A Matter of Life or Death
Larry McSwain
McAfee Worship
October 13, 2009
Exodus 20:13; Matthew 5:21-22a
All of my ministry I have wanted to preach on the shortest verse of scripture in the Bible. From childhood, I was taught that verse was “Jesus wept.” But this text is even more brief—just six consonants in the Hebrew. The sixth word or law is deceptive in its simplicity—No murder—Lo ratzah.
That is the sermon. Do no murder. It is the command of God. It is simple and unambiguous. Why should we not say “amen,” pronounce the benediction, and go live in peace? Well, Dr. Younger fully expects me to preach for at least twenty minutes, and all of you are fully hoping it will last no longer than that!
Freedom is an inherent value of our Creator God. Yahweh created each of us with some capacity of choice, a theological construct we call “free will.” All of us desire freedom—freedom to choose our own values, freedom to choose where we shall live, freedom to choose how we shall be educated, freedom to choose whom we marry or not marry at all, and freedom to engage in relationships with other persons. Freedom is an awesome privilege.
Yet, the paradox of biblical faith is that the greatest freedom persons can enjoy is lived within boundaries. There are limits to genuine freedom. The ten words of Yahweh mediated to Israel through Moses set forth a new understanding within the tribal culture of which these fleeing ex-slaves were a part. That understanding was that highest form of freedom was to live within the boundaries of a covenant between Yahweh and this meandering collection of people we call Israelites. It was a covenant that set forth the foundational understanding of Yahweh’s expectations for those who would live in relationship with the Holy One of the Exodus. Unlike our contemporary culture in which freedom is largely an individual claim that rejects the constraints of parents, or communal groups, or churches, or governments, Yahweh’s words set forth basic laws that can best be lived in community, refined by community, and enforced within community.
The natural human response to these kinds of unambiguous commandments is to affirm them--with qualifications. I asked Rusty Grace what Granny Grace would say about this commandment and he had a good story to tell me, but I thought about my own Grandmother and how she would respond. She was a hardy Kentucky woman who lived with much hardship in her life. Her response would be “Yes, but….” As is ours. “Yes, no murder, but what about Osama bin Laden sending 19 suicide bombers to kill more than 3,000 Americans?” “Yes, but what do we do with the Timothy McVays who set off a truck full of fertilizer to kill hundreds of innocents in Oklahoma City?” “Yes, but what about the late term fetus that threatens the life of its mother with toxic reactions.” “Yes, but…” with a thousand qualifications.
One of the unfortunate choices humans have made since the earliest sagas of the human family living east of Eden is to resolve the emotions of greed and lust, addressed in the next three commandments, out of anger and hatred. Cain murdered his brother Abel out of anger produced by his jealousy toward Abel’s favor before Yahweh. So he became the recipient of judgment, consigned to wander as a nomad in the land of Nod. But even Yahweh exercised no capital punishment of this first murderer. His life was spared, but his freedom limited.
In its raw form, this sixth word of the Ten Words requires interpretation. Does the commandment apply to all forms of killing? Does it include killing only humans or are animals, or even plants, to be included in the injunction? Clearly, if that were so, none of us would be here for the human race would have starved long ago. We could apply it to animals and survive as sanctified vegetarians and we would likely be so healthy that we would not need to debate ObamaCare.
This word is a necessary word. Throughout our efforts to live as a created family of Yahweh, violence seems to be an inextricable part of the human story. It was true of the Ancient Middle East and it is true of the 21st century. Baptist scholar Mark McIntire has written two volumes on the shaping influence of violence on the narrative of the Hebrew Bible. He suggests the slave victims of the excessive violence of the Egyptians developed efforts to limit the power of violence in their community only to exceed their own boundaries in the use of violence and understand Yahweh as a violent God. The literature contemporaneous with the Mosaic era is filled with descriptions of marauding tribes and kingdoms built on the capacities of armies to annihilate their enemies to claim lands and tribute. And if there is any description that will describe that reality I would call it “uncontrolled revenge.” If you kill my family member or my friend, I will kill your village and, if possible, your tribe. Revenge is the human response to murder. Uncontrolled revenge generates cycles of violence that spiral into ever enlarging circles of human death.
