Sic 'Em (Friday Devotional)

When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him, who went and entered a village of the Samaritans, to make preparations for him. But the people did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” But he turned and rebuked them.

- Luke 9:51-55

“Sic ‘em!”

The first time I ever heard that phrase, it was being shouted by a movie character to his dog. Pointing at a couple of trespassers he’d caught on his land, the man was commanding his dog to pursue the trespassers at top speed, catch up with them, and put those sharp teeth to good use.

The second time I heard “sic ‘em”—and the third time, and the fourth, and the thousandth—was in my years at Baylor University, where it’s the go-to cheer, greeting, and all-purpose exclamation. But its origins, it turns out, aren’t altogether different from what I’d seen on film years before. When fans first started shouting to the football players to “sic ‘em, Bears”, they were encouraging them to go for the big hit, to tackle more forcefully, to play the kind of hard-nosed football Texans know so well. Just like the farmer wanted his dog to lay into trespassers, Baylor fans wanted to see their players lay out the other team.

These days it seems like “sic ‘em” is a command that’s increasingly popular, at least in spirit—people want to see their opponents hurt. They’re less concerned with understanding those they disagree with than defeating them; they no longer want their leaders to work with the other side, but to dominate it. Instead of compromise or consensus, the spirit of the day is conquest.

That spirit is one that followers of Jesus have struggled with since the days of his earthly ministry. The passage above tells the story of a Samaritan village who refused to receive Jesus because of his commitment to Jerusalem, which the Jews viewed as God’s city but the Samaritans did not. Stung by the rejection, the disciples looked to Jesus for permission to draw upon God’s power and call down fire on the village—in other words, to sic ‘em.

But Jesus—the one, keep in mind, who’d actually been rejected by the village—rebuked his disciples for their question. The Prince of Peace was not in the business of weaponizing divine power or using his spiritual authority as a bludgeon. As John 3:17 reminds us, God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

Followers of Jesus today ought to take our cues from our Lord instead of from James and John; we ought to be praying for the salvation of our enemies instead of for their destruction. The spirit of the day may be one of condemnation, but the Holy Spirit points us toward reconciliation. Simply put, in a world that cries out to sic ‘em, Christ calls us to love ‘em.