WORKING AGAINST AND WITHOUT VIOLENCE

“Because whatever has happened to humanity; whatever is currently happening to humanity, it is happening to all of us. No matter how hidden the cruelty, no matter how far off the screams of pain and terror, we live in one world.”

Alice Walker (Author “the Color Purple”)

Violence dehumanises. It dehumanises the victim. Obviously. It also dehumanises the victimiser. Watching violence is also dehumanising.  Passing by (or turning away) is a choice available to those with distance. However, choosing not to notice or not to care also diminishes our humanity. It is with this in mind that I dare speak of the crisis in Israel Palestine.

Standing for Palestine does not mean standing against Israel. Standing against Hamas and its practice of terror while hiding behind a civilian population does not mean standing for the collective punishment of a civilian population and their systematic destruction.

The terror of 7 October is the context for Israel’s brutal violence. There is also a context for Palestinian uprising which is decades of occupation and dehumanising practices against Palestine and Palestinian. I am not lauding the use of violence, just pointing to the soil from which it springs, noting that violence begets violence.

We live in a culture that is heavily invested in the myth of redemptive violence, just watch any major action film. Christianity can be, and has been, co-opted into this lie. The church in many places happily swaps out the Saviour who hangs from the tree of human violence for a king who rules with brute force. The lie of violence is seductive. The Christian message is its undoing. If Isaiah is to be used as a  narrative for understanding kingship, the image from Isaiah 2 is compelling.

Come, walk in the light of the Lord:

He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes…
they will beat their swords into ploughshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.

As a broad Christian principle, there is no flourishing for ‘us’ apart from ‘them’. The only way some can ‘flourish’ while others flounder is through the use of walls and the backing of state sanctioned violence.

Any language that describes a group of humans as less than human is the necessary prequel to state led ethnic violence. It was used in National Socialist Germany in the thirties, Rwanda and former Yugoslavia in the nineties. It can be heard on the lips of Hamas leaders as well as the lips of Benjamin Netanyahu this last week past.

There are things we can do to stay human:

• Confront and challenge any degrading, derogatory or bullying language, anywhere.
• Use language and call for a ceasefire.
• Lament. Weep and allow grief to speak into our lived lives and feel for the children who long for a home without war, Israeli and Palestinian.
• Practice the love of Justice in every place and moment.

Put the prayer of St Francis into practice...

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen

Reverend Richard Browning
Chaplain