Put away your sword
Introduction Video:
Hespeler, 9 April, 2017 © Scott
McAndless – Palm Sunday
Isaiah
51:9-11, Matthew 26:47-56, Colossians 1:13-22
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few weeks ago I watched a movie you may have
heard of. It was called “The Magnificent Seven.” It was a remake of an original
1960 western (which was itself a remake of a classic Japanese film), so I am
betting that most of you have seen this movie in some form or another at some
point in your life. That’s why I feel as if I am not going to spoil the movie
for anybody if I give you a quick recap of the plot.
The story went
like this. A very bad man got a bunch of very bad people together and they hurt
and shot and killed some innocent people in a town. A group from that town went
to get some help and found seven people (who were all magnificent) and they
came and killed the bad people in the town. Those who were left alive all lived
happily ever after.
I really
enjoyed watching it. It was a great movie. And it made me think of another
great movie I’ve seen recently. You know the one – that movie where there is
this really evil gang who do terrible violence and destruction and then the
good guys come in and put things right with lots of death and destruction. Oh,
what was the name of that movie? (John Wick) No, that’s a good one but not the
one I was thinking of. (Dredd) Yeah, that is the plot of that one too, but I
wasn’t thinking of that one either. (Avengers) No. (Batman vs. Superman) No.
(Lego Batman) Yes, that’s it.
But, you know,
now that I think about it, there are an awful lot of movies that kind of have
the same plot, aren’t there. The bad guy or the bad woman or group hurts or
threatens innocent people with violence and the good guy (or Gal Godot or team)
comes in and saves the day with more and better violence. It is what is called
a happy ending. Do you realize that if that basic plot did not exist, Hollywood
would produce about half as many movies a year as they presently do? It is just
a story that we keep telling over and over again. The characters and the
setting may change, they may throw in a few twists, but it is all just
basically the same story. Why do we do that?
Well actually,
it is something that human beings have always done. One of the things that distinguishes
us from all the other animals is that we tell stories. Telling stories is what
we do to make sense of the world and figure out where we fit into it. These
stories may not be true in the literal sense – in fact they are usually not.
There was never an actual group of seven gunslingers who saved a town in the
old American west, for example. But on another level, we keep telling them
because we see them as true in the sense that they are telling us true things
about the world and how it works. Stories of this sort are called myths.
I realize, of
course, that most of the time when modern people call some story a myth, they
simply mean that it is not true. But that is not the classic definition of a
myth. A myth is a story that is probably not literally true but that speaks of a
truth that is widely accepted.
And one of the
oldest recorded myths goes like this: there was once an evil dragon named, in
some cultures, Tiamat (though in the Bible they called her Rahab as we read
this morning). Tiamat was a monster who was only interested in bringing death,
chaos and destruction. But then a hero, called by some people Anu, came and
fought against Tiamat with all of his might. The struggle was long and hard but
eventually he defeated the monster and out of her destroyed corpse, created the
world as we know it today.
That is a myth
that human beings have been telling since before recorded history – a story of
an evil destructive monster who did violence and was destroyed by the better
violence of a “good guy.” It is, I would suggest, a story that we are still
telling today – not only because that myth is the plot of every other movie but
also because we all still seem to believe that basic premise.
After all,
when something goes wrong in this world, when some evil is done or somebody is
a victim of violence, what is our first reaction? The first thing we always say
is, we’ve got to fight back. We assume that the only way to defeat violence and
destruction is with more violence and destruction.
We have
actually seen that very thing played out in the last few days. Assad, the
President of Syria, carried out an appallingly evil attack against a town in an
area occupied by his enemies. The unspeakable violence was an attempt to
destroy his almost equally evil enemies. And then, as we all heard, the United
States responded with overwhelming violence through a targeted bombardment by 59
Tomahawk cruise missiles on an airbase. That is how we do it. Evil and
violence, we assume, can only be countered by more violence. It is what makes
the world a better place today – at least, that is what the myth promises us.
It just seems
that we have yet to come across a problem that we are not willing to solve by
shooting something, stabbing something or declaring war against it. Perhaps no
one puts this myth better or more succinctly than American National Rifle
Association when they say, “the only person who can stop a bad guy with a gun
is a good guy with a gun.”
Because the
basic assumption of this myth is that violence is the best way – maybe the only
way – to make things better in this world, it is sometimes called the myth
of redemptive violence. And I suggest to you that, at some level at least,
we believe this myth. We must believe it. Otherwise we wouldn’t cheer when the
Magnificent Seven come riding into town with their guns blazing. Otherwise we
wouldn’t always be so ready to go to war when we see evidence of evil in the
world. That is the power of a myth. It makes us believe it even when we may not
want to.
The problem
with this myth of redemptive violence is all the destruction that it causes.
