As expected, Democrats Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia won their state’s gubernatorial races last night, while California voters approved a plan to redraw their state’s congressional map in Democrats’ favor.

However, the headline news is that Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, and he is the city’s youngest mayor in more than a century. On his campaign website, he advocates for freezing rent, fare-free buses, no-cost childcare, city-owned grocery stores, and tripling the City’s production of housing. He says he will pay for all of this by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthiest New Yorkers.

According to the Times of Israel, he has also refused to support Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, repeatedly accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, and vowed to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits New York City (where the United Nations is headquartered). In a 2023 video, he said, “When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF” (Israel Defense Forces).

However, Mr. Mamdani has vowed to fight antisemitism as mayor, and left-wing Jewish groups in the city supported him, though other Jewish voters fear that he “poses a danger to the security of the New York Jewish community.”

So, what kind of mayor has America’s largest city elected? Is he a radical socialist or a pragmatic reformer? A dangerous antisemite or an inclusive antiracist?

We will have to see what Mayor Mamdani does to determine who he actually is.

Why “the world is not enough”

In the 1976 movie Network, the character Arthur Jensen asserts:

There are no nations. There are no peoples. . . . There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast . . . interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. . . .

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the national order of things today. . . . We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.

You can make a biblical argument for his argument:

• Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit because it was “good for food” and a “delight to the eyes” (Genesis 3:6).
• Cain murdered Abel after God blessed Abel’s offering over Cain’s (Genesis 4:1–8).
• The Jews worshiped Canaanite gods who were purported to control the weather and thus the economy.
• When Jesus warned, “You cannot serve God and money,” the Pharisees, “who were lovers of money,” heard his words and “ridiculed him” (Luke 16:13–14).
• Among the wicked in Revelation are those who worshiped “idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood” (Revelation 9:20).

In a world of materialism, success is measured by material means. We are what we have, what we do, and what others think of what we have and do. But we can always have and do more and impress more people with what we have and do. We are never done.

As the fictional spy James Bond’s family motto proclaimed, “The world is not enough.”

This changes everything

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

According to economist Adam Smith, whose 1776 book The Wealth of Nations was extremely influential for colonial America, the “invisible hand of the market” guides society through self-interested choices to greater societal outcomes. As consumers want what we want, the free market produces goods and services that benefit not only us but everyone else. The astounding technological and material advances produced by capitalism over the centuries illustrate his thesis.

However, the “pursuit of happiness” our nation was created to secure, unalloyed by unconditional love for ourselves and others, can lead only to a zero-sum competition for materialistic success. And such success cannot meet the deepest hunger of the human heart.

This is why the third part of the Great Commandments we’re discussing this week is so important. As we have noted, Jesus famously taught us to love our Lord and to love our neighbor (Matthew 22:37–39a). Many people overlook the rest of the second command, however: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (v. 39b, my emphasis). The phrase could be translated, “Love your neighbor in the same way and to the same degree as yourself.”

So, we might ask: How do we love ourselves?

If we love ourselves as transactionally and materialistically as the world loves us, we will similarly love our neighbor for what they do and have that is selfishly relevant to us. But if we love ourselves as unconditionally and passionately as God loves us, we will similarly love our neighbor as a beloved fellow child of our Father.

This changes everything.

“Reclaim your primal identity”

Philip Yancey wrote:

Sociologists have a theory of the looking-glass self: you become what the most important person in your life (wife, father, boss, etc.) thinks you are. How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible’s astounding words about God’s love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?

Henri Nouwen similarly urged us:

Look in the mirror each day and claim your true identity. Act ahead of your feelings and trust that one day your feelings will match your convictions. Choose now and continue to choose this incredible truth.

Then he added:

“As a spiritual practice, claim and reclaim your primal identity as a beloved daughter or son of a personal Creator.”

What is your “primal identity” today?

Quote for the day:

“Being the Beloved expresses the core truth of our existence.” —Henri Nouwen

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In a democratic republic, politics and politicians will always play an outsized role in our culture. For example, this morning’s announcement that former US Vice President Dick Cheney has died at the age of eighty-four is making headlines even though his term in office ended sixteen years ago.

