Monday, October 16, 2006

I am in the midst of watching Steven Spielberg's Munich for the second time. At the risk of running the issues of peace and war and justice into the ground, I am struck by several things in this movie.

1.) Near the very beginning of the movie, Golda Meir (the Israeli Prime Minister in 1972) says to her generals concerning Israel's response to the Olympic hostage crisis, "Every society has to compromise even with its own values."

2.) When one of the Jewish men who is on the response team is interviewing one of the Palestinian supporters of Black September, the Palestinian and his wife insist upon pointing out the evils that have been perpetrated upon the Palestinians by Israel while barely shrugging at the heinous violence done by the terrorists in Munich.

At the heart of such violence is the insistence upon revenge--disguised as justice, of course. I punch you; you punch me right back. The sad thing is that when you punch me back, it doesn't make us even. Because you punched me, I will punch you again. And so on and so forth. The lex talionis ("An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth") always reminds me of the Mafia: a cycle of violence that will not be broken until someone refuses to hit the other back. "An eye for an eye" cannot produce justice, cannot lead to peace. And the first instinct is always to respond in kind.

"You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth'; but I tell you, do not resist an evil man. If someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him your left cheek also." I had someone tell me a couple of weeks ago that it was 'lunacy' to think that Christ renounced self-defense, for if he did, then God wants his people to be murdered. Yet what did Christ do in going to the Cross but refuse to defend himself? Are his disciples not called to the same cross, the same suffering? God doesn't want his people to be murdered; he wants us to be the firstfruits of the Kingdom that shall be consummated on a day when "they shall turn their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and will learn war no more." In incarnating that kingdom vision in our troubled times; in refusing to take revenge; in refusing to use evil means against evil men, Christ's disciples may face their Lord's fate. But won't those who are "faithful unto death" be crowned with life?

What shall we say to each other of these things? Shall we trust in the sword and the spear? Shall we finally acknowledge that the kingdom into which we have been translated shall not be destroyed by any craft or weapons of any enemy--nor men nor demons? What shall we say to each other of these things, you and I?

Thursday, October 12, 2006

"We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we do about peace - more about killing than we do about living."—WWII General Omar Bradley

Saturday, October 07, 2006

http://www.worldonfire.ca/

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Blessed are....

"Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down to us from the Father of Lights...." (James 1:17)

I hear people talking about how God has blessed America all the time. We feel richly blessed--we live in a "land of plenty" in which certain freedoms are guaranteed. There's nothing wrong with being thankful for the "good gifts" God gives, of course, nor is there anything wrong with desiring God's blessing. Christians are told that "we are given every spiritual blessing in Christ" and we often remind each other that our God is the "fount of every blessing." But just what are the "good gifts" that God gives?

Israel always perceived that God had blessed the rich. So ingrained in Israelite culture was this idea that the common, poor, landless Jew of Jesus' day was completely oppressed: being poor and uneducated, he was completely dependent upon the Temple system for the blessing of God--and much of the Temple system was nothing but a forum for spiritual abuse.

Jesus saw the sickness. In his Sermon he turned the world of the Israelites on its head:
"Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you hungry, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep, for you shall laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you, and ostracize you, and insult you, and scorn your name as evil, for the sake of the Son of Man. ...But woe to you rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full. Woe to you who are well-fed, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way." (Luke 6:20-22, 24-26)

Our Lord and his disciples never speak of wealth as though it were a blessing--they seemed instead to think it perilous. This is hard teaching for us, who are rich. We think ourselves blessed with our riches and our freedoms--things our Lord never spoke of by way of blessing. Christ's message is consistently one of surprising grief for those who are wealthy and comfortable; he always seems to shock the poor and persecuted with hope, with a message of God's favor. It is precisely the people who are in the most dire of straits, whose backs are hardest against the wall, that our Lord calls "blessed."

Does Jesus overturn any of our tables when he pronounces as woes the very things we consider blessings? What does it say about who we are and what we value when we call our rich and free land "blessed"--though Jesus often seems to say the exact opposite? Perhaps God's "good gifts" are not what we thought, after all?

Behold; he turns the world upside-down!