There is a macabre sort of irony in the juxtaposition of what many Western Christians are hearing in church these weeks with the war that is brewing from Nigeria and the Lake Chad region to Libya, Egypt, Israel-Palestine, Syria-Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan: for as those following the ‘semi-continuous’ Old Testament track of the Revised Common Lectionary reel their way through the patriarchal and pre-monarchical narratives this summer, hearing reference after reference to the Lord’s promises to give the land of Cana‘an to the Israelites and the special status of the descendants of Jacob, the modern State of Israel wages war on the people of Palestine, upon whose land it has superimposed itself. At the same time, not far away, Muslim fundamentalists have ejected the remnants of one of the most ancient Christian communites from their homeland on pain of death. Almost all of us in the United States, and many who dwell in other colonies and empires past and present, occupy stolen land, and most of us continue to benefit from the legacy of slavery. Supposedly Christian and Muslim and Jewish extremists mirror one another almost humorously: siblings who cannot stand one another yet whose family resemblance is all too obvious.

Concepts like ‘promise’, ‘chosenness’, ‘manifest destiny’, ‘true religion’, along with flight from or reaction to very real persecution on account of (and in the name of) religion, have been used in part to justify conquest and colonization of North America and South Africa as well as the Middle East, in all of which places (among many others) massive subjugation of native peoples or the legacy thereof – sometimes boiling over into outright slaughter – continues to this day. This kind of colonialist rhetoric, often proclaimed as if it will echo from one end of an uninhabited land to another, instead falls flat when it, along with the weapons wielded in its behalf, meets the flesh and blood of native peoples. And it haunts, or mocks, the interpretation of scripture and the practice of religion in any realm that acts, or has acted, as an oppressor.

How, then, can people of faith read ‘sacred’ texts that seem to call for conquest, forced conversion, ethnic cleansing? Can we come to terms with – repent of – legacies of unspeakably barbaric violence perpetrated by all our races and religions? Can people of deeply held belief nevertheless respect the deeply held beliefs of those around them, those of one identity appreciate the richness of others? Can we find in common the way to reconciliation and union with the divine within, among, around, and beyond us that the divine incarnations and great sages of many traditions have embodied and taught? Can we see ‘chosenness’ or ‘election’ as a call not to conquest but to service, not to correctness but to compassion? Can we see the particularity of spiritual revelation in certain times and places not as a sign of superiority but as an affirmation of the goodness – the holiness – of all people(s) and land(s)?

I cannot tell Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or anyone else how to read their scriptures. I can say that the most meaningful Christian solution to reading the violent narratives of the conquest of Cana‘an as well as the ‘imprecatory’ Psalms has been to see them as an allegory for resistance to evil in oneself or malign spiritual powers in the world. The contemplative Christian tradition understands the ‘Promised Land’ as the place of communion with the divine, which is promised, particularly in the Psalms, to anyone who will seek it.

On the other hand, though the Lord has no need to ‘send’ war or plague or famine, as we seem quite capable of bringing those upon ourselves, I wonder whether too ‘spiritualized’ an approach to reading apocalyptic will prove to be a misapprehension and whether indeed only those who heed the call to compassion and communion will be able to survive the sort of disaster which our prophets foresee all too well, to claim the vision they have glimpsed – through the smoke of ruin and through the veils attempting to ensure ethno-religious purity – in which all nations stream to the light of the Lord, where all are counted as citizens of heaven, where wolf and lamb, adder and toddler, coexist peacefully, weapons become tools of cultivation, and war is thrown out of the curriculum.

And seeing we be all ordained to be citizens of the one everlasting city, let us begin to enter into that way here already by mutual love, which may bring us right forth thither.

     the conclusion of a prayer ‘for those who wish us ill’

         by Ludovicus Vives (tr. John Bradford)
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