Beware of Misguided Loyalties

MISGUIDED LOYALTIES

Real love and real loyalty never say: This is my family, my country, or my church – right or wrong! Instead, when things are wrong, they tell us to show love and loyalty not by protecting our own, but by confronting what’s wrong.

That’s the biblical tradition of the prophets. They loved their people and were fiercely loyal to their own religious tradition, but they were not so blindly loyal so as to be uncritical of the real faults inside that religious community. They were never constrained by false loyalty so as to be blind to the sins within their own religious structures and remain muted in the face of those faults. They never said of their religious tradition: Love or leave it!  Instead, they said: We need to change this – and we need to change it in the name of loyalty and love.

Jesus followed in the same path. He was faithful and loyal to Judaism, but he was not silent in the face of its faults and wrongdoings in his time. In the name of love, he challenged everything that was wrong.

Jesus would be last person to teach that loyalty and love mean never criticizing your own. Indeed, he de-literalizes the meaning of family, country, and church and asks us to understand these in a higher way. He asks: Who is my mother and who are my brothers and sisters? And he goes on to say that these are not to be defined by biology, country, or religious denomination. Real family, he says, is made up by something else: by those who hear the word of God and keep it, irrespective of biology, country, or religion.

Consequently biology, country, and religion must be criticized and opposed whenever they stand in the way of this deeper union in faith and justice.

For Jesus, faith and justice are thicker than blood, country, and church. Genuine love and loyalty manifest themselves in a commitment to challenge things that are wrong, even when that means seeming to be disloyal to one’s own.

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