The Script Out Verses of the Bible: "Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock."
Hespeler, 8 November, 2015 © Scott
McAndless – Remembrance Sunday
Matthew
5:43-48, Joshua 5:13-15, Psalm 137
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bout our Psalm reading this morning, I
just wanted to let you know that I saw your reaction. In fact, we actually read
this same Psalm in the same way a few weeks ago. I chose to have us read it
responsively even though, at the time, I was not intending to preach on it as a part of my
Script Out series. And then we read the closing words of the Psalm together: “O
daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you
have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them
against the rock!”
When we all read
that, I saw it. There was this little, “Wait, what?” moment. “Did we just read
what I thought we read? How can there be people in the Bible who are
congratulating themselves for dashing little Babylonian babies against the
rocks? I thought that the Bible was supposed to be a nice book!”
It is an awful
couple of verses – the kind of passage makes you wish it were just taken out of
the Bible altogether. I mean, I think we can appreciate, in this Psalm, that
the Jews were rather mad at the Babylonians. The Babylonians had attacked them.
They had destroyed their whole country and reduced the city of Jerusalem and
the temple of the Lord within it
to so much rubble. The Babylonians had taken the Jews as slaves and captives
and removed them from their land and made them live by the rivers of Babylon
far from home.
So, yes, they
hated the Babylonians and saw them as their enemies and it is hard to blame
them for that. I’m sure that we would all understand if they cursed and swore
at the Babylonians all they wanted or even if they fought against them if given
the chance. But, at the same time, I’m pretty sure that most of us would draw
the line at rounding up little Babylonian babies and dashing them against the
rocks as a way of getting back at the nation of Babylon for what it had done to
them.
So, yes, we
squirm when we read it and would just as soon pretend that the verses weren’t
there at a
Today we are
observing Remembrance Sunday. It is a day on which we honour the service of
those who went and gave of themselves for the sake of their country in wars,
conflicts and peacekeeping missions. We honour those who fought and defended.
We honour those wounded in body and in spirit and we especially remember those
who gave their very lives in service. This is a worthy thing to do. It does us
all good, both as Christians and as Canadians, that we set aside time each year
to do this.
It doesn’t mean,
of course, that we love war or glorify the violence that comes with war. On the
contrary, we also see this time as an opportunity to pray for peace and to
support those who work for peace. It’s just that most of us recognize that, as
bad as it is, sometimes war cannot be avoided. There is a time to fight. If you
look at the case of the Jews and the Babylonians, we can sympathize. We can
understand the enmity that the Jews held for the Babylonians and can support
the idea that they might have resisted them.
And that is what
the greater part of the psalm we read this morning is about: the Jews grieving
and mourning for what has been done to them. Their captors, the Babylonians,
make fun of them. They mockingly tell him to sing some of their songs of Zion –
to sing the songs that used to be sung in the temple that was built on the top
of Mount Zion in the city of Jerusalem before the Babylonians destroyed it.
They are rubbing it in and it is just plain mean. For the Jews to chafe and
complain and even to seek to fight their way out of their situation is at least
understandable.
But the whole
thing about bashing out baby’s brains crosses a line. That’s not about
defending yourself or even about fighting back. That is about hate, pure and
simple. It is about treating Babylonians as something other than human beings –
as objects that can be bashed against the rocks with impunity.
The reason why I
am glad that it is actually there in the Psalm is because it is human. It is a
reaction that is natural and all too common in times of war and civil strife. I
don’t think that there has ever been a war where people didn’t speak of those
that they were fighting against as somewhat less than human. Just think of all
the slang terms that have been used for Germans, Japanese, Vietnamese, Iraqis,
Iranians, Somalis and the list goes on and on. You can understand why soldiers
do it. It is just so much easier to kill an enemy if you don’t think of them as
human anymore – if they are just a Hun or a Jap or a Raghead.
So I understand
where it comes from, but there is also so much that is wrong with it. When we
dehumanize anyone, even an enemy, we are ultimately devaluing our own humanity
and that is a big problem. And of course, it becomes even worse when the
fortunes of war put us in a position where we can actually act on our belief
that our enemies are somewhat less than human. Fortunately, the Ancient Israelites
were never put in the position where they could actually dash Babylonian babies
against the rocks, but unfortunately Canadians, Americans and others have been
in that kind of position. The Canadian Airborne Division found itself in that
kind of position in Somalia in 1993 and the result was what we know of as the
Somalia Affair, one of the worst chapters in Canadian military history. The
Americans found themselves in that position at the Abu Ghraib prison during the
Iraq war. The results were very disturbing to say the least.
