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Could
You Do It? We must respect our men and women in the military
services for the tremendous sacrifices they make for us. This is the very
least we can do. And please understand that I mean no disrespect for them
in what follows. Imagine for a moment that you were a soldier
about to go to war. And
before you leave, in a vision, God showed you all the anguish, all the
pain, all the heart rending suffering that your own actions in the war
would cause. Then God placed before you the very people you would kill,
maim, or otherwise wound in the war.
Their families and close friends are also there and they plead with
you at length to spare their father, mother, child, husband, wife,
brother, sister, ... Then, without the heat of battle, or any danger to
you, standing right there in front of them, could you kill a man while his
wife and children beg you plaintively not to?
Could you kill a young mother while her husband and young children
weep and beg you not to hurt her. Could
you throw burning napalm on a baby while his mother watches frozen in
horror and desperation? Could
you wound and maim others as those who love them watch helplessly. Could you do such things? Could you, right there, ask anyone else to do them on your
behalf? Do you know anyone
who could do this? After such
a vision, could you proceed to go to war, knowing you would cause the very
effects you saw in the vision? If not, then shouldn't we find some other way to
respond to those things that cause us to go to war? To be sure, there will be times when we must be willing to
lay down our lives for our country. But,
in the eternal scheme of things, is there really
a necessity to kill for it? Nonviolence
has not been tried and failed, rather it has largely not been tried.
The same has been said about Christianity, but we Christians
aren’t allowed to wait for everybody else to start acting like Christians before we have to,
are we? We are fond of saying that might does not make right,
but when violence is the means used by both parties, might alone decides
the issue. Only when at least
one side uses nonviolence does right have a chance of prevailing against
might. India's Independence Movement, lead by Gandhi, showed
us two things. First, that a country cannot be controlled by an oppressive
occupation force if its citizens refuse to cooperate with the oppressors.
Second, that an oppressor can be defeated and expelled by active
(as opposed to passive) nonviolent resistance.
Many Indian citizens had to die for their freedom, but none had to
kill for it. And far fewer died than would have had they resisted
violently. In fact, it is doubtful they would have prevailed if they had.
To be sure, the British were undoubtedly less brutal
than Tojo’s Japan or Hitler’s Germany, but respect for life was not
always evident in their attempts to defeat India’s Independence
Movement. Many Indian
citizens were killed in their struggle for independence.
At one point, a British rifle brigade sealed off the exits of a
small stadium where a rally for the movement was being held, and using
only 1650 bullets, killed 1516 unarmed men, women and children. The
brigade commander received only a reprimand and a transfer. One day, much
later in the movement, thousands of Indian men marched five or six abreast
slowly and deliberately on the gates of salt works all over India, which
had been impounded by the British to try to force the movement to its
knees. All day and into the night the British and/or their hired hands
beat them to the ground with bludgeons as they reached the gates.
The women carried their broken, bleeding bodies off, making room
for the next row to step forward and be bludgeoned.
Many of them were seriously injured, some died, but they kept
coming, and coming, and coming, until sometime in the night when the
British could no longer continue. They
could no longer continue beating these men who would not fight back.
This day was the turning point, the point at which the British
began to realize that they could not overcome the (nonviolent)
Independence Movement. The Bible can be said to be at least partly a story
of God making a long slow transition from being a vengeful bloodthirsty
warlord to one who tells us that we must love
our enemies and who forgives his own murderers from the cross.
The Old Testament God not only says to slay the enemy, but often
also to kill all the inhabitants
and sometimes even all the animals and to burn the cities and the crops.
Fundamentalists apparently have no problem with this image of God.
Catholic scripture scholars say that this is not the God Jesus
revealed, rather what the O.T. is showing is the evolution, not of God,
but of the Hebrew people’s understanding
of God. In war we always demonize the enemy. How
does this square with the command to love our enemies?
And how can we love our enemy and yet take his life and devastate
his family? What is required is a resolve to firmly resist evil and to, as J.V. Langmead Casserly says "endure its sting without reciprocating" -- as Jesus showed us by his life and most profoundly by his death on the cross.
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