What is it about “ Thou Shalt Not Kill!” that we don't understand?

Reflection: Liz McAlister. Kirkridge September 2004

What is it about “ Thou Shalt Not Kill!” that we don't understand? From almost its beginning to its end, the Biblical subject is violence. Why, we might ask, is biblical revelation focused on violence, with the Cross of Christ at the center? Why is Christ 's submission to human violence so necessary for us? A succinct summary of the Gospel appears in the First Letter of John: " This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in God there is no darkness at all " (1 John 1:5).

We are created in the image of God, we are capable of living in God's love. But we have continually stumbled into envy and rivalry, spoiling our attempts at love. Genesis 3 relates the story of how the serpent needles Eve with envy-desire so that she/we place ourselves in rivalry first with God and then with one another - constant rivalry, constant competition, constant comparisons, and the need to justify ourselves vis-a-vis others. As Genesis 3 shows, we need to blame others (Gen. 3:11-13) to lift ourselves above them.

Even when we achieve some union with one another, we fall short. We fall short because all our attempts at unity, if they are not rooted in God, always leave someone out. In fact over-against-ness to those left out is - all too often - the principle of unity for human communit y – a far cry from God's kindom. Then, leaving-out becomes active expulsion which – surprise, surprise - unifies the expellers. The world-view of love is that creation is abundant, there is enough for all to share. The worldview of envy/rivalry sees scarcity, exacerbates the rivalries. When Satan began playing with desires the results were: rivalry with God; blaming one another; broken and distorted relationship with each other and the earth; and rapid descent into the way of violence - one son kills the other - all elegantly summed up in the basic story of our lives apart from God. The way of violence includes the way of unholy unions - a special form of violence. We call it sacred or good violence, sanctioned to keep in check the bad violence - the violence that arises out of rivalry, greed, desire. In modern cultures based on law, good violence is the violence of police and military forces. In more ancient cultures, it was the sacred violence of ritual blood sacrifice.

We make careful distinctions, don't we, between bad violence and good violence? 'Bad' violence arises from rivalrous desire. It begins with mimetic desire among creatures, rather than the creatures following the loving desire of the Creator for the whole Creation, and it quickly descends into brother killing brother (Gen. 3-4). It is a violence with the potential to escalate into an all-against-all deluge of violence, an 'apocalyptic' crescendo of mutual destruction (see Gen. 6:11ff.).

'Good' violence, the sanctioned, even sacred, violence used to keep 'bad' violence at bay - only for a time, however, since it is always based on over-against-ness - will fall. Such righteous violence is based in the accusation of the majority against a minority of so-called 'trouble makers,' who take the blame for the mimetic violence of everyone - one brand of violence to stop the other - Satan casting out Satan . The definition of trouble maker is, of course, constantly changing.

But, akin to the man born blind in John 9, humankind, since its origin, has been blind to its idolatry around sacred/good violence. It isn't good; it isn't sacred; it is idolatry. When our idols “ command ” us to sacred violence, we fail to see our gods as the satanic powers that they are. The gods/idols can be, as they are today, things like our way of life. We've been reflecting a lot lately on the Myth of Redemptive Violence and have concluded that that is the religion in the U.S.A. today. In John 9, it is easier for Jesus to heal the man's physical blindness than it is for him to heal blindness toward sacred violence. The Pharisees deepen their blindness by performing the age-old satanic function of expelling the man ( John 9:34). " Jesus said, 'I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind'" ( John 9:39). Jesus brings judgment against them by letting them judge him and execute him in a supreme act of righteous violence.

The cross of Christ begins a process in history of revealing the sacred, sanctioned violence for the violence it is. We are supposed to continue that process. Sacred, or sanctioned, violence is unveiled as violence.

The satanic powers' hold on us won't go away easily. Their attempts at veiled sacred violence become more desperate and more lethal. The satanic powers can take advantage of the fact that people have never learned any other way to stem the tide of 'bad' violence. It is an addiction. In fact, the mechanism of sacred violence is similar to taking drugs. A drug is a poison that, given the right circumstance and precisely the right dosage, can also be a remedy. Sacred violence is violence - and violence is poisonous to us - but, we think, given the right circumstance and precisely the right dosage, it can also pass as a remedy against 'bad' violence.

