I thought about doing a very short sermon today. I mean, I want to do a sermon on biblical perspectives on war. And I thought, well, one way to sum it all up would be to come out here with a little bit of funky brass and say, “War. Huh. Good God, y’all. What is it good for?” Then you would respond, “Absolutely nothing.” And we’d all go home.
But that’s a little too easy. And it really doesn’t require us wrestling with the Bible, which is what we should be doing in here. It also isn’t nearly all that we want to say or want to know about war. Edwin Starr gave us a great song to sing when we are fed up with the evil that is war, but there’s a lot that we struggle with as Christians when our nation goes to war. We want to hear more. It’s great to know what Edwin thinks, but we also want to know what God thinks. So once again, let’s go to the Bible, this great, frustrating, complex, wonderful record of God’s dealings with the people of God through the centuries, and see what we can get out of a sounding on war.
I have a story before we head into this exploration. It’s a story of how history weighs so heavily on us when we come to this. I was a history major in college and one of the reasons that I was…the main reason that I was, was because of a professor of Southern History. Eddie Ayres was from the deep South and he knew the mythology of the Old South, which is what I grew up with. He knew the truth of William Faulkner’s saying, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”[i] The Civil War and the weight of southern history had endless fascination for Faulkner, a Mississippi writer, for Eddie Ayres, a Louisiana history teacher, and for me.
In his book, Intruder in the Dust, Faulkner wrote a passage that captured perfectly how I felt about this mythology of my history. He says, “For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is stll time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago....”[ii] I was that fourteen-year-old boy.
But as I grew older I came to the struggle that Faulkner and Ayres had with that history. Why did a white society with such hideous scars fascinate us so much? Underneath the magnolias and Spanish moss, there was a legacy of hatred, racism, slavery and subjugation. That war about which we knew so much, down to the fact that I know Stonewall Jackson liked to suck on lemons when he went off into battle, that war was one of the most horrific experiences we ever went through as a nation. It’s a story of unspeakable violence and death. But that’s why it stayed with us. The wounds weren’t just done to our ancestors, they remained in our flesh. So when Eddie Ayres told the stories of the old South and made us struggle with them in all their wonder and horror, it was like he was telling my story. I was hooked. And I, who at that time was a pacifist and very aware of how troubling the Vietnam War had been and very opposed to it and anything that looked like it…I spent my undergrad years studying a war that was still alive in me. The Civil War.
I say all that to say that when we look at the Bible and what it says about war we will recognize that it is not enough to say that war is evil and good for absolutely nothing. We also have to say that war is inescapable. We all carry within us the wounds it has inflicted on people in our families, even it was a generation ago. War is a constant in human history from Genesis to Revelation to the Crusades to Gettysburg to Fallujah. And the questions we bring to God about war are also consistent: Under what circumstances, if any, should God’s people be engaged in war? How do we know what God’s will is in the midst of fighting? Is there such a thing as a just war? How do we love our enemies in a time of war?
So let’s get at it. The first thing we need to say about the biblical witness on this question is that it seems very mixed, which is a kind way of saying that it doesn’t seem to fit together all that well. Think of some of the things that the Old Testament tells us about war and violence. On the one hand we have a commandment about this. Commandment number 6 on the list of the Top 10 is “Thou shalt not…kill.” Exodus 20, verse 13. The translation of that verb has always been in dispute. You may see a note in your bible that says this verse could also be translated “You shall not murder.” And that does put a different spin on it, but I think the intent is very clear. God’s presumption is always that life is to be valued, honored and preserved. It’s one of our core values as human beings. Most of us have an innate sense that killing is a violation of what God intends and even when it is done in justifiable circumstances, as in defending someone from an attacker, we recognize that something has been violated. Hunters even know this in killing animals. Most hunters I have known have a deep sense of respect for the life that they are taking. The presumption built into the commandments and into us is that life is good and it is not to be taken by murder.
