This morning we are beginning a series of sermons in which we are looking at some of the tough questions that we have as we seek to live as faithful followers of Jesus. It seems to me that the reason that we find these questions difficult is that they bring up conflicts and tensions between our values, our experiences, and the values of the world around us.
So, for instance, this morning we’re thinking about the violence that we find in the Old Testament, and what we do with that. Asking “Why is this a problem?” might sound like a stupid question, but it seems to me that if we’re going to come up with any kind of answers, then the first thing we have to do is face squarely why it’s a problem for us.
As a church, three of our core values start with the word, “Loving”. Loving God, Loving Each Other, and Loving our Neighbours. We know that violence is not an expression of love, so why is there violence in the Bible? We find it difficult to love violent people, or those who condone or encourage violence, so how can we love God, when we see violence attributed to God in the Bible? One of the ways in which we say we want to express our love for God is by being rooted in the Bible, so we have to find a way to take seriously the violence in the Bible, and wrestle with what it means for us, and how we are to live.
We, or those we love, may have experienced violence – physical, mental, sexual, spiritual, verbal. There may still be trauma associated with those experiences that troubles us, that causes us pain. This is not just a theoretical, theological exercise – this is struggling to make sense of our own, damaged lives, in the light of God’s revelation in Scripture.
In some senses, this morning we are barely going to scratch the surface of dealing with this question. There is so much more that could, and should, be said. I think the most that we are going to be able to do is to point out some possible ways in which we can think about it – probably prompting more questions than answers. Perhaps you might like to explore these further in your small groups, or to meet up with a friend in the week to talk about them. In the preparation for this morning, I’ve been greatly helped by this excellent book, “God of violence yesterday, God of love today?“which I’d recommend you reading, if you want to explore these things further.
So, what do we do with violence in the Old Testament (and to be honest in the New Testament as well – it appears just as much there)? We’re going to explore this by looking at some different ways that violence appears in the Bible, and think about each one in turn.
Let’s start off with described violence. This occurs when violent things happen in the lives of the people being described, but it isn’t approved of. There are many examples of this. In the early chapters of Genesis, Cain murders his brother Abel because he’s jealous, and God passes judgement on him. Later in Genesis, Joseph’s brothers get fed up of their father’s favouritism towards him, and sell him into slavery in Egypt, showing their father the many-coloured cloak, drenched in blood, as “evidence” that wild animals had savaged him. The stories of both Tamars, Dinah, and Bathsheba describe the sexual exploitation or rape of women.
Jumping to the New Testament, in the garden of Gethsemane, Peter strikes one of the people who come to arrest Jesus, cutting off his ear, and Jesus rebukes him.
These passages often make uncomfortable reading, so why are they there? It seems to me that they fufil a few purposes. Firstly, they show us that the Bible is real about the situations it describes. The people in the Bible did not live in some perfect world, where everything was fine, and the sun always shone. They went through some awful things, and had to work out their faith in the middle of it all. There is no white wash here – it is life as it is.
Secondly, it shows that the Bible is real about the people it describes. There are no perfect people here, well only one anyway, everybody else is here, warts and all. We see their imperfections, their failings, their violence. If these folk could be forgiven these things, and if God called them anyway, can God not also forgive us, and call us to follow anyway. Thirdly, it is clear from the vast majority of these examples that violence is not OK, it is not commanded or approved of by God. In fact it is judged and condemned. Where it has been perpetrated, the only right response is confession and repentance.
So, that is described violence. But what about prayers for violence? We find this particularly in the Psalms – songs and prayers in which the violence of God is called down upon the enemies of the person praying. We also see it in the New Testament when Jesus and his disciples are journeying through the country, they are prevented from going into a couple of Samaritan villages. Two of his friends, James and John, ask if they can call down fire on the villages, Jesus is not impressed.
What is going on here?
Well, similarly to what we said about described violence, it seems to me that there is a sense in which the presence of prayers for violence in Scripture allow us to face the reality of life. Last weekend I read the book “I never gave my consent”. It was written by a teenage girl whose path into sexually abusive relationships and being sold for sex began on one of the benches in the churchyard that surrounds this building. As I read it, I got angry. Angry with God for allowing this happen, angry with the adults involved in the exploitation, angry with those who allowed it to happen on their watch, angry with myself for not knowing about it.
