Power and Violence (Remembrance Day 2012)

When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come (Mark 13: 17).

  

My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness   (II Cor. 12: 9).

Violence wears many different faces. 

We see it in Syrian jets bombing rebel civilians, attempting to cow them into submission.  We see it in the global slave-trade, which is at its highest levels in centuries.  We see it in a young man leading a young woman on to drink too much so that he can have his way with her sexually.  We see it in a young woman seeking revenge by engaging in cyber-bullying.  I see it in my own heart when the anger that accumulates there like barnacles on a rusty ship hull doesn’t know what to do with itself anymore. 

Violence is all around us and within us. 

After the Western world realized just how horrific the violence of World War I was, they called it “the war to end all wars,” a phrase which we recognize now as nothing more than sentimental balderdash.  Even so, in Canada we commemorate the conclusion of that war every year on Nov. 11 at 11 AM to remind us that we long for the day when “’the wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, but dust will be the serpent’s food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain,’ says the LORD” (Isaiah 65: 25). 

Because Remembrance Day falls on a Sunday this year, we will mark it today, on Monday, Nov. 12.  As we do, I invite you to ponder the relationship between the accumulated violence of human history and the impulse to violence that lives within your own heart.  I invite you to ponder along with the monk Thomas Merton, who, according to Henri Nouwen, “discovered that the roots of all problems were in his own soul, too, that evil is not something outside himself that could be identified, but part of the whole human condition of which he was a part.”

When I peer into my soul, I recognize that the impulse to violence that lives there is directly connected to an anxious need to be in control, to have things my way, to hold things together forcibly by my own will. 

And when I recall the times in my life history when I have begun to act on this impulse, I recognize that every single time the results have been disastrous:  damaged relationships, paralyzing guilt and shame, barriers between me and God. 

I cannot hold things together by a sheer exercise of my own will.  I cannot control the outcomes of my own life.

Jesus teaches strange phrases like “love your enemies” (Matt. 5: 44) and “blessed are those who are persecuted” (Matt. 5:10), which are further developed in Paul’s command:  “do not take revenge” (Rom. 12: 19). 

And when my anxious soul protests and says “that’s crazy!  I’ll be ripped to pieces,” it’s as if Jesus calmly smiles and says something like, “but I hold all things together, and you can’t.  Suck it up, get over it, trust me and live out my kind of peace.”