Violence – 9 August 2019

Wars and fights among you, where do they come from?  Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?  You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder.  And you covet something and cannot obtain it, so you engage in disputes and conflicts. (James 4: 1-2)

Bryan Jackson’s strange book on Warkworth: Incidents, Accidents and Tragedies, opens with an account of the apparently de facto wife of the local medical practitioner, Dr Edwin Theophilus Jesse Ick-Hewins, horse-whipping the local pharmacist, J Charles Cadman, who she thought had maligned her.  Mr Cadman’s allegations would scarcely raise an eyebrow today.  However this was 1911, and while Mrs Ick-Hewins felt insulted, Mr Cadman was publicly wounded and humiliated – I trust he had suitable liniments and soothing salves in his pharmacy shop.

Our subject is violence, and the notion that violence is ever an appropriate or sensible response to dispute.  The doctor’s wife thought it was -- and she then presumably felt better.  Violence is pandemic.  I don’t know that there has ever been a peaceful human society.  We have violence against children in Syria, in Yemen, and in many other places.  Violence brings towns and cities to rubble, destroys crops and livelihoods, irreplaceable libraries and sacred shrines.  Doctors and others working to relieve suffering become subject to violence, as also do journalists seeking out the truth. We have “domestic” violence in many homes, and again children suffer.  Many factors make violence almost a reflex reaction, mindless and blind.  Words are used to do violence, and this is now facilitated by powerful tools such as Twitter and cell-phone texting, driving some to suicide. 

The writer of the James Epistle says violence comes from our conflicting desires.  The KJV translates it the lusts which war in your members, but it means simply desires… life frustrates me, I am not getting what I want, I can’t handle what I do get, I’m afraid, angry, out of options, I do what I don’t want to do…  On the much wider social and international scales there is always the serious risk that competing wishes or demands default to violence.  There must be tens of thousands of battered Toyota utes rushing around the Middle East with machine guns mounted on the back and excited young men dedicated to violence, knowing little else.

Jesus teaches otherwise, and the Spirit of the risen Christ, when we make space for this, attacks the roots of violence in us.  One day it dawns on us that even our hidden violent thoughts, malevolence, and what in German is called Schadenfreude – pleasure at the suffering of others – is becoming attenuated within us and we don’t want to live that way or have those reactions.  The Spirit is calming our conflicts, opening pathways of peace… it develops day by day, year by year, as we make space in prayer and in our hearts.  Yes, there are situations in which violent people have to be stopped… and that may mean physically and with retaliatory violence.  We hate it – it’s part of our bent world.  It is still a fact that we are people of peace and reconciliation, trust and understanding, in company with Jesus.