So what are we to make then of all the killing that takes place in the chapters that follow this commandment? The people of Israel start to move through the wilderness and they run into other nations who do not worship the same gods and who are hostile to them. And the people, at God’s direction, start to prepare for war. The book of Numbers gets its name from a census that God commands. God tells Moses to take a census of “every male individually from twenty years old and upward, everyone in Israel able to go to war.” [Num. 1:2-3]
Before that book finishes the Israelites have gone to war with the Midianites and it is a bloodthirsty campaign. Now remember that Midian is where Moses had gone when he fled from Egypt. His wife was a Midianite. His father-in-law was a Midianite. But Chapter 31 of Numbers records how the peoples had come into conflict. God tells the Israelites to go to war and they get a thousand men from each tribe, 12,000 soldiers, and they go out and kill all the men of Midian. But even this wasn’t enough and Moses tells the people to kill the adult women, too.
Now this is hard stuff. When we talk about the violent stories of the Qur’an, the scriptures of Islam, we need to recognize that we have some of those same stories, too, and Christians have sometimes been guilty of trying to recreate them without regard to what the rest of the Bible says. Hearing these stories now, we wonder, as someone asked me this week, “Why does God give us these?” What purpose do they still serve?
We read them as lessons on how God demanded exclusivity from the people God had liberated from Egypt. They were learning how to be faithful to the one, true God and as part of that they had to learn to put away everything that would keep them from serving God and they understand that to mean putting away even the peoples who would lead them astray. Was this part of their journey? Were they not yet enlightened enough to hear God’s call to be a light to the nations? The Midianites had led the people into sexual immorality. Were their passions causing them to misunderstand what God wanted? Then why did they preserve this story even after they had come to a new understanding of God?
I’ll be honest. I have a hard time understanding the stories of God’s command to wipe out the Midianites and the Amelekites and all the other peoples on the way to the Promised Land. I’m glad that our ancestors didn’t try to sugarcoat the story they passed along. They knew they had a disturbing history with some disturbing characters in it but they also knew that God was working even through all of that. So we shouldn’t be surprised that treachery, torture, idolatry, and even genocide are in these pages. They are definitely the stuff of human history, and, as we know from our headlines, they still are.
But here’s what I believe. Stories like Numbers 31 are a minority report. Even in the Hebrew Scriptures there are passages that tell us something different about how God views war. In fact, even in Numbers 31 there are hints of this. In verse 2 there, as God tells Moses that the Israelites will avenge themselves on the Midianites, God says, “afterward you shall be gathered to your people.” It seems like there is a connection. “Moses, do this terrible thing and then you will die.” There is a price that must be paid for all the horror. Later in verse 19, Moses tells the warriors, “Camp outside the camp seven days; whoever of you has killed any person or touched a corpse, purify yourselves and your captives on the third and on the seventh day. You shall purify every garment, every article of skin, everything made of goats' hair, and every article of wood." The act of killing has made them unclean and there is a price that must be paid for all the death.
Later in the Old Testament, in the midst of all the wars that led to the united kingdom of Israel, David stops to lament the price that was paid when the king, King Saul, was killed along with his son. Even though David had been fighting against Saul and Jonathan he says, “How the mighty have fallen, and the weapons of war perished!” [2 Samuel 1:27] There is a price that must be paid.
In the Psalms there are certainly songs to the God who strengthens the warrior for war. Psalm 18 says, in verse 34, “God trains my hands for war, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze.” Psalm 144 begins with similar words: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle, my rock and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield, in whom I take refuge, who subdues the peoples under me.”
So there are songs that are sung by people headed off for battle, but there are also psalms like Psalm 33, which says, in verses 16 and 17, “A king is not saved by his great army; a warrior is not delivered by his great strength. The war horse is a vain hope for victory, and by its great might it cannot save.” The people had started to trust in war itself as a sign of blessing and strength, but their trust was misplaced. God was the source of their strength. And then you get Psalm 120 where it says, in verses 6 and 7: “Too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace. I am for peace; but when I speak they are for war.” Again, it seems like the people were forgetting a more fundamental desire of God. God does not desire war; what God wants is peace and if war is the only means to that peace it is a sign of the tragic fallenness of the human race. People had begun to glory in war.
Later on in the Old Testament, the prophets offer a new vision of a day of peace that will come. Isaiah and Micah both describe it with the same image. In Micah chapter 4, verse 3 it says, “God shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” At the end of all things, war will come to an end.