The word "apocalypse" means "unveiling." What, then, is veiled which can have apocalyptic consequences? The answer is: violence . Veiled violence is violence whose religious or historical justifications still provide it with an aura of respectability and give it a moral and religious monopoly over "unofficial" violence. Unveiled, violence is apocalyptic because, shorn of its religious and historical justifications, it cannot distinguish itself from the violence it opposes. Without benefit of religious and cultural privilege , violence does what it always does: it incites more violence. The scope of violence grows while the ability of its perpetrators to reclaim religious and moral privilege diminishes. The reciprocities of violence and counter-violence spin out of control. It is no surprise that, from the outset, Christian faith offered its interpretation of the Apocalypse. From beginning to end, the biblical story is a story of our descent into violence, and of God trying to save us from our violence. So much of the responsibility for the state of endless war in this society today has to be laid at the foot of the churches which bless and sacralize it. I see such a parallel to Bonhoeffer's call for a Barmen Declaration – as necessary and as impossible today as it was it Nazi Germany

The Biblical story is a story of our descent into violence; it is the story of human idolatry. We continue to choose our way of salvation from 'bad' violence through sacred/ good violence. We persist in a blindness that stubbornly sees the satanic powers behind sacred violence as divine. We continue to choose gods who justify human violence instead of the God of Jesus Christ who calls us to live the way of nonviolence. What we fail to see is that the way out of the idolatry and violence must be a way out of both 'bad' and what passes as 'good' violence.

Nonviolence or nonexistence. M.L.K. posed this life-death alternative to us in his last Sunday sermon before he was felled by violence. Nonviolence had become the heart of King's faith. The more I study the Scriptures, the more I am convinced that nonviolence is at the heart of Jesus ' faith.

Nonviolence is at the heart of Jesus faith? "Isn't Love the broader category of Jesus ' message?" Yes, when stated positively, God's Love is the heart of the New Testament faith. Yet the New Testament letter which most clearly develops the theme that God is Love - the First Letter of John - is also careful to state the case in the negative. John is quick to add the corollary about hate: "Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars" (1 John 4:20). Even stronger: “ We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death. All who hate a brother or sister are murderers ...” (1 John 3:14-15). John is clear - God is in no way about death or violence. We should not be either. There is a good reason for John 's being so explicit about violence. He is acknowledging the fact that, in the Hebrew Scriptures, we often experience the darkness of an angry, punishing, violent God. But in Christ we come to understand that these experiences are not of God. These are experiences of idols. For God is light and in God there is no darkness at all .

John also knew that it was not enough to acknowledge our problem with violence. In fact, the deeper problem is precisely in the acknowledgment: with the help of our idols - gods who command violence - we refuse to think of our violence as violence. The gods command it, so it must be the right . (Now doesn't that sound just like George W. ?) It was a holy war, a new crusade. No wonder George W. could lie to Congress and to us with impunity. He was serving a higher power. As a self-described "messenger" of God who was "praying for strength to do God's will." “ God told me to oust Ossama Bin Laden and I did; God told me to overthrow Saddam Hussein and I did; God is telling me to fix this situation in Israel and Palestine and, if you're willing to work with me, I have this window of time in which to do it, then I need to concentrate on the election…!”

Bush relishes his role as an avenging Christian crusader who seeks — under the guidance of God — to cleanse the world of "evildoers/terrorists." Asked if he consulted the former president before ordering the invasion of Iraq , Bush replied that "he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength; there is a higher father that I appeal to."

The president conceded that he had the good sense not to "justify war based upon God" but would ask for forgiveness if he took the wrong path. It is time he found God's grace in the exercise of humility rather than plunging deeper into this madness.

Still, we are told by the nation's media and political elites that we must "stay the course," "get it right" and, in the words of the president himself, "honor the fallen." How do we honor the fallen by sending more soldiers to die in a war based on lies amply documented by insiders?

Our gods sanction our violence against our enemies. What our enemy does to us is violence; what we do to them is "justice.” When it comes to our own violence, we are in denial. With the help of our gods, we lie to ourselves. (The power of the lies) It may be my own misguided/rationalized hope, but I keep wondering when the dishonesty of the war on terrorism might shock us into moral maturity. It is so deeply rooted in us… Maybe the worst effect of the Cold War on this country was the bipolar thinking – good violence/bad violence! We believed the world was divided between virtue and evil. We operated for a generation on the assumption that the Soviets were in the grip of Satan , while we were in God's pocket. Kremlin intentions were imperialist expansionism; our own global reach was ''containment.'' We spent our treasure and our intellectual effort preparing to blow up the world and deemed it high virtue.

We knew that we and our leaders were capable of lying, but in the American story, deceptions – Watergate/Iran etc. - are exceptions which proved the rule of our goodness.

But the main moral failure doesn't consist in thinking one thing and saying another. The disorder is deeper; it is possible that our leaders are convinced of the justifications they offer. When W. broke America 's promise on the ABM treaty, that did not make us a nation of liars, he told us, but of reali sts. And, incidentally, his aspiration to become the sole super power was advanced.

