the field of civil and human rights. MLK’s Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? calls out materialism, nationalism, and militarism as the unholy trinity that emerges within a culture of violence. All these prophets of peace were “eliminated by any means necessary”: execution, excommunication, or exclusion.

Along with story and history, poetry is part of cultural heritage. We now turn to celebrated poets for spiritual and social expressions of contrasting cultures and worldviews.

Poetry: Heartland and Homeland

Psalm 22 is both lament and prayer, and provides us a bottom-of-the-pyramid view of life. In the gospels of Matthew and Mark, the first line of the psalm are Jesus’s final words from the cross, spoken in solidarity with those persecuted by empire. The rest of the psalm enumerates how a culture of predatory violence dogs, dispossesses, and drains all life from every suffering servant and human being made in imago Dei, God’s image and likeness.

My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
Dogs surround me;
 a pack of evildoers closes in on me.
They have pierced my hands and my feet
I can count all my bones.
They stare at me and gloat;
they divide my garments among them;
for my clothing they cast lots.
But you, Lord, do not stay far off;
my strength, come quickly to help me.
Deliver my soul from the sword,
my life from the grip of the dog.
Save me from the lion’s mouth,
my poor life from the horns of wild bulls.

Two and a half centuries after the Declaration of Independence, our nation is still passing through the labor pains of birthing mutual interdependence in “one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all.” Mary Oliver’s poem “Of the Empire” speaks of the hardened hearts that desire and defend a culture of violence, love of power and empire: 

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

“Let My Country Awake,” the century-old poem of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, reminds us that fear, fragmentation, and the fog of “dreary desert sand of dead habit” are the effects of a diabolical culture of violence. Tagore’s poem also serves as path and prayer to help us awaken from the slumber of inaction and indifference into “that heaven of freedom,” where reverence for all life is manifest through divinely led “ever-widening thought and action”:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

A final story-history-poetry of compassion, courage, and catholicity to conclude our reflections: Tagore won the Nobel prize for literature during the British colonial era, and was knighted by the empire for his achievement. He used his prize money to open a bank for the poor “down-and-out-castes” who were refused loans by wealthy landlords and imperial banks. He also operated Shantiniketan, which means “abode of peace,” a nature-centered school in Bengal. When British troops massacred unarmed Indian civilians, Tagore renounced the knighthood of the empire to show solidarity with his people.

Tagore’s bank provided the economic model for micro-lending and Grameen Bank, which means rural bank, of Nobel-laureate and Bengali economist Muhammad Yunus. Shantiniketan was the school where Amartya Sen, another Nobel laureate and Bengali economist, received the education that formed his lifelong work on welfare economics and social justice. May Tagore’s words and example, along with other role models in the “vast multitude . . . from every nation, race, people and language” (Rev 7:9) inspire us to “work for justice, be compassionate and walk humbly with God” (Mic 6:8).

Postscript: Colonial Constructs

A brief review of American history at hundred-year intervals readily reveals the pernicious and persistent transhistorical expressions of the parable of the warlord. In the 1520s, the first Christian missions and inquisition offices were established along with European settlements in Central America. This resulted in mass conversions to Christianity, along with genocide and dehumanization of Native communities. In the 1620s, slave-holding ships started arriving in American ports, bringing captured Africans to serve the economic needs and domestic whims of wealthy European settlers. In the 1720s, European nations battled each other to claim and colonize “discovered” lands, based on Roman terra nullius land laws (terra nullius was redefined as lands without Christians). In the 1820s, former colonists become colonizers, as Native tribes were dispossessed of their ancestral lands and “cast out” of the Christian settler-colonial version of history. In the 1920s, eugenicists and white supremacist warlords joined hands to suppress and oppress nonwhite populations. In the 2020s, religious nationalism is a violent political force in America.

Cultures are shaped by history, and the liberation movements of two former British colonies can help us understand how and why a culture of reverence or violence can shape postcolonial history. US colonies fought a revolutionary war, and the violence of military force was the means to achieve independence from British overlords. Thus, violence is inextricably linked with settler-colonialism and patriotism in US postcolonial history. A war economy is considered culturally acceptable and even essential in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” In contrast, the Indian colony adopted the mindset and methods of a no-kill policy, and used nonviolence as a moral force to gain independence from the empire. Gandhi’s satyagrahis were nonviolent non-Christians, and US patriots were violent Christians. We should not consider violence as an aberration of the religion of the Christian West. All major world religions originated in Asia, and violence endorsed by religious authorities through silence or active propaganda is not just a cultural vestige of colonial history in postcolonial times.

One present-day example to remind us of religious and state collaboration in the deeply rooted settler-colonial culture of violence is the oldest Catholic mission on US soil, Mission Nombre De Dios in St. Augustine (!), Florida. Established in 1565, it displays a statue of the priest who accompanied the Spanish military commander and a towering structure that can be viewed as both the Cross of Christ and the Sword of Constantine. The mission museum has a large banner of the Blessed Mother as patroness and protector of both missionaries and mercenaries. The inscription underneath the banner reads, “The spread of Christianity was a critical force in shaping Spanish New World colonization. In many areas of the Americas, priests were the cultural emissaries . . . founding mission communities in advance of Spanish settlements.” Native cultures and languages were suppressed in mission schools, along with erasure of Native peoples’ self-assigned identities. Thus, mercenaries and missionaries became agents and partners in colonial and cultural genocide of “indigenous” populations.  The word indigenous is a colonial construct based on the French word indigenes (“Indians,” in English). Though within ten years of arriving in America, Europeans knew that India was on the other side of the planet, we continue to use colonial-era constructs of cultural erasure to refer to non-European Natives of all continents to this day. ♦

O’Neill D’Cruz retired once from academic clinical practice as a pediatrician and neurologist, a second time from the neuro-therapeutics industry, and now spends his time caring, coaching, and consulting from his home in North Carolina, known locally as the “Southern Part of Heaven.” He is a wounded healer who works to heal the wounded, in order that All Shall Be Well.

Images courtesy of O’Neill D’Cruz