One of the strange things about returning to grad school many decades after finishing high school is that I am significantly older than all of my classmates. One result is that I have been asked, on a number of occasions, about historically significant events; “Do you remember this? Were you alive for that?” Yes, I remember 9/11: I was standing in a campus sports bar, along with scores of other students, watching the towers fall on tv screens that usually showed hockey games. I remember apartheid South Africa, and I remember Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and his election as president. And I was alive for the first Gulf War, for the Soviet collapse and the fall of the Berlin Wall. I remember the Rwandan massacres, the years of the Yugoslav genocides. I remember the height of the AIDS crisis, the scourge of it, the disgust and hatred to which its victims were subjected before they died, often alone, neglected and abandoned.

So maybe it’s a generational thing, the fact that I have not only been alive for these events but that they were broadcast into my home every day, that their images are trapped in my memory, that I find myself not just dissatisfied but disappointed—worse yet, angered—by any perceived indifference or societal unwillingness to call things what they are, to speak aloud what is uncomfortable, what is disquieting, what we do not want to hear: to do so is to deny basic truth.

A while ago, our church scripture reading was Romans 12: 1-21, and though the sermon recalled a time where a congregant suggested leaving off the last verses, I quite like them: ‘“Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord,” continuing, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink, for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.”’ (Romans 12:19b-20)

While the gospels show Jesus welcoming and accepting everyone, regardless of their past transgressions, he does so freely but also honestly. He tells the woman who was about to be stoned, ‘Go, and sin no more.’ He tells Zaccheaus, yes, I know who you are and want to dine at your table, but I also know that you have made yourself wealthy at the expense of your countrymen by collaborating with your oppressors. He brings comfort while also making those most privileged uncomfortable; after all, does he not first call out the men with stones in hand, pointing to their own sin?

In my own work, I spend a lot of time trying to understand Christo-fascists: what they do, why they do it. In the course of this work, I’ve found new insight into some of Jesus’s words that I found most disrupting: “I came not to bring peace but the sword.” I’ve thought about this in light of the Beatitudes, particularly “Blessed are the peacemakers,” mostly that he says peacemakers. Jesus does not say peaceful; in order to be peaceful there must first be peace, and where there is none, peace must first be made.

Was Jesus peaceful? Did he bestow, universally, peace on all he met? I would venture to say no, he was not and he did not. He disrupted. He disquieted. He called out. He brought comfort to the afflicted and affliction—the affliction of inner knowledge of one’s own transgressions—to the most undeservedly comfortable.

And maybe this is my own generational bias, born out of a lifetime watching from my couch as one atrocity after another plays out on a screen in my living room, but that’s what I find most relatable, most familiar. Maybe it helps me identify with Jesus’s loving frustration and even rage, as he, like the prophets of old before him, watched people fail and self-aggrandize and indulge themselves for their own comfort.

My children’s identities make some people uncomfortable. My feminism makes some uncomfortable. Calling out genocide makes some uncomfortable. Pointing to our own complicity in the climate crisis, or the homelessness crisis, or the addiction crisis makes some uncomfortable. But we are not promised a comfortable peace, a peace that is familiar and expected; to be sure, if peace were familiar, we would already have it. We will not accidentally fall into peace: it must be made, constructed out of our brokenness, hard-won through a willingness to sacrifice privilege, familiarity, and luxury on the altar of justice and righteousness. With a heap of burning coals on our head we will “overcome evil with good,” (Romans 12:21) burning away all that separates us from peace, from each other, from real peace. From God’s vision.