Recently somebody shared on Twitter a pep talk given by a minister’s wife to the women’s Sunday School at some church, somewhere. I forget. The woman’s point was that she didn’t want to “play the victim.”
One thing people noticed about the characters Jodie Foster had any real control over, in her youth, was that they didn’t look like real-life Jodie Foster; the other thing, the thing Foster told people was essential to her willingness to play those roles, was that they Were Not Victims.
As a teenager, Jodie Foster survived one of the most horrible, disgusting, embarrassing things that could possibly happen to a teenager. Every girl has an Insane Admirer but Foster’s was violent, and he told the arresting officers that his motive for shooting President Reagan and James Brady was that he hoped his doing that would impress Foster. Naturally the FBI asked her a lot of questions about how he could have got such an idea. People (like my mother) actually said things like “She did play sleazy characters in smutty movies! That’s the kind of thing that gives that kind of boys ideas!” People who were more sympathetic said, “No, no, poor little Jodie Foster is strictly the Victim of her Insane Admirer’s Insane Fantasies,” and Foster said she did not want to be considered a victim. As far as she was concerned she wasn’t even that close to having a relationship with her Insane Admirer. (She has a valid point there.)
Now if this minister’s wife had said something like “I refused to be a victim of that mugger, so when he said ‘Give me your bag’ I let him have my bag, lead weights and all, right between the eyes, and he ain’t no mugger no more,” that would have been interesting.
Or if she’d said, “I refuse to be a victim of local warming this summer! Adirondacks, here I come!”, that would have been…reasonable.
“I refuse to be a victim of my car, utility company, computer, cell phone, home security system, etc. etc. etc., so here’s what I’ve learned about trouble-shooting this device.” That would have been cool.
“I refuse to be a victim of an underprivileged background and/or an underachieving school. I’m taking courses in…” That would have been powerful.
“I refuse to be a victim of a spoiled-brat cat. I’m watching the garden, and when that animal starts digging around the petunias, I’m using my finger to pressurize the stream so, pow, the hose just knocks it sidewise!” That would have been cat-tested and Cat-Sanctuary-approved.
The list of useful things someone, somewhere, might have to tell us about not being a victim, is probably infinite, but what does not belong on it was what this unfortunate minister’s wife did say, which was basically “I don’t want to be a victim because I don’t liiiike victims.”
Ooohhh, pity da fool, Gentle Readers. Anybody out there who’s come to terms with the fact that, in this world, all of us get to be victims sometimes, be aggressors sometimes, and share the blame for most of the remaining messes into which we get, may now proceed to mop up the floor with this squeaking, cat-teasing little mouse; she deserves every bit of what she gets, and more. “Overcoming evil with good” includes many things. Judging and blaming victims is not one of them.
Think you’re too good to be a victim, do you? That’s what they used to call hubris; in classical Greek drama it fairly well guaranteed that, if you were extremely lucky, you’d survive the disaster heading your way with some limited use of one hand and one eye. And the audience would laugh and cheer over your misery, and leave the theatre with a sense of renewed hope for some measure of justice in this world.
Jesus, of course, did like victims. Most Christians believe that Jesus had special, divine insight into the extent to which individuals were to blame for their own circumstances, and to which others were to blame for their circumstances. It’s likely that He did counsel individuals, privately, about their self-defeating or self-destructive habits, if any. What we’re told about is His public ministry.
In His public ministry Jesus did call people out about their private sins. Rabbis were expected to be memorably witty and not overly concerned about sparing people’s feelings; Jesus preached as His audience expected a rabbi to preach. He had no qualms about shaming individuals, even about the collective sins of their home towns. “Woe unto you, Chorazin! Woe unto you, Bethsaida!” “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem that kills the prophets…” “You have had five husbands.” “This kind requires much prayer and fasting.” “Those who take the sword shall perish by the sword.” He called the puppet king of Judea “that fox.” He called His most ardent disciple, Peter, “Satan.”
This being the case, one might expect to find Him, like so many of those who dispense free advice today, telling people all about how their problems were of their own making, as some of them were. The Old Testament prophets had foretold that, because of their collective sins, the Israelites would become a subject race, as indeed they had. Jesus might have spent His time reminding Israelite audiences that Roman soldiers were likely to seize any able body they came across on the road and order him to carry their armor for a mile because the Israelites had not been faithful to the Law of Moses. It’s possible that He did read some of those prophecies aloud in some Sabbath meetings; we are not told. What we’re told is that He read the passage from Isaiah about “The Spirit of the Lord…has appointed me to preach good tidings…release to the captives…restoration of sight to the blind.” Not only that, but when literally blind people asked Him for healing prayers, they were healed. This is probably the most conspicuous of the differences between Christ and the average Christian today.