When, for example, a government tries to stop the terrible violence being
planned by a group of terrorists by ordering a drone strike on the terrorist
compound, that sounds, to us, like a smart thing to do. Surely the violence of
the drone strike is the only thing that can prevent a greater evil. But it that
doesn’t always work out that way in reality. In reality, what happens is that
some people are killed – some of them with evil intentions, no doubt, but also
some who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In reality, all
the people who are killed are all connected to other people who then hate you
and probably vow to kill you in vengeance. In reality, you often only manage to
create more chaos, more hatred and more death.
There may be
cases where a better world has been created by means of violence. I will admit
that. But I suspect that more often it has quite the opposite effect. And yet
we keep on believing in the myth of redemptive violence. Why? Probably because
we think it’s the only answer that there is to what goes wrong in this world.
But what if it isn’t?
As Christians
we believe that Jesus came into this world because God loved the world so much
that he wanted to save it. Jesus came as the response to all that is wrong with
the world. There were people who seemed to recognize that about him right away.
When he arrived in Jerusalem, for example, people turned out en masse to
welcome him as the “one who comes in the
name of the Lord” – the one who would set all things right. But how do you
suppose that they thought that he was going to do that? Since they, just like
us, had lived all their lives believing the myth of redemptive violence –
believing that the only way to counter the unjust violence of the world was
with more violence – you can just imagine how they thought that he was going to
do it.
You don’t
really have to imagine it, though; you just have to read what happened when
everything finally came to a head. All week Jesus had been causing unrest in
the City of Jerusalem by stirring up the crowds and the authorities had been
trying to get rid of him but dared not make a move for fear it might provoke a
riot. But finally, on Thursday night, they caught up with him while he only had
a few followers with him in the Garden of Gethsemane. They made their move and
at least one of Jesus’ followers decided that this was the moment to set
everything right.
And how do you
set everything right? According to the myth of redemptive violence he knew
exactly what to do. He “put his hand on his sword, drew it, and struck the slave of
the high priest, cutting off his ear.” He
thought he was starting something – that his first blow he would set in motion
the events that would put everything right again. That is how it is supposed to
work according to the myth of redemptive violence. And if that had ever been
Jesus’ intention for accomplishing the work he had come to do, that would have
been the moment to do it – the spark that would have ignited the flame of
violence in order to set everything right.
But what did Jesus do? “Put your sword back into its place;”
he cried. He immediately rejected the possibility of putting things right
through violence. Not only that, but he exposed the myth for what it was: a
lie. “For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” He was not
only saying that violence doesn’t make anything better. He was saying that it
only makes things worse – that violence only leads to more violence until the
world spins completely out of control taking with it all the people you hoped
to save by resorting to violence in the first place.
Jesus makes it clear that he isn’t saying this because he has
no means of winning through violence. He has more power at his fingertips than
the world’s worst tyrant could muster: “Do
you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more
than twelve legions of angels?” It is just that Jesus knows that such an
approach can never work.
But this is not just a matter of Jesus rejecting
violence under these specific circumstances. There is something much more
important than that going on here. You see, one of the big problems in our
world is, in fact this myth of redemptive violence. Because we believe this
myth, because we don’t think that there is any other way of creating a better
world than according to the dogma of this myth, the world is caught in a web of
despair. So long as the myth of redemptive violence rules in our hearts, it
will force itself upon us and will drive us deeper and deeper into the endless
cycle of violence and hatred answering violence and evil until we have all died
by the sword.
Jesus came to
expose the myth as a lie. He did that, first of all, by always demanding a
better world – a world where the poor, the meek, the weeping and the hungry
were blessed – and yet by refusing to take up violence and extremism in order
to make it happen.
But he did
even more than that. This coming week we will have the chance to review the
story once again of how, in response to Jesus’ demand for a better world, the
world refused. The world resisted what Jesus was asking for because it was
unwilling to change. And so the world responded to Jesus in the way that it
always does to anything that threatens what it values. The world responded with
violence because it believed the myth of redemptive violence that this would
make everything better.
But Jesus, by
becoming the ultimate victim of the world’s violence, by accepting the
consequences of that violence without complaint and without condemnation,
finally proved the myth of redemptive violence to be a lie by turning it on its
head. On Good Friday, violence won and asserted its power over Christ fully and
completely. And the God turned that defeat into a victory.
That is one of
the things that we mean when we say that the death and resurrection of Jesus
changed everything. It destroyed the power of a myth that has held sway over this
world for many centuries and caused endless destruction. Jesus showed us a
better way. Now if only we could learn to live out that truth in all our
reality.
140CharacterSermon World teaches violence is the only way to
fix what’s wrong in the world. Jesus’ death & resurrection teaches that’s a
lie
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