The Mosaic community understood clearly they would have to interpret this core law. So, they developed the understanding that the commandment applied to pre-meditated murder. And, according to Old Testament scholar Mark Biddle, their solution for maintaining the law was to create canons of “controlled revenge” to enforce it. If you murder someone as an act of pre-meditated anger, the community will enforce justice by killing you. But there are limits to the revenge that is possible. You cannot kill the family of the murderer. Your revenge is limited, unlike that of many of Israel’s neighbors, in that the punishment cannot exceed the severity of the deed. It is the law of lex talionis—eye for eye, life for life. Thus, a due process of judging the murderer based on the witness of two or more persons resulted in capital punishment as the policy of this understanding of the commandment as described in Numbers 35:30 and numerous other passages of the Pentateuch.
Moreover, there were limits on the punishment of those who killed without intent by the provision of cities of refuge. There the person committing manslaughter could flee and be protected from vengeance until the community would judge the offender according to the law. It was an advancement in civilization to provide a legal system for the judging of murder. I like to imagine it probable that Moses himself came up with the cities of refuge since he had clearly violated this sixth word of Yahweh and found in the wilderness a refuge from the authorities in Egypt. Ironically, this community of faith developed all kinds of justifiable killing to create boundaries around the other commandments. If you cursed or struck your parents, enslaved a fellow Israelite, allowed your animals to kill humans repeatedly, engaged in bestiality, sacrificed to another god, or a host of other forbidden practices, you would be killed. It was a system of “controlled revenge.” And of course, engaging in war with the enemies of Yahweh was always exempt from these prohibitions.
We have not progressed very far from these practices of both “unrestrained revenge” or “controlled revenge.” According to R.J. Rummel, in his books Death by Government (1994) and Statistics of Democide (1997), the definition of democide is “. . . the intentional killing by governments of their people—induced famine, forced labor, assassinations, extrajudicial executions, massacres, or full-scale genocide—of civilians or military noncombatants.” He estimates from 1900 to 1987 governments murdered almost 170 million people—a figure that far exceeds the 34.4 million battle deaths thought to have resulted from all of the international and civil wars fought during the same period. If all lived in one nation, it would be the sixth largest in the world.
Chris Hedges, in War is a Force that Gives us Meaning, is equally shocking in his account: “Look just at the 1990s: 2 million dead in Afghanistan; 1.5 million dead in the Sudan; some 800,00 butchered in 90 days in Rwanda; a half-million dead in Angola; a quarter of a million dead in Bosnia; 200,000 dead in Guatemala; 150,000 dead in Liberia; a quarter of a million dead in Burundi; 71,000 dead in Algeria; and untold tens of thousands lost in the border conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the fighting in Columbia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Southeastern Turkey, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, Kosovo and the Persian Gulf War (where perhaps as many as 35,000 Iraqi citizens were killed).” He concludes, “In the wars of the 20th century, not less than 62 million civilians have perished, nearly 20 million more than the 43 million military personnel killed.”
It comes closer to home when we realized that controlled revenge is the policy of the government for which we vote and to which we pay our taxes. In 2005, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Dept. of Defense the United States spent $522 billion on military arms compared to $63 billion in China, $62 billion in Russia, $45 billion in Japan, and $14 billion in the combined budgets of 14 adversaries of the US including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Sudan.
Have we not done horribly in protecting the created of our Creator God? If the sixth word of the Lord to Moses means anything, we have ignored it abysmally. What is clear is the horror of both unrestrained revenge and controlled revenge in our world.