I needed to find a way to pray through this anger, and the violent feelings I had about it all. Ironic, isn’t it, the way in which violence calls out violence. Now, I didn’t use the psalms of retribution to pray, but I did pray with the permission they give me to be honest with God about how I was feeling, to express that anger, to ask where God was when this was happening. To pray for God’s justice on those involved.
And so we come to the last category that we’re going to consider this morning, those places where we read that God commands people to commit acts of violence, an example of which we heard read from the account of the taking of Jericho as the people of God entered the Promised Land. How do we understand that, when Jesus in Matthew’s eye-witness account of Jesus’ life, tells us of Jesus teaching that we shouldn’t even get angry with people?
The first thing to say is that I don’t think that there is an entirely satisfactory way of answering this question. However we look at it, in the end, we are going to have to make a choice about whether or not we are willing to trust God’s actions, even when we don’t understand them. Having said that, there are some insights that it seems to me do help us to understand what is actually going on here.
If you open your Bibles to p.210, and look at Joshua 6:17, you will see that there is a little “a” next to the word “devoted.” If you then look down to the bottom of the page you will see a note that this word can be translated in a variety of ways. It is the Hebrew word, “herem”. There are many books and articles on the correct translation of this word, as it is one that has many levels of meaning. There are two things we can be sure of – it does not always mean killing or destroying but sometimes it does. At its core, it is about putting something aside, dedicating it, separating it out for God. Sometimes this means destroying it, and sometimes it means putting it in the temple sanctuary.
Now turn with me to p231, to Judges 1. In verse 8 we read, “The men of Judah attacked Jerusalem also and took it. They put the city to the sword and set it on fire.” Sounds pretty definitive, doesn’t it. So what is verse 21 all about? “The Benjaminites, however, did not drive out the Jebusites, who were living in Jerusalem; to this day the Jebusites live there with the Benjaminites”. So was Jerusalem completely conquered, or not? We don’t know, there is a tension in the text, and this tension is found in a number of different places in the conquest narrative, through the books of Joshua and Judges. It seems to me that the most likely explanation for this is that the reporting of victories has an element of hyperbole and rhetoric to make a theological point that God is completely victorious, rather than being a completely factual, historically accurate account of the conflict.
So, it seems to me, that whilst there was violence in the conquest of Canaan, and that God did command that violence, it was not neither in command, or in reality, a genocide or extermination. As the writer of this book puts it,
“Does this help? I suspect that the answer is, “only partially.” I would much prefer that these texts were not there or that God were clearly speaking against the violence and not (apparently) in favour of it. And I, too, wish that nobody had died in the conquest of Canaan”
As I said at the beginning of this section, we have to choose if we will trust, even when we don’t fully understand.
There is violence in the world today. We witness it, we experience it, we may even perpetrate it on others or on ourselves. For me the presence of violence in the Bible reassures me that it is dealing with reality. The Bible names it, faces it, and usually condemns it. It gives us a language to use when we need to pray about it. There are a few places where violence is condoned or even commanded, and I don’t have a complete understanding of this. What I am sure of is that those rare examples do not give us a mandate to exercise violence, and that we should be careful about how we use stories of violence in our worship, and particularly in the teaching of our children.
I want to come to a conclusion today by reminding us that the balance of God’s revelation to us in Scripture is one that is heavily weighted away from violence and towards compassion. The prince of peace, the bringer of Shalom, of peace, reconciliation and restoration is the one that is portrayed most frequently and most clearly.
There is far more violence in our society and culture today. We are repeatedly told the lie of redemptive violence – it’s the core lie at the heart of Jack Bower’s 24, James Bond, the Marvel Universe. It makes for exciting story telling, but the truth is that violence never redeems or makes things right. The only true Redeemer is the one who was silent before his accusers, chose not to call on legions of angels, but absorbed all the violence that was directed at him, and defeated it by refusing to respond in kind. This is the God we love, worship and follow, because by his death and resurrection we are freed from all violence.
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