The pattern is wide. Executives who want to put the numbers ''in a better light'' cook the books. Politicians who aim to tell voters what they want to hear lose any sense of truth. Religious leaders who must appear virtuous lose the capacity to recognize their humanness. The tendency toward self-deception is universal. The most damaging lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

Today's nationwide rude awakening prompts outrage at lying leaders, but that must not be our only response. During the Cold War we exempted ourselves from the moral scrutiny that could have prevented the spreading of this poison cloud. The lies of business (Madison Avenue), of government (the Missile Gap), of culture (Forever Young), and of religion (God Bless America ) were built into our system, but we could not see them as lies because of the split in our thinking. In this time of reckoning, will we again smugly divide the world between the good and the evil?

Yes, we can insist on purging public lies. But we repeat the sin if we conclude that the deception is elsewhere. ''When we talk about the contaminated moral atmosphere, it involves all of us.'' ( James Carroll – July 02)

In John 's Gospel, Jesus makes this proposition: “ You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” ( John 8:44) What is the lie? Isn't it believing that we aren't murderers? That when we kill we do so with justification? In fact, our most common reaction to this word of Jesus is something like, "I've never killed anyone!" But, in so saying, we are lying to ourselves. Alone, we might never have killed, but together - in the name of law and order - we have executed; lived under and supported governments that have gone to war; participated in communities that neglect the poor leaving them to die. But we resist recognizing our own complicity in the darkness of violence. In the unilateral move to war, the U.S. not only shred the fabric of international law, it virtually declared itself above the law. The administration tried to negotiate, country by country, an imperial exemption from prosecution in the court. This is not merely to protect Kissinger from his crimes in Chile and Indo-china, or the Reagan administration's in Central America , they carefully consulting lawyers over war crimes they planned to undertake. They DO know what they do. And they are doing it anyway. Here's their claim theologically implicit: they are not accountable to human life; they are above the law. All the talk about prosecuting Saddam Hussein in the international court of law, however legitimate, is supreme irony and projection. We'd prosecute him in a court to whose authority we refuse to submit. Virtually everything we say about them, true as it may be, can be said about ourselves. Start with inventing, developing, and using weapons of mass destruction, truly illegal under international law, and threatening or using them against human beings or making them the foundation of foreign policy for half a century. Or start with a definition of state terrorism. Whether we are talking about the UN Charter, or the 1928 or 1949 Geneva Accords (the War Powers clause of our own Constitution) this administration as much or more than previous administrations, counts itself above the law. That is a legal structure we have waved off as “irrelevant” to national security and imperial design. This is a theological pretense of divine sovereignty.

Jesus recognizes our self-delusion when he 'ups the ante' on confronting our violence in the Sermon on the Mount: " You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not murder'…But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment... You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist evil with evil.. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.... You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." (Matt. 5:21ff) These verses exhibit the core of Jesus ' life, death, and resurrection. These verses most distinguish him and his message among all the world's religions.

Jesus calls us to "Be perfect/merciful as God is perfect!" What does this say about our problems with violence? We can strive to be children of light in the spirit of nonviolence. We are called to love like God with a love that reaches out even to our enemies – which is to say, with a love that never does violence. For violence against our "enemies" is our chief justification for doing violence. If, in the cross of Jesus Christ, we see God's perfection in loving enemies - and thus in suffering violence and forgiving it - then our way to faith is living in nonviolent loving relationship with all people..

Our problem with violence, however, goes much deeper. The Christian revelation enables us to understand what it means to be human; and it helps us to recognize the sinful ways of being human, back to our origins. When John speaks of murder and lies from the beginning (John 8:44), we need to understand this as our being under compulsion to lie by creating gods in our own violent image in order to cover our tracks. I say "compulsion" because we seldom make a conscious decision to lie, nor to create violent gods who bid us to do violence. As Jesus hangs convicted of blasphemy, an offense against his persecutors' god, he prays to God, "Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing." The God of forgiveness to whom Jesus prays is a different god than the one who, in the eyes of those who put him there, justifies his hanging on the cross. In other words, we insist on worshiping gods who command us to do violence so that we can feel righteous in doing so. Thus, our problem is not simply with violence in general, but even more so with righteous violence - that is, with violence that the gods of our creation deem righteous.

