The Lord’s Prayer sets before us that heavy lift, “…and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us….”

Seriously, God? I not only face judgment by the standard I apply to others, but must pray for that? I happen to be quite judgmental. Well, he’s God, he’s got that Creator-of-the-Universe ethos, and Matthew 6:12 resonates persuasively with justice. Matthew follows up strongly on this point in 7:1-5, warning us against hypocrisy. Socrates and Plato lacked that instruction. Mother Teresa and Donald Trump received it.

In “America According to Trump and Musk: The Unexamined Life is Still Not Worth Living,” Corcoran contrasts perfect shalom, in God’s Kingdom, with Trump’s second-term presidency, as exemplified by a video showing “deportees in shackles, their chains rhythmically clinking together…”  Only God knows how to manage his Creation properly. Deportations from God’s Kingdom precede our Lord’s inauguration—the sheep bidding goodbye to the goats (Matt. 25:31-46). We do a messy job of managing our worldly affairs.

The character of Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic serves as the ‘heel’ of the debate, but I ask for some real Christian grace for that fictional pagan. Thrasymachus defines justice as the will of the strong, but not happily. His definition angers him. It should. Thrasymachus stands for the cynical opinion that might makes right, and yet also for the wistful opinion that might should not make right.  He does not speak smugly, as a bully with strength in hand, but rather with the passion of a victim who perceives no hope of real justice. Thrasymachus agrees with contemporary conflict theorists: the powerless are always righteous, because power is always abused.

Might does not make right, of course, but it does make jurisdiction. When the Allies liberated Europe and put the Nazis on trial as war criminals, the legal basis for those trials landed on fundamental human rights, a novel legal theory. How distressing that this idea took so long to surface, given Paul’s clarity on the origins of worldly authority in God’s authority! Under German law, few Nazis were guilty of war crimes. That paradigm of legal defense collapsed when they lost. Did the Allies hoist Thrasymachus up as judge over the Nazis? No; the Nazis did, by starting a war that they lost. The victorious Allies gained jurisdiction—the right to say—by seizing Germany’s territory.

What to do with jurisdiction, once we have it? I answer, as before in “Trump is no King,” that we act as if we will answer directly to our God for our use of it, because so we shall (John 19:11, Romans 13:1). Thrasymachus would have made a happier Christian than a pagan, believing that injustices get corrected and the unjust receive justice (Revelation 7:17, 21:4).

Corcoran also calls for moral disgust. I concur, and add: let us all indulge in a hearty round of mutual disgust, eww, look, sinners all around us! I pray that we include ourselves in that disgust, to avoid hypocrisy through humility. Where was that disgust when we abandoned our southern border to anarchy? Shall we compare the evils of human trafficking with the evil of deportation? The one led directly to the other. I, too, wear shackles when transported, and I do not love it. Nor do I love the mismanagement which lost over 300,000 migrant children. Trump vowed to find them all, and I pray that he does. I pray that our deportees find shelter, too. I count illegal immigrants among my friends. I also pray that we Christians stop hating each other.