Today’s political races are dominating the news as well, from the mayoral contest in New York City to gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey to a redistricting vote in California. By my calculations, these elections will directly affect 80.3 million people, which is obviously a very significant number of people, but less than a quarter of our national population.

The larger story is what they mean for our own larger story.

• According to a new poll, 49 percent of Americans say our best times are behind us, while only 41 percent think they lie ahead. According to Politico, this underscores “a pervasive sense of unease about both individuals’ own futures and the national direction.”
• Only 39 percent of Americans believe the Republican Party governs in an “honest and ethical way”; only 42 percent say the same about the Democratic Party.
• Most Americans expect political violence to keep growing in the US.

We are not surprised by reports that Iranians are taught to hate America. But it is distressing that so many Americans are taught the same. In cultural commentator Andrew Sullivan’s latest blog, the Oxford and Harvard PhD graduate summarizes a new report on American higher education:

On race in American history, for example, only one viewpoint is actually taught: that the US is a white supremacist state that murders and imprisons black people as its core goal, that its real founding was 1619, its Constitution is a form of white tyranny, and racial “progress” is a lie designed to obscure this permanent reality.

Sullivan grieves for recent generations who have been indoctrinated in Critical Theory and its resultant anti-Americanism. Clearly, we live in a divided and divisive time in great need of a positive path toward a unified future.

The good news is that this path is as available and transforming as it has ever been.

“They are generally the same people”

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv thirty years ago today. I flew home from Israel that morning and heard the news upon landing in the US. In the years since, I have been many times to Rabin Square, the site that commemorates his tragic death. He was murdered not by an Islamic terrorist but by a Jewish extremist opposed to Mr. Rabin’s peace initiatives with Palestinians.

His death illustrates G. K. Chesterton’s maxim: “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”

We are clearly to love both. Jesus insisted: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). His words can be translated literally from the Greek, “Continually and unconditionally love those who hate you and ask God for their best even as they are persecuting you.”

Our Lord went even further when he taught us, “Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34). To translate again, “To the exact same degree that I have loved you, you also are to continually love one another.”

Our Savior’s love was unconditional (Romans 8:35–39), sacrificial (1 John 3:16), and empathetic (John 11:35). Now we are commanded to love others, including those who hate us, in the same way.

Imagine the difference in America if every American Christian obeyed his command.

When I love my neighbor well

Of course, as we noted in discussing our love for God yesterday, such love for others is impossible in human agency. I cannot love my neighbor, much less my enemy, as Jesus loves me. I am a sinner, but God “is” love (1 John 4:8).

However, Jesus never intended me to do so. He wants to continue his earthly ministry through me as his “body” (1 Corinthians 12:27), which includes his ministry of love. He wants to forgive those who sin, comfort those who grieve, and heal those who hurt through me.

My part is to stay submitted to his Spirit (Ephesians 5:18) and then measure success by what Jesus does through me (John 15:5). When my words and deeds express his love for those I serve, I love my neighbor well. When they do not, I do not.

This works in every dimension of life. If you’re a teacher, Jesus loves your students and wants to love them through you. If you’re a doctor, lawyer, pastor, or business person, he wants to love your patients, clients, congregation, and customers through you. If you’re a parent, he wants to love your children through you. If you’ve been hurt by someone, he wants to love even your enemy through you.

And he wants such love to transform not only our divisive and discouraged culture but our hearts as well.

Forgiving a concentration camp guard

In her classic autobiography The Hiding Place, Holocaust survivor Corrie ten Boom told this remarkable story:

It was at a church service in Munich, Germany, that I saw him, the former SS man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing center at Ravensbrück. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. Suddenly it was all there—the roomful of mocking guards, the heaps of clothing, [her sister] Betsie’s pain-blanched face.

He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming. “How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein,” he said. “To think that, as you say, he has washed my sins away!”

His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side. Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. “Lord Jesus,” I prayed, “forgive me and help me to forgive him.”

I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. Again, I breathed a silent prayer, “Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness.”

As I took his hand, the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand, a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.

I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on his. When he tells us to love our enemies, he gives, along with the command, the love itself.

Why do you need her discovery today?

Quote for the day:

“If God should have no more mercy on us than we have charity to one another, what would become of us?” —Thomas Fuller (1608–61)

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