Texts: Jonah 3: 1-10; Luke 6: 27-35
In a church I served many years ago an older woman who read biblical passages every day came to me quite troubled. “How,” she asked, “could a God of love do all the terrible things that the Bible says he did?” “Like what?” I said. “Telling the people of Israel to kill everyone, even babies, as they entered the Promised Land,” was her response.
Not a bad question. Over the last two hundred years scholars and theologians have debated the religious and theological significance of such passages, at times dismissing them as irrelevant to our understanding of God as a redeeming and reconciling spirit. Confronted with the image of the God of Hebrew Scripture, especially in what became called the “historical works,” theologians attempted to separate stories of Israel’s history from a theology of forgiveness and redemption.
In his book Theology of the Old Testament, scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann writes that “Old Testament theological articulation does not conform to established [Christian] church faith.” By that he means that in many ways we must separate our faith from the fact that the Old Testament was not written as a prediction of the coming of Jesus, much as the Gospel writers and religious thinkers, not to mention composers, want to believe.
Reading the stories from the Old Testament, we look for stories that tell us that violence is not the way to respond to problems we face today. The story of Jonah is usually held up as a model of a nonviolent approach. Jonah is a man who when told to go to Nineveh to get the city to repent, at first refuses to go, and then when he finally does go and gets the city to repent, is really upset.
Jonah wanted fire and brimstone to come onto the city because he saw the city as an enemy. I have to admit that when I see images of Vladimir Putin spouting forth his justifications for his idea of a new Russian Empire, I harbor the deep feelings of wishing him dead. It’s not a feeling I feel proud of, but it’s there.
This has been a terrible week because we have seen what vaunted pride and desire to restore “greatness” has cost. The cost is measured not just in Ukrainian lives, which is a terrible cost, but in the suppression of opposition and protest in Russia. Like Iraq was, it’s the wrong war for the wrong reason.
International power politics is not a place where we can all sit down and be nice to each other. It is, and has always been, a place that often culminates in destruction and death.
Nineveh, the city that Jonah was ordered to go to calling it to repent in the story, was one of the greatest cities of the ancient near east. The settlement that became Sennacherib’s glory originated around 5000 BCE. As it grew it became a military power, absorbing and being absorbed into empires.
It became a threat to Judah and Israel in the time of Sennacherib whose army attacked Jerusalem around 700 BCE. Its greatness, however, was short-lived, falling to Babylon in less than a hundred years. Empires rise and fall. Scripture and the ruins of these ancient great cities tell us that.
Jesus in Luke tells us to love our enemies, do good to them that hate us, pray for those who abuse us, and share our cloaks with those who have none. The passage closes with the famous words” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
So, the question becomes for us: How do we respond to violence – personal, societal, or international? These commands of Jesus were made in another time, to be sure, but they have relevance today. How we respond personally is quite different than how we respond societally or internationally.
Societally, we have created laws to protect people against those who would do violence or condone it. Laws against domestic violence and the conviction of three police officers this week in Minneapolis point to a system of law that protects people from those who would do violence.
We feel we can breathe easily because our legal system is not one – at least, it should not be – one of violence, but of justice. As my son George once said to me, Jesus said to turn the other cheek, but he didn’t say to be a doormat. There’s a difference.
Showing mercy does not mean yielding to injustice. It means looking at justice from another perspective, one that is restorative, not just retribution for the injustice or crime committed.
The question of nonviolence becomes more difficult when we look at the international stage. Are the Ukrainians obliged just not to fight, but lay down their weapons to be occupied? What about our response when attacked, whether it was at Pearl Harbor or the Twin Towers and Washington only twenty-one years ago?
I heard myself being chastised when I said that the Ukrainians should learn from the Finns who developed what we now call the Molotov cocktail. In white covers over their uniforms, they slipped these bottles under Russian tanks in 1939. The odds against them were greater than the odds against Ukraine today.
The late Desmond Tutu, the Anglican Archbishop of South Africa, once said that he believed in nonviolence but was no pacifist. There is a terrible tension in that statement. It is a tension I feel because I do believe I nonviolence, but I know I am not a pacifist.
Perhaps the question can be resolved, or at least addressed, by recognizing that defensive war is different than an offensive one. Jesus makes hard demands, really hard demands on us. We live our lives full of the tension of how to live up to those commands. I am not sure they can be resolved in the sense that we can honestly follow them but still support violence, for that is what war is: violence.
It may be defensive violence but it is still violence. It’s easier to talk about these issues when we are not the ones being directly and violently attacked. The question for our Nation is how we can support a free and democratic Ukraine, reign in someone who thinks he can recreate the Russian Empire, and do all this with the minimum of violence.
Let us come to God in prayer: Eternal God, who did not create us to have us kill each other, be with those forces that are trying to end the terrible violence we see in Ukraine and in Russia against anti-war protesters. Guide us in this perilous time to make the right decisions that will create a lasting peace. In the name of the One who calls us to peace, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.