Murder Is About Killing a Person

Meditations on the 6th Commandment, Pt. 3

The call to anti-murder, and how our best intentions lead us back into the dynamics of murder.

The Decalogue and the Eclipse of the Person

One of the persistent themes we have been tracing in this series is how, in the Decalogue, there is a persistent temptation to obscuring and effacing particularity. This temptation emerges first with respect to God: God is not a category into which other things might be substituted, and thus, there are no other gods whose images might work.

Any number of minions of the idols come alongside to stultify our attention to this God. In the process, we are led away from a world in which we might recognize this particular God: an anti-Sabbath, idolatrous world, filled with routines which keep us inattentive to this God. And this temptation is not just about God: we deny what we owe to our parents, having forgotten that it is through this site and no other that we entered the world, given by this God.

Murder—like idolatry—is about the eclipse of the particular, and in this case, the eclipse of a particular person, treating a person as a no-thing, when every person is a bearer of God’s own image.

The endless distinctions which we can draw in trying to account for which deaths qualify as murder are, in this way, secondary. It is important to ask about intention, if in doing so we may come to a better sense of what restitution and reconciliation might look like. But these questions can ultimately obscure the heart of murder: they can become, subtly, a different way of asking “Who is My Neighbor?”, of asking which killings can be warranted and which cannot.

But this is to miss the point: murder is the most visceral way to erase a particular person. Parsing out which killings are murders can be a way to focus our attention on the act and away from the persons who have been killed, and the one who has killed.

Preparing to See the Person: Mind, Soul, and Body

The challenge of how to address murder passes through the words of Jesus, whether one looks at Matthew or Luke. In Matthew, this theme of the particularity of the victim comes into view:

^{5: 21} “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ ²² But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.

For lack of a better term, let us call what we are after here anti-murder, for it is not enough to just not-murder someone, but to undo the very conditions which eventuate in murder. In Matthew, we see that the danger of reducing a person to a category of fool, born not just in action but in anger. It is not enough to preserve the life, for preservation of a life happens in how we attend to and evaluate one another. This expands in the next passage to the context of worship, in which we set aside sacrifices to make amends where there is animosity, and finally, to the context of public disputes, making amends rather than going to court.

We see, in other words, an expanding circle which pushes out the protection of the would-be murdered beyond the mind to the church, and from the church to the world. Luke cuts to the chase, getting at these same dynamics, under the heading of the enemy:

³² “And if you love those who love you, what kind of credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them! ³³ And if you do good to those who do good to you, what kind of credit is that to you? Even the sinners do the same! ³⁴ And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive back, what kind of credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, so that they may get back an equal amount! ³⁵ But love your enemies, and do good, and lend expecting back nothing, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.

Here, the same dynamics roughly appear: love (instead of not-hating in the heart), doing good (instead of worship), and lending and commerce (instead of courts). The movement still works from the inside to the furthest reaches of society. But in Luke, the focus is not on how to protect the potential murdered but on how on these dynamics relate to the enemy. Seeing the person, as the antithesis to murder, has encompassed not only the would-be victim, but the enemy as well.

Notably, the enemy remains named as the enemy. There is no wishful thinking here, any more than in Matthew, where anger still persists: the wolf is still at the door. But the preparation and the vision of what anti-murder requires is the same.

Preparing to Not See the Person: Solidarity

What appears here in, in the anti-murder teachings of Matthew and Luke, digs down into the practices and dispositions which foment murder, even while they do not wistfully reunite all persons and at all times and places: enemies remain named as enemies. There is an attention to the opposed person which drills all the way down to the bedrock.

What I want to suggest that, unintentionally, contemporary forms of anti-murder stop short of the anti-murder vision on offer in the Gospels. The concept of solidarity will help us to see this¹.

Solidarity, as a tactic of social engagement, emphasizes the need for various groups to band together as not just collaborators and partners for social change, but particularly as co-antagonists. Solidarity binds persons together in common cause. As Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor describe it,

Solidarity is that which binds a group—that visceral feeling of connection that sharing a hometown, alma mater, or favorite sports team can produce…We are interested in transformative solidarity—the kind that propelled the fight for civil rights along with other movements that have sought to expand the circle of inclusion while also altering society’s very character.

They have in view a kind of alliance-based sociality, where wounds create partners, in order to foster a world where that which created the wounds will not be possible. In creating these kinds of arrangements, some people come into view as friends, on the basis of their common aspirations. But there are aspirations, and aspirations:

Solidarity creates passionate in-group bonds, and these can justify violent othering, as evidenced by the exclusionary solidarity of white supremacists, ruling elites, and jingoistic nationalists. In its reactionary form, it is the easy draw of like-to like, and often aggressive in its rejection of that which is different.

It is tempting to take one form without the other, and my interest is not in denying the value of advocacy groups. But I am interested in asking whether solidarity movements—in their best form—are capable of doing more than Matthew 5, and moving into the space that Luke carves out. I am interested in whether solidarity, in creating anti-murder space and preserving the life of the victims, is only possible by the enemy remaining the enemy on the one hand, and by the wounded remaining the potentially murdered on the other. I am interested in whether solidarity unintentionally leaves the dynamics of murder untouched.

In Luke 6, a small door opens: God’s kindness toward the wicked. It is a small door because it is a confession of what God does and what we, by God’s grace, can hope for. But it is a door which does not appear in either form of solidarity that Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor describe, whether transformative or reactionary. For even in Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor’s preferred version, sociality is created by a common antagonism which does not let the tax collector, the debt-maker, the bigot in—for the protection of their victims. But what binds people together also inhibits them: the solidified must retain their debts and wounds in order for new social form to hold. The dynamics of murder do not pass into anti-murder, because there is always a wolf at the door.

But in Luke, the small door of God’s kindness leads from solidarity—a joining together for common support and advocacy—to a further place: of asking whether whether our wounds and the actions they generate are the things which imprison us, and which keep is closer to the dynamics of murder than we wish. The small door of Luke 6 calls us to account:

Give, and it will be given to you, a good measure—pressed down, shaken, overflowing—they will pour out into your lap. For with the measure by which you measure out, it will be measured out to you in return.”

In that common judgment, then, we begin to see well ourselves, and our enemy. In that, we see the person before us, and only in that does the real anti-murder work happen:

³⁹ And he also told them a parable: “Surely a blind person cannot lead the blind, can he? Will they not both fall into a pit? ⁴⁰ A disciple is not superior to his teacher, but everyone, when he is fully trained, will be like his teacher. ⁴¹ And why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the beam of wood that is in your own eye? ⁴² How are you able to say to your brother, “Brother, allow me to remove the speck that is in your eye,” while you yourself do not see the beam of wood in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the beam of wood from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck that is in your brother’s eye!

The person appears before us—not their stand-in category—they might be called Brother.

1. I’m hoping to expand this in a future series.