Reflections on Torture

It may seem all but out of line, writing about torture at Christmas. Not really. St. Matthew’s Christmas story comes to a bloody conclusion: the massacre of the children of Bethlehem. The Christ child got caught up in the politics of the times, to say nothing of the religious confusion.

Beyond this story, the Bible has other ways of addressing the issue of torture. Specifically, Hebrews 13:3 commands, “continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them…and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering” (TNIV). The word translated mistreated can also be rendered tortured and it occurs in Hebrews 11 where, beginning at verse 37, one encounters a repertoire of tortures enough to make one’s skin crawl.

Christmas impinges in this way: the author says the recipients of Hebrews should be “as if you yourselves were suffering.” That’s identification with the tortured and mistreated at the deepest level possible. Such identification took place when the Word took on flesh in Jesus when he entered human history, and history did its dirty work on him.

It started early, with Herod. Did Mary and Joseph tell Jesus the story of the massacre? Is that where he learned to identify with those who had no voice, no one to stand with them? The author of Hebrews said that Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered (5:7-9). Wounded or not, Jesus never withdrew his person from friend or foe. As Jacques Maritain wrote, “wounds which cause a human soul to be compassionate are evangelical wounds.”

If it is thought such identification is limited to the Christian community, it is well to look at Hebrews 13:2. Hospitality is to be given to strangers.

Such texts require nothing short of the Christmas Spirit to carry out the Christ child’s later commands: “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:44-45, TNIV). One of his followers, a converted torturer, Paul, said, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse” and “Do not repay anyone evil for evil” (Romans 12:14 and 17, TNIV). Finally, this hard-to-swallow command from Proverbs: “If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head (25:21-22; Romans 12:20, TNIV).

Let us join the incarnated Christ in his identification with the tortured and torturers on the cross, using a verse from Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Torture” to not forget the Christmas connection to those exploited in body and mind by torturers.

Nothing has changed.
The body is painful,
it must eat, breathe air, and sleep,
it has thin skin, with blood right
beneath,
it has a goodly supply of teeth and nails,
its bones are brittle, its joints extensible.
In torture, all this is taken into account.

“Christmas has its cradle, Easter has its cross.” Both hold Jesus. The inn has no room for torture.