But it’s in Jesus that we see the really new message of how God views war. Jesus seems to recognize that war is a continuing reality for us and will be for some time. He talks to soldiers and centurions and does not tell them to leave their professions. They end up following him and remaining in those roles. He told parables about kings planning for war. And he says, in Matthew 24, verses 6 and 7, “You will hear of wars and rumors of war; see that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.”
Jesus was also not averse to using violent imagery either. He says in Matthew 10, verse 34, “Don’t think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not yet come to bring peace, but a sword.” And just before his arrest in the garden of Gethsemane, in the story we read this morning, he says to his disciples, “Now the one who has a purse must take it and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one.” Then the disciples pulled out some swords and said, “Lord, look, here are two swords,” and Jesus says, “It is enough.” [Luke 22:36-38].
But it’s pretty obvious that Jesus was about a very different ethic of violence than the rest of the world had. He was not about inflicting violence but about suffering violence. He told Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, that his kingdom worked differently than the kingdoms of the earth. In John 18 verse 36 he says, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”
Jesus’ kingdom demanded something different from his followers. That’s why the things he had to say were so hard for his disciples. In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, verses 43 and 44, Jesus says, “You have heard it said ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy,’ but I say unto you, ‘Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.’” Love your enemies. Can we do that? Luke 6, verse 29: “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.” Can we accept violence and respond to it in a different way?
It’s not that we are not to fight. We are definitely at war. But Jesus comes to tell us not to get distracted by the hatred that so easily pops up in us. Paul tells us in Ephesians chapter 6, verse 12, that we need armor, but “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” We love our enemies because they are just as much in the grip of the evil powers of this world as we are. They are just as much in need of God’s redemption as we are. The structures of our nation, our governments, our international bodies, all of these are fallen and can be corrupted by the present darkness. So we are called to love our enemies because in the end we share much more than we think.
As I come to the close of this sermon, I realize that there are a lot of unanswered questions here and we will need to come back and talk more about this subject. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of a biblical view on this. But two final places to touch down, because I know we have more than just an academic interest in this question.
First, Iraq. It has been hovering in our minds this whole hour and for the last five years. We are a nation at war and we are in the midst of a deep national struggle to understand why we went there, why we are still there, and how we can do any good. I believe this is a tragic war that was begun under the flag of some high-sounding values that represent the best of what we hope for for the world. Apart from the security concerns and the weapons of mass destruction that never materialized, there was a group of leaders who really believed that this war could transform the whole region with new democracies upholding the same ideals our government holds up. They still believe this. But so many things have gone wrong and so much blood and money has been wasted. And we have lost the ability to speak honestly about what it is happening. We are having to learn again the lessons of what military power, even the greatest military power in the world, can and can’t do. And what it can’t do is bring peace by itself. We need to pray for our nation and its leaders, for our soldiers who so often seem confused and caught in the rhetoric and the policy. To pray for the people of Iraq and that they and we may be true to the ideals of justice and humanity expressed in our faith.
Finally, I want to lift up a flyer I saw the other day. I was across the bay for a church meeting and I was walking outside a shop and I saw a flyer for a cagematch. These have become popular, these fighting matches in a ring surrounded by a cage. Two guys, or girls, I suppose, will go at it so that there can be blood and spectacle.
What it tells me is that, in men especially, there is an implanted need to defend something worth defending. All of us need something worth living for and if it is worth living for, then it is worth dying for. If we do not fight for the things that really matter then we will end up doing something stupid like getting into a cage and fighting for no reason at all. We will end up turning our anger in on ourselves in depression. Or we will fight someone in the grocery store because they took 13 items in the 12 item lane.
Jesus knew that there was something worth dying for. It’s why he invited us to take up our cross and follow him. It’s why he warned us against the false gods that we would be tempted to serve. It’s why Paul tells us to put our armor on. It’s the kingdom of God’s love that is worth dying for and living for. And anything that does not advance that kingdom is not worthy of our lives. And so we test the spirits of this age. Thanks be to God.
Luke 22:47-51 [NRSV]
While he was still speaking, suddenly a crowd came, and the one called Judas, one of the twelve, was leading them. He approached Jesus to kiss him; but Jesus said to him, "Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?"
When those who were around him saw what was coming, they asked, "Lord, should we strike with the sword?" Then one of them struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his right ear.
But Jesus said, "No more of this!" And he touched his ear and healed him.
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