Enemies can be
very useful, of course. They have a way of uniting people together and focusing
their efforts towards a clear purpose. And of course, if you can persuade the
people in general to treat their enemies as somewhat less than human, it allows
you to manipulate people in some very scary ways. I don’t know about you, but I
have felt like there has been a lot of that going on recently.
Look, for
example, at the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis. With huge numbers of people on
the move through Europe and spilling over into the whole world – people fleeing
for their lives – of course there are a number of difficult issues that are
arising. There are concerns about the economic impact, about security and about
what such a large number of outsiders can do to a society. Of course these
concerns are there and there is nothing wrong with being concerned about such
things.
But what is a
problem is a growing tendency to see the strangers involved in this global
disaster as somewhat less than human – to see them as barbarians or terrorists
or to focus on the niqab that some women wear. These are all terms that have
been freely thrown around in our political discourse and it is worrying to say
the least. Some people have been using this kind of language in an attempt to
direct the Canadian population in some dangerous directions.
As I say, I think it is important that this
kind of dehumanizing attitude is found in the scriptures. It teaches us that, if
the Ancient Israelites had to deal with such attitudes, we have to be prepared
to as well. But it would not be good if Psalm 137 were the final word on the
attitude we should have towards our enemies. Fortunately, it is not.
We get another
point of view, ironically enough, from one of the most violent and war-minded
books of the Bible: the Book of Joshua. In that book, Joshua, the great
commander of the forces that are about to sweep through the land of Canaan and
to conquer it for the children of Israel has an amazing encounter. He is out walking
through his army’s camp when he comes across a soldier – a man he does not know,
standing there fully armed with a drawn sword.
Joshua responds
to this, like any of us would, by saying, “Are
you one of us, or one of our adversaries?” – “Are you a friend or an enemy.” What he doesn’t realize, however, is
that he is not confronting just any soldier but a heavenly warrior – the
commander of God’s own army. In fact, the suggestion is, he is in the very
presence of God. So this ordinary battlefield question – “friend or foe” –
actually turns into the great question that people ask in war: is God on our
side. And usually the answer to that question is an unqualified yes, of course
God is on our side. We almost have to believe that.
But God has a very different answer for
Joshua: “Neither;” he says, “I’m
neither on your side nor on the other but
as commander of the army of the Lord
I have now come.” God doesn’t take sides. God certainly doesn’t see your
enemies as dehumanized monsters as much as you might like him too. God won’t
approve of bashing the little ones against the rocks just because their parents
are Babylonians. I wish we could all learn the lesson that Joshua gained that
day in his camp.
Jesus took that
kind of approach even further. He felt it wasn’t enough to just see your enemy
as a fellow human. “You have heard that it was said,” Jesus challenged his followers, “‘You shall love your neighbour and hate
your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who
persecute you.” That saying of Jesus is, in its own way, almost as hard for
us to hear as that passage from the Psalm about bashing babies against the rocks.
In many ways, loving enemies is much more objectionable than is treating them
as somehow less than human.
Of course, in this saying, Jesus was
acknowledging that we do have enemies – that, in this dark world, there are
people who will be out to get us, to destroy our way of life and even all the
good that is in the world. He was being utterly realistic and he was speaking
to people who knew very well who their enemies were.
But it was out of that very realistic view
of the world that Jesus brought the command to love your enemies. He said that you
had to love them, not for the sake of those enemies who, realistically probably
couldn’t care less about your love for them. He said that you had to love them
for your own sake – so that you could be all that you were created to be, so
that you could be like God, in fact, who could never hate even those who hate
him.
The world is a dark place where there are
people who will hate us, threaten us and attack us. That hasn’t changed and
that is why we can and must honour the memory of those heroes who put their
lives on the line for the sake of all that is good about our country.
But at the same time, we must never forget
that God calls us to see more in the world than just that. He calls us to
understand that even those who would destroy us are humans made in God’s image.
We cannot rob them of their humanity without robbing ourselves of our own. Are
we always going to live up to what Jesus calls us to do – will we always be
able to love those enemies? I suspect not. But what Jesus asked for must ever
be before us. That is our challenge. Whatever we do, however, we must not give
into hatred and treating people as less than human. That is a very dangerous
path to go down.
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