Recently, I posted an article that highlighted the return of firing squads (in Utah) to all the ways Americans can now officially be killed by the state for "punishment" for crimes committed. That article discusses "a bill that would allow the state to execute
prisoners on death row by firing squad in the event the appropriate
drugs for a lethal injection cannot be obtained". In my response to the article, I said:
"Man's inhumanity to man", as Robert Burns put it, is the very gist of those curses from Genesis. I'm hardly surprised at the anger and the violence, because we humans have always been good at this sort of thing. ISIS learned it from us, to be honest. (America created so many crises in the Middle East since the 50s that those chickens were bound to come home to roost.)My sadness stems from my understanding of Jesus ministry.
Cain killed Abel. We kill one another. Whether it's the atrocities committed by Americans (anyone who thinks we haven't, I only respond with: "the bombing of Dresden") or by Muslim fundamentalists like ISIS, we're good at this sort of thing. When you learn violence like we learn violence, the nonviolence of the cross is such a radical alternative.
The good news is that it needn't be this way. Killing is wrong. Whether it's one person, or a collective (the state). After Cain killed Abel, it was God who put a stop to it (Genesis 4.14). When Jesus wept over Jerusalem, his tears are telling: "If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!" (Luke 19.41-44).
I'm not surprised we do this kind of thing. I'm saddened. Because it's that sadness that's a deeper, evangelical emotion. We've been so good at this for so long, that I long for that time when we won't learn violence anymore -- even when it's the violence against those who've been violent (Isaiah 2.3-4). Which is to say, I long for the Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.
If you want to stump Americans (who think they know the Bible ever-so-well), ask them this question: What was Jesus' mission?
One of the things I've noticed after years of reading the New Testament is that Jesus seemed acutely aware that his people were on a lethal collision course with Rome. If Israel didn't repent, if Israel didn't listen, she was going to revisit the catastrophe when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple. It was all going to happen again, Jesus prophesied. History was repeating itself.
Only this time it would be Rome dropping the hammer.
Jesus saw it coming. And it brought him to tears. He tried to stop it. But he failed. Then he cried.
And when Jesus drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation" (Luke 19.41-44).It's this lament that unpacks what Jesus understood his mission to be. And it's this lament that highlights just how unchristian America might be.
So the episode begs me to ask a question: Why did Jesus weep over Jerusalem?
It was because Jerusalem had failed to learn "the things that make for peace". And because Jerusalem had failed to respond to Jesus' kingdom proclamation, failed to learn the things that make for peace, that the kingdom of God was "in their midst" if they had the eyes to see it, Jerusalem had set herself on a path of destruction.
What I find important in these observations is how Jesus' teachings regarding salvation and judgment are rooted in the concrete and historical conflict between Jerusalem and Rome. Jesus' kingdom proclamation wasn't about a heaven in the clouds. The kingdom was about learning "the things that make for peace" in this world. Learning that the kingdom of God is, right now, "in our midst". The kingdom is here, but it's the treasure hidden in the field. It's the seed being sown.
Will that seed -- the kingdom proclamation -- find good soil in our hearts? Will we learn the things that make for peace?
The judgment and the salvation Jesus has in mind, it's avoiding hell. This was the judgment that Jesus wept over: Violent death in this world. The "coming judgment" was a personal and communal annihilation because a people had failed to learn "the things that make for peace".
And there we are. That judgment is a judgment on American violence.
With Jesus, I continue to weep over a world that refuses to learn "the things that make for peace". Interpersonally, socially, economically, politically, ecologically.
The Kingdom of God is in our midst. That the world might be saved from its self-destruction.
So what will be our choice?