The Weapon Comes Back

I am routinely reminded that much of my movie collection is older than some of my staff members.

I have tried not to take this personally.

One of my all-time favourite movies is The Hunt for Red October. Near the end, a torpedo is fired at the submarine Red October. The captain of the attacking vessel orders the safety mechanisms removed so the torpedo can detonate at close range.

That also means there was nothing to protect the submarine that fired it.

Red October turns. The torpedo misses, circles back, and destroys the vessel from which it was launched.

The Soviet first officer flatly chides his captain in his final moment, “You arrogant fool – you’ve just killed us.”

The weapons we use against others have a way of coming back toward us.

Paul gives a similar warning to the Galatian church:

“If you bite and devour each other, watch out that you are not consumed by each other.”
—Galatians 5:15

Behind Paul’s warning is something deeply human: our universal instinct toward tribalism.

We want to belong. We want to know who our people are. We want the security of being among those who believe, think, worship, or vote as we do.

The danger comes when being an insider requires someone else to remain outside.

For the Galatian church, faith in Christ alone was not enough to be on the inside; if Gentiles wanted to belong fully to the people of God, they also needed to adopt the defining practices of the Jewish law.

After all, the insiders were the keepers of the law.

Perhaps opening the circle felt like compromise. Perhaps it seemed that freely allowing “outsiders” in would weaken the purity of the church.

Paul drives a wrecking ball through that thinking.

“For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith working through love.”  —Galatians 5:6

Christ does not simply make the old circle larger. He changes the basis on which the circle is formed.

The boundary is no longer the law.

The centre is Christ.

That kind of freedom is difficult because it removes one of our most familiar ways of proving ourselves right: comparison.

Most people assume that in order for them to be right, someone else must be wrong.

Sometimes ideas do genuinely conflict. Truth is not infinitely elastic. But there is a difference between believing something is true and needing another person to be diminished so we can feel secure in it.

Freedom in Christ means I can believe I am right without standing on the neck of the person I believe is wrong.

I do not need to humiliate you to hold a conviction.

I do not need to question your sincerity to defend my theology.

I do not need to place you outside the grace of God to reassure myself that I am safely inside it.

This requires humility.

We are ordinary people trying to understand the divine. We read Scripture through language, history, tradition, culture, personality, pain, and hope. We may have strong reasons for what we believe. We may even be right.

But none of us sees with perfect clarity.

That does not mean truth is unknowable. It does mean that we should approach the mystery of God with more humility than tribalism usually allows.

Too often, however, we remove the safeties.

Billy Graham and his early ministry team recognized this danger. As part of what became known as the Modesto Manifesto, they committed themselves to avoiding public criticism of other ministers and churches.

That did not mean wrongdoing should be ignored or accountability avoided. It was a recognition that tearing down another Christian leader rarely leaves the person doing the tearing untouched.

Criticism can become intoxicating. It creates an audience. It identifies the insiders. It establishes who is faithful and who is compromised.

Once we remove the safeties from our speech, however, we cannot control where the weapon will travel.

A workplace that normalizes gossip eventually becomes unsafe for everyone.

A church that builds unity around a shared enemy will eventually need a new enemy.

A political movement that survives by humiliating opponents will eventually turn that same appetite inward.

The torpedo comes back.

Paul offers another way:

“For you were called to freedom. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” —Galatians 5:13

Freedom in Christ is not the freedom to sharpen the boundaries of our tribe.

It is the freedom to stop asking, Who is in and who is out?

It is the freedom to stop obsessing over, Who is right and who is wrong?

This does not mean avoiding hard conversations. Unity is not silence, and love does not eliminate correction. Honour and honesty can cohabitate together.

But there is a difference between defending truth and defending our tribe.

Perhaps if we spent less time deciding who is in and who is out, who is right and who is wrong, we would have more time to exercise our freedom in Christ to serve one another humbly in love.

When the safeties are removed, the weapon may strike its intended target.

But eventually, it circles back.

That may be an old warning.

Then again, some old things are still worth keeping in the collection.