Sunday August 15, 2010 | Greg Boyd
While he was still speaking a crowd came up, and the man who was called Judas, one of the Twelve, was leading them. He approached Jesus to kiss him, but Jesus asked him, “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?"
When Jesus' followers saw what was going to happen, they said, “Lord, should we strike with our swords?” And one of them struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his right ear.
But Jesus answered, “No more of this!” And he touched the man's ear and healed him.
Then Jesus said to the chief priests, the officers of the temple guard, and the elders, who had come for him, “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come with swords and clubs? Every day I was with you in the temple courts, and you did not lay a hand on me. But this is your hour—when darkness reigns."
When we experience the peace of God, it frees us from fear and the temptation to take matters into our own hands.
Read the passages listed in the key scriptures for this week. These are the texts Greg referred to as he laid out three aspects of our fallen condition. As you read these texts, consider this question: “Why is the command to love enemies and refuse to participate in violence so rarely preached and practiced?”
We don’t trust God:
By asking for a human king, the Israelites demonstrated that they didn’t trust God to be their king. When we put human beings in charge of our nations we are doing the same thing that Israel did.
We take matters into our own hands:
Inevitably, once we stop trusting God to have a plan for the good of all creation we need an alternate plan. And we are quick to create our own. But since we don’t have all of the information God has (and we couldn’t possibly process it if we did!) we are bound to fail to act for the good of all creation. Our actions consistently have consequences that we didn’t anticipate or intend. One example Greg gave of this was the how the Crusades of the Middle Ages helped create entire cultures of people that identify Christianity with anti-Muslim violence. Another example that Greg cited are the “Christians” who commemorated 9/11 by burning copies of the Quran. This too will have unintended consequences like helping turn moderate Muslims into terrorists who will in turn kill more US citizens. Things do not go well when we take matters into our own hands.
We fear:
On some level, we know that the above two things are true. We know we are not competent to run the world ourselves. Because we don’t trust God and we take things into our own hands we are bound to live in fear.