We are faced with an idolatry that turns on the issue of human violence and the delusion surrounding it. For a thousand years, Jesus ' people had grown in their recognition of idolatry and in their faith in the one true God. But idolatry continues to exist deep within us - resistant to coming into the light. There is a sense in which violence always involves idolatry. Follow the blood of the innocents to the foot of the idols. For what and for whom are human beings willing to kill? Even against the “guilty,” violence involves an idolatrous and preemptive exploit of the divine prerogative. This is more than merely “god on our side.” Whether it is in the death penalty or war, the exercise of official violence presumes to know or to execute (which is to say, usurp) the judgment of God who alone holds the power of life and death.

Christians have persecuted Jews for their righteous violence against Jesus - and thereby made it clear that they/we are victim of the same sin. It has required the cross and resurrection to reveal to all of us the sin of idolatry that the cross represents: an act of violence justified by one of our violent gods (who we, of course, are deluded to think is "God!”

God suffered violence rather than retaliate. God was unwilling to intervene in the process of action and consequence in the world. God refused to abridge our freedom. God respected our choices even when they were/are catastrophic. In contrast to our violent wrath, God reveals her power as nonviolent love, that is, as love which will suffer violence rather than inflict it. And I would suggest that Gandhi and King were faithful disciples of God's power in Jesus Christ in living out what they referred to more simply as the way of "nonviolence." Nonviolence is the heart of Jesus ' faith, the faith by which he was able to endure the violence of our wrath, because it is a faith in the power of God's unconditional love, a power that manifested itself on Easter morning as the very power of Life behind Creation. It is a faith that the power of human violence can never defeat God's power of Life." Jesus Christ came to save us from our own violence, not from God's violence.

And do we ever need saving from our own violence! Images of tortured Iraqi prisoners show the disaster to which we have descended. They reveal the crisis of our paradigm of civilization. Our age was founded in the will to conquer, to dominate others and nature, almost always resorting to violence -capitalism, private accumulation of material goods, consumerism, competition, exaltation of the individual and pillaging of natural resources. We must recognize a perverse legacy: a merciless humanity divided between included and excluded, a sacked Common House and a ready death machine, capable of totally destroying the human project and of deeply affecting our life system. All seems to indicate that it has already fulfilled all its historical potentials. Without the capacity to persuade, it needs to use violence to stay alive, which aggravates its situation. If we want to assure our presence in the evolutionary process, we need another civilizing arrangement with conditions for a future and for sustainability.

In other words, we need a new direction with other guiding-stars to give meaning to our steps. There is too much suffering in history, too much blood in our paths, endless loneliness in millions who carry in their hearts the lonely cross of misunderstanding, bitterness and injustice. I speak of an ethos that includes the whole human household, where there is hospitality and where tears can be shed without shame, or can be lovingly wiped from the cheeks.

In the Christianity of the early days, compassion was synonymous with mercy, an attitude that shares another's passion; an attitude that does not want to leave the other alone and in pain. Yet we live in a country that allows millions of children to go hungry and to suffer from inadequate health care and education. We have stunningly high rates of divorce and domestic violence, abortion and addiction. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, and we're the only industrialized nation that still imposes the death penalty. We export more violence through our films, TV shows, music, and pornography than any other nation on the globe. We spend more money on our military than the eleven next highest defense-spending nations combined and have shipped our weapons all over the world—including to Saddam Hussein and many other tyrants whom we considered allies when it served our political purposes. We launched a massive war and occupation with no provocation, no evidence to support our justification for it, no long-range plan in place, and virtually no international support.

During the “Faith and Resistance” Retreat for the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Scott Langley gained access to the Unity Conference of Journalists of Color as George Bush was speaking to that gathering. When Bush began to talk about his compassionate conservatism, Scott spoke up and named it a lie: “How can you call the murder of Iraqi children compassion? How can you call lying to the press compassion? How can you call deceiving the American people compassion?” He was ultimately escorted from the hall.

It's a lie, stated ad nauseum by the Bush administration, that “we” value human life and “they” (our enemies) do not. Have those officials missed the photographs of Iraqi parents weeping for their dead and maimed children? Do they value the humanity of the prisoners they ordered soldiers to “soften up” for interrogation, the ones whom Red Cross workers complained for months were being abused? History shows that every empire eventually collapses—often not by being conquered militarily, but from its inability to sustain its own lies, pride, and moral bankruptcy. If we are truly a nation under God, we should be on our knees confessing the sins of our nation and praying for mercy. And we should be on our feet in every assembly proclaiming the nonviolent Christ . And we should be on the streets, on the picket lines, marching, resisting, embracing the consequences – even as the nuns and other prisoners of conscience are at this moment and for months and months to come. And we should be doing it for the sake of the kids, for the sake of the earth, for the sake of the truth, for God's sake, for the sake of our own humanity.