By Father Casey

In the arc of human history, a single idea has lurked behind many of the greatest evils: "the ends justify the means."

This is a rationale used to defend all kinds of wrongdoing through history – that somehow, a desired result is so important that it is worth sacrificing our values to achieve it. Close your eyes, pinch your nose, and do the thing you would rather not have to do, because it will enable you to gain something good. Yes, you might rather not have to act this way, but it will be worth it in the end.

This is a perversion of the idea of sacrificial love. Sacrificial love says that the means to a good end may sometimes be costly. We may have to endure pain or loss in order to love our neighbors as ourselves. Sacrificial love is at the heart of the gospel. Jesus utterly empties himself for the sake of love. He willingly embraces suffering to defeat sin and death. The beautiful end of his salvation is accomplished by crucified means.

But the Tempter is skilled at twisting the idea of sacrificial love into a rationale for moral compromise – that if the ends are virtuous, the virtue of the means is not as important. But just as Jesus rejected this temptation in the wilderness, so must we, because the means are simply the ends in the process of becoming.[1] How we go about achieving something is not incidental to the goal. How we go about achieving something fundamentally shapes the future we are trying to create. We may be striving toward a noble goal, but if our methods are wicked, then the future will never truly be good. The means become the end, whether we intend it that way or not.

This last week our nation once again launched an unauthorized war upon another nation. Much as we did last year in Venezuela, our president unilaterally and without the support of Congress or international law ordered the use of deadly military force against the government of Iran. We have killed Iran's supreme leader and rained destruction on dozens of other locations around the country. The administration seems to be hoping that the American people will tolerate the use of such means to achieve a desirous end – the toppling of a cruel and oppressive enemy state.

But what really is the "end" of "Operation Epic Fury"? Is it, as the president has stated, regime change? Is it, as others in his administration have declared, the destruction of Iran's nuclear capabilities, which just a few months ago the president declared "totally annihilated" by earlier strikes? Or is it, as the Secretary of Defense boasted in a press conference, simply to declare to the world: "If you threaten Americans anywhere on Earth, we will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you." We don't seem to know what we're trying to accomplish with all our destructive force. Are we liberators, police, or bullies?

Unfortunately, when you open the pandora's box of war, no matter your intentions or how much power you wield, you are not in control. Winston Churchill once said, "Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."[2] And sure enough, this war has quickly expanded with terrifying speed, reaching nearly every country in the Middle East. Pope Leo has already warned about the growing "spiral of violence" that threatens to become "an irreparable abyss" – an abyss that makes no distinction between combatants and innocent people.

Ultimately, even if a goal is good, when we choose to pursue it with the evil meas, a truly good end will always remain out of reach. The means are just the ends in the process of becoming, as we should have already learned from our nation's other interventions in the Middle East in recent decades. When you try to make peace by killing your enemies, the only certainty is the eventuality of future conflict.

I hope you will embrace the call of the Most Rev. Hosam Naoum, Archbishop of the Anglican Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East, who implores us to pray for soundness of mind in our leaders, that they would seek better solutions to problems than bombs and war.[3] And we must pray for all those caught in harm's way, whether they are Muslim, Jewish, or Christian, Iranian, Israeli, or American, for God's mercy to enfold them.

And pray for our own Christian witness, that we would resist the lie that good ends justify wicked means. Instead, let us live like our Lord, pursuing goodness with goodness, peace with peace, and love with love.

Fr. Casey +

 

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[1] Brian Zahnd, Postcards from Babylon: The Church in American Exile (Spello Press, 2019), p 70.

[2] Winston Churchill, My Early Life (New York: Simon and Schuster), p 199.

[3] https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2026/03/02/archbishop-of-jerusalem-and-the-middle-east-shares-pastoral-letter-in-light-of-escalating-conflict/