Matthew 3:1-12
Isaiah 11:1-10
In 1995, the world marked the Fiftieth Anniversary of the end of World War II, a conflict that raged from 1939 to 1945.
There were events marking V-E Day, the final defeat of the German Fascist regime by anti-Fascist Allied Forces, and V-J Day, the final defeat of Japan’s brutal colonizing forces, by the equally colonialist Allied Forces. The Japanese surrender only came after atomic bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a catastrophic declaration of humanity’s capacity for self-destruction.
Yet, even as the world marked that solemn anniversary, there was violent conflict in Europe. Ethnic battles in the former Yugoslavia included more crimes against humanity, including the Srebrenica Massacre that July, when nationalist Serbian forces slaughtered more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.
In the fifty years that had followed the Second Word War, United States forces fought three “hot” wars, the Korean War, which ended in a stalemate, the Vietnam War, which we lost decisively, and the brief Gulf War, restoring a brutal monarchy.
It felt good, in that context, to reminisce about a “good war,” where we were the “good guys” and actually won, even if that required a bit of selective memory.
An entire World War history II industry followed, books and television series and group tours. Tom Brokaw, a national news anchor, wrote a bestselling book profiling those who came of age during the war, titled “The Greatest Generation,” a term coined decades earlier by World War II General James Van Fleet. Every other generation was apparently not quite so great.
“Band of Brothers,” a hit mini-series profiling a single airborne company, was followed by “The Pacific,” focusing on Marine Corps campaigns against Japan, and more recently, “Masters of the Air,” covering Army Air Corps bombing missions over Europe. The effort to focus on this distant “good war” continued to play out as our post-9/11 wars found us in yet another quagmire, an Afghanistan that has chewed up one foreign power after another, and in an unnecessary and unjustified war in Iraq, where we destabilized an entire region, leading to terrorism and yet more genocide. Along the way, we became the same sort of war criminals we vowed to pursue rather than the moral center we so arrogantly claimed.
The “good war” narrative with its necessary adjunct of national unity is a lie. More than half of those who served in the American military during the Second World War were drafted, and the almost 50,000 who deserted were largely part of a sub-group, men who were drafted and sent into combat. We can’t ignore the military’s ability to manufacture cohesion and consensus, or at least a camaraderie of survival. We also cannot ignore the terror and trauma.
There were other voices. In his 1984 work of oral history titled “The Good War,” Studs Terkel includes the voice of Dellie Hahne, who said:
“World War Two being called a good war is a horrible thing… If they had said to me, Look… we’ll all get our arms and legs blown off but it has to be done, I’d understand. If they didn’t hand me all this shit with the uniforms and the girls in their pompadours dancing at the USO and all those songs – ‘There’ll Be Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover’ – bullshit!…
Maybe you have to get people to fight a war, maybe you have to lie to them.”
Hahne, who lost a brother in a training accident before he ever saw combat, may well have been right.
Today, we still reminisce about the Second World War, even as our American despot charges toward yet another petroleum war with lies and misinformation, imaginary weapons of mass destruction replaced by Trump with imaginary narcotics, even as he pardons prominent narco-traffickers. His racist tirade against Somali-Americans certainly reminds us that one of the first steps in white-washing violence is to turn your enemy into an “other,” an object.
And here we are, with our Advent Two theme of peace. About that…
Advances in science and historical research mean we know way more about the time of Jesus than they did a thousand years ago, yet we know far less than we would like.
Many of the stories we have told ourselves about the cultural context of Galilee and Judea are questionable if not altogether wrong.
We’ve been taught that there was widespread messianic expectation among the Jewish people, though there is no good evidence that such a belief was common.
We’ve been told that there was a popular movement that advocated for violent resistance to Roman rule, though that is far from proven.
When such a movement did develop, more than thirty years after Rome executed Jesus, the result was the First Jewish War. Initial victories by the armed Jewish resistance were followed by a Roman mobilization that crushed the rebellion and destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Temple. The Arch of Titus, still standing in Rome, depicts the spoils of that war, the Romans carrying a Temple menorah through their capitol.
Did Jesus predict this war with Rome when he declared that the Temple would be destroyed? He never advocated violence, engaged in only one disruptive act of civil disobedience, and did not resist when he was arrested by the religious police.
That does not make him passive, which seems to me an equally troubling misreading, one that promotes the interest of those who use violence and the threat of violence for power. There are many forms of active resistance that do not involve intentionally killing other humans.
Would we still be talking about Jesus if he’d led a mob into Jerusalem, then died in combat? Would his followers have experienced him as still present to them in ways they did not completely understand if he and most of his movement had been mowed down by Roman cavalry?
There is no question that Isaiah’s peaceable kingdom, the wolf and the lamb, is sweet nonsense. Wolves evolved as carnivores, their teeth designed to tear and rip, not grind fields of grass, and evolution, creation understood through the lens of science, is every bit as charged with holiness as the mythic interpretations of a pre-scientific past. Even herbivore’s compete for space and mates in the dance of natural selection.
But human cruelty appears to have little evolutionary advantage. It is all too often based on things we have constructed, race, and religion, and though tribes still represent useful social groups of a size we can manage, they must always remain porous and provision, for they do not represent a messy and miraculous creation that defies neat boxes.
If Jesus, the story of Jesus that we are still talking about almost two thousand years later, if that story is touched with something mysterious and powerful, a light we call holy, that we might name as God, then it is worth noting that it is not a tale of triumphant and righteous violence, not human violence, not divine violence. It is the story of triumphant love, the story of the victim of violence as the righteous one.
The prophets imagine a realm ruled by justice, not the retributive justice that comes to us so naturally, but restorative justice, the justice of the father welcoming back the prodigal son, of the shepherd searching for one lost sheep.
Certainly some suffer the natural consequences of their own disordered behavior, but the holy is always inviting, always offering transformation to the sin-sick soul. I do not believe an egotistical “god” punishes. That’s us projecting our pettiness onto the divine. I do believe that consequences are part of the process, and that the process is grounded in the Holy Mystery I choose to call God.
I do not pretend to have all the answers. Surely Hitler and his cult needed to be stopped, as did Osama Bin Laden at the start of this century. Should the Allies have bombed the train tracks leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau once they knew the evil of that place? I don’t know. But there is much I do know about that war, from the monumental cost of bad intent and bad leadership by Churchill, Montgomery, and MacArthur to the Katyn Massacre of more than 22,000 Polish military leaders, academics, and professionals by Soviet forces on orders from our ally, Joseph Stalin. So no, definitely not a “good war.”
It is my opinion that no such thing exists.
If we take only one story from the gospels as we consider peace, let it be this: They asked him what was the greatest commandment. He answers, “Love God above all things, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.” They continued: “But who is my neighbor?” He responded with the story of a man who was mugged and left in the ditch, the people who wanted to be seen as religious who walked by, and the man who was a hated “other” who actually helped.
Who is your neighbor? Everyone. The Afghan and Somali immigrants who have followed the law and now face terror from Neo-Nazi extra-judicial police. The parent going without food trying to keep a child alive in Gaza. The widower trying to find anything to burn to keep warm in Ukraine. The addict in a squat here in Elmira who doesn’t love himself enough to believe he can get clean.
Hard stuff, this religion of ours. Hard, but incredibly simple. Love. Everything else will follow.
Amen.