Readings:
Wisdom 2:12-22; Psalm 34; John 7:1-30

[The godless say to themselves, with their misguided reasoning,] ‘Let us lie in wait for the virtuous man, since he annoys us and opposes our way of life… the very sight of him weighs our spirits down… Let us test him with cruelty and with torture, and thus explore this gentleness of his and put his endurance to the proof. Let us condemn him to a shameful death since he will be looked after-we have his word for it.‘
Wisdom 2:12, 14, 19, 20

After this Jesus stayed in Galilee: he could not stay in Judaea, because the Jews were out to kill him.
John 7:1

Why did Jesus incur such unpopularity that his own people were out to kill him? The Gospels present him as most attractive and compassionate. Only the very evil, we think, could possibly hate such a man. The Jews are presented as wanting to kill him, so the Jews must be malicious, a thoroughly illogical conclusion, but one which has infected Christian consciousness and brought misery to generations of Jews, labelled by Christians as ‘Christ killers’. It was Christians themselves who perpetrated the very evils of which they accuse the Jewish people. Jesus identified himself with every human being in his description of the Final Judgment, ‘in so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me’ (Matthew 25:40). Our relationship to God is expressed in our relationship to one another. Whatever we do to the other, we are also doing to God. Jesus is not crucified by the Jews: he is crucified by any of us whenever we violate another human being.

There is a latent violence, a desire to destroy, in all of us. Violence, once unleashed, is like fire, devouring and destroying everything it encounters. Many of the taboos and strange customs of ancient societies, like the Jewish scapegoat, symbolically laden with Israel’s sins and driven into the desert to be destroyed, are attempts to contain and limit the danger of raging violence. The Greek historian, Thucydides, wrote that the first casualty in war is truth, for in war vicious and cruel killing becomes virtue. We have seen the horrors of unleashed violence in our century. We all deplore it, throw up our hands in horror, and then proceed Ito restore law and order by more violence. Of its nature, violence is imitative and contagious. Those who counter violence by violence are infected by the violence they deplore and add to it. The 1914-18 war was to be the war to end all wars. The armed violence ended on Armistice Day 1918, but the seeds of violence remained in human hearts and erupted again in 1939. Since the end of the Second World War in 1945, there have been over 200 wars, mostly in Third World countries, where the superpowers continued their conflict. Now that the Communist block has collapsed and the violence of a totalitarian regime has been broken, ancient animosities within the Communist block have revived and new violence threatens.

Every conflict in which our own country is engaged is always justified by the State and, if not fully endorsed, neither is it condemned by Church authorities. Any who question our national rectitude, or our need to preserve peace by violent means, are immediately pilloried. The American, Dorothy Day, once asked of nuclear deterrence, ‘Is there a difference between throwing innocent people into ovens and throwing ovens at innocent people?’ All political parties and most church leaders believe it is legitimate to threaten to throw ovens at innocent people. To hold a contrary opinion is considered politically disreputable and a sign of unfitness to govern. It is of the nature of evil, as the Wisdom reading states, so to corrupt the mind that what is good and creative is considered dangerous and destructive.

The seeds of violence are in our own minds and hearts, nurtured by every form of prejudice, strengthened and sustained by our fears, and they infect every aspect of our lives, turning even our religious beliefs into instruments of violence.

Prayer
O God, eradicate from our minds and hearts the hidden roots of violence and destruction. Infect our minds and hearts with the gentleness of your Son, so that we may learn to counter violence with blessing, hatred with love, and cruelty with kindness. We ask you this through Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Amen.