Wrestling With War: Part Three.

Part One of Wrestling With War
Part Two of Wrestling With War

This is where I tell you one more time it’s more complicated than my small stupid words before I start telling you about my struggles.

This is a chance for us to realize that these words without action are as effective at bringing about peace as tanks and bombs.

And so I begin.

My biggest struggle as of late is with what war creates. Perhaps under ideal situations, it displaces an evil, although one can certainly make the point that oftentimes this is only temporary as another evil rises up and takes it place. Or that peace brought about by violence can never last because it is built on a crumbling foundation. Not to speak of the apparent evil or contradiction of getting rid of violence through the means of violence.

Sadly, these “ideal situations” are just that . . . ideal. And rarely realized. More often than not, war creates a cycle where violence begets violence. Threat is returned with counter-threat. Eye for an eye. Tooth for a tooth. Blood for blood. At times after war has absolved the present conflict . . . violence will go dormant. But at the first sign of conflict, those who had previously been oppressed and delivered from violence at the hands of war, will use the only methods and responses that they have learned and seen effective. Thus, the cycle continues.

Those who have seen war will never stop seeing it.

The original victims usually have a sense of being “owed something” (back to our concept of justice in part two). So once they arise from the oppressed to the ones in power, they typically seek to “be righted” from “their wrong”. The oppressed become the oppressors and the cycle continues.

But beyond the cycle of violence that I feel war creates, it creates something much more saddening to me. Sickening even.

The creation of orphans and widows. I tear up thinking about it because that could as well be my father or my son or my daughter or my wife who is laying in a hospital bed covered in blood, tattered clothes, and the dust of debris. Or worse yet laying in a grave.

Despite the best intentions (or lack of concern) war inevitably creates orphans and widows. A bomb strays from an Israeli jet and hits a hospital killing 54 civilians, mostly children. A Lebanese rocket hits a home where a family sits down for dinner, killing the father and leaving a wife and child behind.

War that creates orphans and widows is a war that I can not support. Whether intentional or not, it is wrong and should be named as such.

The prophet Isaiah spoke of God’s heart for the orphan and widow when he wrote,

“Learn to do good; Seek justice, Rebuke the oppressor; Defend the fatherless, Plead for the widow.” – Isaiah 1:17

We must seek justice (reconciliation), name the evil of the oppressor, and we are to defend the fatherless and plead for the widows. But we can not defend the fatherless and plead for the widow for one side while creating orphans and widows on the other side. It doesn’t work that way. This is how the cycle begins.

So if our response to defend the fatherless and the widows in turns creates the same, we have become the terrorists. We have become the oppressors. We have become the ones who attack the innocent. We are the ones with blood on our hands. We have become the evil.

When war turns children into orphans and wives into widows . . . what then? What then does my faith mean? What role do I then play? How do I resist evil? Do I resist evil with evil? Violence with violence? Sword with sword?

I have a hard time believing that Jesus would support “a means” whose “end” is oprhans and widows. That would trade one type of oppression for a different kind of oppression (war inevitably leaves a broken infrastructure, a political vacuum, and civilians homeless with broken homes and possessions, pushing them further and deeper into poverty).

When I think about Jesus, I have a hard time seeing him brandishing a sword to achieve his “end”, his purposes, his goal. I still hear him saying to Peter, “Put your sword back in it’s place, for all who take up the sword will perish by the sword.” Your way of violence can not protect the innocent. Your way of retribution will not erase the past. Your zeal to support the innocent can not last longer than the last shot fired, the last stroke of the sword taken. Your way is only as good as your last defense.

I think what happened in that garden exchange between Peter, Jesus, and his accusers was as pivotal as any moment in the life of Jesus. Without that exchange, the cross loses a bit of it’s texture. In the garden, Jesus was presented with a chance to defend himself, to defend the innocent. To use violence to escape the violence of his accusers. To stand with Peter and his sword. To stand with a legion of angels. To stand with force and might and power.

It was as if the whole thing, everything that Jesus had been talking about and living for and moving towards, everything hung there on the blade of a knife. And in the wise words of Gandalf, “Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of it all.”

The suspense hung heavy with the choices before him. What would his defense be if not the sword, if not violence. His only way to defeat the evil and violence was to do something rather drastic.

His only defense was sacrifice.

Tags: War, Peace, Emerging Church, Justice, Jesus, Lebanon, Israel