But there is a third way to be found in the Matthean text read earlier in our worship. “You have heard that it was said to the ancients, “’No murder; and whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that every one who is angry with another shall be liable to judgment. . .” Jesus refines the move from unrestrained revenge and from controlled revenge to no revenge. What Jesus does is to look beneath the intention of the Holy One whose un-nameable Being was Creator of a universe. This was to be a universe in which shalom was to be the fabric of human community. Humans were made good to live in a world that was created by a righteous God who envisioned a family that lived in peace together. When any of us violates that universe of shalom by our hatred of another that results in killing, we tear apart the fabric of the universe itself. So, Jesus shifts from the focus on the consequences of our hatred to the foundational source of all violence in the human community—our anger toward the other. To say that Jesus came preaching peace—shalom, eirene—is to say that violence is rejected for his followers as a response to the hatreds of the world.
But there is one more movement in this dynamic understanding of the drama of human experience. We move from unrestrained revenge to controlled revenge to no revenge only as we allow a far greater power than violence to control our anger. That is the power of forgiveness. So the crucified one demonstrated our response to all who would murder, “Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” We do know, and so we pray daily with Jesus, “forgive us our sins as we also forgive those who sin against us” (Mt. 6:12) for he taught us, “. . .if you forgive others their sins, your heavenly Father will forgive you; but if you do not forgive others their sins, neither will your Father forgive your sins” (Mt. 6:14-15).
The new community of Jesus followers we call the Church are those who will live life without revenge. When hatred rises from within the human heart, the call of Jesus is to address the hatred before it turns to anger that generates violence. Our colleague David Gushee and friend Glenn Stassen have taught us well this insight in their writings. It is a new way and it is a challenging way because it is a call for this community to exercise a new standard of living that goes beyond the standards of revenge into a grace-filled existence rooted in forgiveness for the enemy and dependence on the grace of God for living without the hate that leads to violence.
I have never murdered anyone and I dare say few, if any, in this room have done so. But all of us are guilty of the hatred that could generate the revenge of killing the thief who invades our house or the other who would steal our spouse. The sixth word of Yahweh can best be lived by practicing the new word of Jesus, “No hatred.” That is an expectation that judges me.
I have no pretension that this way is easy. It is not easy because violence in our world is one of the “principalities and powers” the Bible identifies as those structures that good humans somehow allow demonic power to control. Or, if you are a disciple of the literary critic Rene Girard, violence is a dramatic imitation of the inherent mimetic response humans throughout history have made to the conflicting desires they experience. In my mind, it is simpler to call it what it is: sin!
I have a hate relationship with a bank right now that owes me $92.41. I know the people who work at that bank are good people who mean well when they tell me that another department will handle my problem, but the other department never seems to respond. There is something within me that would like to blow up the main headquarters of that bank. But I know that is not the Jesus way, so I will give up my quest for this small change before I allow that hatred to control me into revenge. Hate that reigns always exceeds the injustice toward which it is directed. So, the community of Jesus faith lives differently than the needs of the world for revenge. Perhaps Stanley Huerwas, is right when he wrote, “The name of the ‘politics of God’ is church. Preaching is a gift given to the church to aid those who worship God in making the connections necessary to see the world truthfully. Thus my claim that the first task of the church is not to make the world more just, but to make the world the world. For the world cannot know it is the world unless a people exist who are called from the world to be an alternative to the world. How can the world know there is an alternative to war unless a people exist who, shaped by the word of God, know they are not to kill—even in war?” (“Preaching Repentance in a Time of War,” 7).
We cannot be the Church in the world if our own language is that of the world. When the Church uses the language of violence to describe its ministry whether it is “worship wars” or “church fights” or evangelistic outreach couched in the language of a military invasion, it ceases to be the community of Jesus. Just last week I heard a well-known political commentator, who declares his Christian convictions regularly, exegete what I am saying. He said in response to his adversarial guest who asked if he followed Jesus in loving his enemies, “Yes, I love my enemies. I love Osama ben Laden so much that I would like to see him killed in Jesus’ name.”
God is the God of life and we dare not allow our fears, our angers, or our pride to choose death over the abundance of life in Jesus Christ. Killing is wrong. The word of the Lord to us this day is clear. “No murder!” Yes, no murder. But even more clearly, “No hatred,” for without it there is no revenge and “forgiveness,” for with it there is no hatred.