Don't Prepare Your Defense Beforehand-- Are You Kidding?
by deacon bob schnell
For more than 44 years I was a commercial litigator-- a lawyer who handled business disputes in court or arbitration. The work was al about preparation. To be a good business litigation lawyer you need to know all the facts of the case-- cold-- and have at your fingertips all the documents that matter-- emails, texts, tweets, you name it. You take lots of depositions so that you know what all the witnesses will say. You spend days and days with your clients so that they are prepared to answer all the difficult questions they will get on cross-examination. In big, important cases we would even hire mock jurors, people who were demographically matched to the jury pool where we would try the case, and present the case to them in a simplified way so that we could see what worked, and what didn't, and what ideas and themes seemed to resonate. By the time you actually got to court there would be no surprises, at least if we did our job as we should. So the notion that we would "not prepare our defense beforehand," as Jesus instructs today (Lk 21: 12-19), had always struck me as craziness. No one does that-- at least no one who wants to win. In my world not preparing beforehand was a sure path to disaster. What in the world can Jesus have in mind in this very-clear command? Why not prepare your defense beforehand? A couple of thoughts: First of all, this instruction is about trust, and about teaching us to trust in the Lord, and not in our own abilities. When Jesus says, in essence, "leave it all to me," we need to get used to the idea that we can follow that command with a happy heart. We're not in control, after all, and it is very liberating not to have to agonize about one's defense. Of course, that idea applies in lots of contexts, not just in the time and place of the early Church. The common expression "let go, let God" comes to mind. But there is a second thing going on here as well. I said that you need to prepare well if you want to win. I don't think Jesus wanted His followers to "win," at least if by that you mean not being convicted of the charges brought against them. After all, they were guilty, at least in the eyes of those who made the rules. They had split away from the mass of Jewish believers, and they didn't worship the Emperor in Rome or the gods of the Greeks. Guilty as charged. But from Jesus' perspective, the reason for the trials wasn't to establish His followers' innocence in the worldly sense. The point was that the trials would provide a platform for people to explain what they were doing and why-- to publicize the Good News of the Kingdom of God-- and in that way to display a "wisdom in speaking that (the) adversaries would be powerless to resist or refute." Sure, Jesus' followers might be convicted. Some would even be put death, Jesus predicts. But in the end they would win-- not a hair on their heads would be harmed from an eternal perspective. We're steeped in a culture which tells us to be in control, which means being prepared, having every possibility accounted for or, in the words of one of the best Canadian generals in World War I, "neglect nothing." That's fine in the life of the world, and we should certainly conduct our worldly affairs in that way. But when it comes to the spiritual life-- the life that really matters-- we seek a deeper virtue, a virtue of not being in control, a virtue of trusting God. It's a real challenge, but that's the challenge Jesus gives us today.