The wheel goes round and round. Does
the Sabbath mean nothing at all any longer?
In a world in which cheek turning is
becoming obsolete in the most cruel sort of way, I can’t believe I’m writing
about these things again, and again, and again, but I am. Will it ever end?
Will it ever stop?
Or are we one of those gerbil’s on a
wheel in somebody’s cage?
I wonder.
I can't believe the news today
Oh, I can't close my eyes
And make it go away
How long
How long must we sing this song
How long, how long
'Cause tonight, we can be as one
Tonight
Broken bottles under children's feet
Bodies strewn across the dead end
street
But I won't heed the battle call
It puts my back up
Puts my back up against the wall
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
U2 – Bloody Sunday
Blood came
raining down on Sunday, March 7, 1065, Six hundred marchers assembled in Selma
on Sunday, March 7, and, led by John Lewis and other SNCC and SCLC activists,
crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River en route to Montgomery.
Just short of
the bridge, they found their way blocked by Alabama State troopers and local
police who ordered them to turn around. When the protesters refused, the
officers shot teargas and waded into the crowd, beating the nonviolent
protesters with billy clubs and ultimately hospitalizing over fifty people.
Blood came raining down on Sunday,
January, 1972 in Derry, Northern Ireland. British soldiers
shot 26 unarmed civilians during a protest march against internment. Fourteen people died: thirteen were killed
outright, while the death of another man four months later was attributed to
his injuries. Many of the victims were shot while fleeing from the soldiers and
some were shot while trying to help the wounded.
Yesterday Death beat the drum slowly
again, as once again blood came raining down.
Three men were shot to
death and at least 15 other people were wounded in shootings from late
Sunday morning into the night on the West and South sides of Chicago, police
said.
An 18-year-old man was fatally shot and
a 33-year-old man was wounded in a shooting in the Austin neighborhood around
11:50 p.m., according to police. The two men were at a house party in the
5000 block of West Jackson Boulevard when they were shot.
In Baton Rouge, of course, three
policemen were shot to death and three more injured in an apparent ambush by
one shooter.
It’s time someone stepped up, spoke up,
stood up and said this must stop. Must. Stop.
In the past few years, mass shootings/deaths
have grown so quickly it’s hard to even get a mind around them. Now they’re
using trucks to kill. Now they’re killing cops. Now they, whomever they are, are dreaming up
next week’s deaths as I write.
We
live in a world that is increasingly violent, increasingly split or divided.
What
do we do in those instances when peace can’t be found no matter how much we
want it?
In his fascinating essay “Why I Am Not a Pacifist,” C. S.
Lewis considers Jesus’s injunction regarding “turning the other cheek,” which
he believes cannot be intended to rule out protecting others. “Does anyone
suppose,” he asks, “that our Lord’s hearers understood him to mean that if a
homicidal maniac, attempting to murder a third party, tried to knock me out of
the way, I must stand aside and let him get his victim?”
If
Jesus is calling for absolute nonviolence based on Matthew 5:38–39, then we
would be under obligation to turn the cheek of a third party. Lewis prefers to
accept the plain reading of this text.
Jesus’s
audience consisted of “private people in a disarmed nation,” and “war was not
what they would have been thinking of” by any stretch of the imagination. (2)
Lewis’s understanding proceeds on a plain reading of the text.
In
the end, the Christian is called to resist evil when and where it is
possible, as saints past and present always have understood. And the apostle
Paul states in no uncertain terms that the magistrate exists precisely for this
divinely instituted function:
Let
it begin before Sunday, bloody Sunday, comes back next week.
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