[This is the 3rd of a 4 part series. You can read the 1st part focusing on anxiety here and the 2nd part focusing on pride here]
Pride, Anxiety, and Injustice in Relationships
Why is it so hard to dislodge injustice? Why is it that families and communities can allow the worst sort of situations to go on and on? You see this happen all the time. They won’t make even the slightest change to make a bad situation better. Why do they stay in these bad relationships and make little effort to change them?
Why? Because it is scary. Injustice is rooted in an attempt to solve the basic problems of life: loneliness, insecurity, provision, and meaning. When you fight against injustice, you are battling with people’s anxiety over these basic issues. This makes these problems much more intractable.
This does not mean that we should not fight against injustice. It just means that we will fight against it better if we understand that it is rooted in anxiety over the basic problems of life.
A great example of this tragic interplay of injustice can be seen in American race relations. The treatment of African-Americans by whites in this nation has been reprehensible. However, the system of slavery was designed to solve the basic problems of labor, and it was the basis of the position of the wealthy elites of Southern society. Over this position, they had much anxiety. If they let slavery go, where would that leave them? Understand. I am not excusing it. I am just saying that there was a fear in letting that go that made it harder to apply the basic principles of Western and Christian teaching to this issue. As Booker T. Washington noted, “Having once got its tentacles fastened on to the economic and social life of the Republic, it was no easy matter for the country to relieve itself of the institution.” This is the way injustice becomes a fixture in human life.
That’s why it was so necessary for Martin Luther King, Jr. and others to work to force whites to give up their privileges in the South and elsewhere. He recognized that because of the anxiety of giving up privileges, the white community would not give up their privileges without being compelled to.
On a smaller scale, why do people stay in such bad relationships? Why do they not confront such bad behavior? Because the alternative is often being alone, and that is quite scary. The current relationship solves to some degree our anxieties over loneliness and security, and it is hard to face those issues more directly without the anxiety reducer of even a bad relationship.
In our third installment of our study on the relationship of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, I want us to consider what injustices their anxiety and pride led them to. I will show how each of their behaviors was unjust but also try to show how that injustice was rooted in their own significant challenges. The injustice calls for condemnation, and the anxiety calls for sympathy. It is a complex response to a complex problem.
The goal is to enable us to better confront injustice in ourselves and others. When we can confront our own unjust behavior by confronting our underlying anxieties. That’s what God does when He confronts this issue, as we shall see in the next article.
Hagar
We noted in the last article that Hagar’s anxiety was that of a slave: she is unseen. However, what every human longs for is to be seen and to be seen as significant. A slave is not seen that way. A slave is just part of the scenery. That’s the misery that every slave would experience every day of their lives.
Then, something happened. Hagar was chosen to bear the child of Master Abraham. She conceived, and she became a major player in the house. She let this go to her head. The result was that she looked down on her Mistress, Sarah. “And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress” (Gen. 16:4). This wasn’t something she kept to herself. Sarah noticed and brought it up to Abraham.
What was the injustice here? It was a lack of respect. Ironically, she did not see Sarah as valuable. Maybe Hagar was just doing to Sarah what Sarah had done to her, but this would not justify this behavior. Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 3: Anxiety & Injustice”