For good and sufficient reasons, most of us neither claim nor try to restore sight to the blind. That would be enough to prove our inferiority to our Master but many of us add hubris to our inferiority.
It’s interesting to imagine many modern Christians approaching the man who lay near the healing pool in Bethesda. “I’m blind and crippled, and nobody ever helps me toward the healing pool—instead, they push me back as they crowd closer to the water.”
“Well, if you didn’t whine and wail so much about being blind, you might have found a friend to help you by now.”
“If you’ve been waiting here so long, how have you failed to notice how many people are not being healed by touching the water?”
“If you’d stop playing the victim, you’d be able to do whatever you did to get yourself this close to the pool, to get yourself right into the water.”
“If you’d let yourself notice that other people are not healed when they touch the water, you might get on with the process of inner healing and be able to feel good about being blind.”
“If you really trusted God, you’d accept that God wants you to be blind.”
Everybody loves a chance to blame a victim. Blaming the victim lets us imagine that there is justice in this world. We want justice. If we can’t have the real thing, most of us will settle for a cheap imitation…
“If you really had faith in God, you’d be thinking about what you’ve done to cause God to want you to be blind!”
Another day, when a man who was born blind was pointed out to the disciples, they even asked, according to the belief of the lovers of justice in their day: “Who sinned, this man or his parents, so that he was born blind?”
“Neither,” said Jesus. “He was born blind in order to display the grace of God”—and He healed the man.
At Bethesda, likewise, Jesus healed the man.
It’s not impossible that the beggar in Bethesda had adjusted to his role in life as a beggar. Some of the people Jesus healed obviously had adjusted to their life situations, and were uncomfortable with their healings. In some of these stories we’re told that Jesus advised people to do something with their new health and strength.
A really desperate case tried to get into one house where Jesus was preaching. This would have been one of those little flats packed together in some of the ancient Middle East to this day, perhaps only one room, no furniture to speak of, people sitting or lying on the floor, with one of those flat tile roofs that can exist only in places that never get much snow. Perhaps the owner had said, “Rabbi, I am unworthy that You should visit my house,” and Jesus had cheerfully said, “Will you let Me visit your house?” And the people had packed in. They perched in the windows, they stood in the door, they spilled out into the alley. Jesus obligingly projected His voice so that those on the steps and outside the house could hear as they listened with bated breath.
Up comes a disturbance: a crowd of young laborers. “Let our friend in! Let Jesus heal him!”
“Go away! There’s no room!”
“We’ll soon see about that.” Possibly the one who reassured the friend he was helping to carry was a roofer. He bounded up on to a window ledge, silently gesturing to the others to hand their injured friend up, and as the injured man stifled groans of pain he shoved the man up onto the roof.
Jesus obligingly projected His voice above the noise, so the guys outside could hear. Perhaps He was quoting, “Then shall the lame man leap like a deer.”
Louder and louder He had to speak. “And the tongue of the dumb shall sing.” Scraping and clattering sounds began to be heard on the roof.
“Wotthe…”
“Hush!”
Bits of plaster began snowing down on the old gentlemen who had been ushered closer to the Great Teacher.
“That ought to be enough! Hold on tight, Ben Judah…”
“This day this Scripture is fulfilled,” Jesus might have been saying, loudly and cheerfully, as the tiles of the roof were moved aside and the litter on which the paralyzed man lay was lowered in. The respectable old men quickly crowded back toward the periphery of the room.
What we are not told that Jesus said was anything along the lines of, “If you weren’t so fond of playing the victim and calling attention to yourself…”
What he said was, “Stand up.”
To his surprise the paralyzed man could stand up. Was standing up. He had thought he’d never walk again.
“Pick up your bed,” Jesus told him, “and walk.”
Awestruck, the young men on the roof would have busied themselves replacing the roof tiles as their friend rolled up his bedroll and moved quickly back to a more suitable position, not blocking his elders’ view of the Great Teacher.
Jesus never told people not to stop thinking of themselves as victims. Neither did He tell them to think of themselves as victims. Jesus fixed the facts and let the feelings follow.
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