Readings: 1Kings 18:36-40; Matthew 5:43-48; Matthew 26: 47-52; `Arms and the Man`
From Afghanistan to Timbuktu, from Bali to Baghdad, the suicide bombing that Ashley has dramatised for us this morning is a common occurrence. What we have seen portrayed is almost a weekly event in Iraq and Pakistan.

What do we make of it? How do we react to it? For some it is simply shock-horror – and there is no doubt that it is both shocking and horrible. But for me it goes much further than that. In Ashley`s dramatisation there is an elephant in the room, something that no-one talks about but is of huge importance. Indeed there are two elephants in the room. One is the religious nature of the event. The other is the central position of violence within our world. What I would like to do this morning is to deal with the elephants in the room – religion and violence.

The first is the religious nature of the event of suicide bombing. It is based on the belief, the presupposition, that there is some kind of heaven to which we go when we die, a place where we will meet our loved ones once again. This is a dominant theme in many religions – not the least the Christian religion. The bible and our hymn book are full of it! Indeed, to go to heaven after death is what salvation is about for millions of Christians and Muslims.

The point I am making is it is religious belief that so often drives suicide bombing and violence, the belief that the violent act they are about to commit will be rewarded in heaven. Such a view presupposes a God who approves of violence and it presupposes life after death. Here lies the rationale of suicide bombing.

Don`t let anyone ever tell you that a person`s religious beliefs and ideas aren`t important. A person`s theology (and I use that word in its broadest sense) is what drives a person. Martin Luther pointed this up in his words, `That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is really your God.` What drives a person is their God. The issue is not so much whether you have faith but what you have faith in. This is why so much emphasis is placed on idolatry within the Jewish story. What is the nature of the God you worship? To ignore the religious beliefs of a person, to ignore that which drives them, is a recipe for disaster and importantly so as far as suicide bombing is concerned. I am reminded of John Dominic Crossan`s words, `I believe that suicidal religious terrorism is the most dangerous force in the world today because it alone can move from homicide to genocide to cosmocide in the serene confidence that a better world awaits elsewhere`. Suicide bombing is the most dangerous force in the world because it is based on going to some kind of heaven when we die. This I do not believe. I received a letter the other day from a woman who said that she was agnostic about life after death and that it was irrelevant to her faith. My response was `Amen to that`. Life after death is of no significance to me also.(1) I am prepared to concede that no–one really knows what happens after death but the existence of some kind of parallel world where we will meet again is non-sense as far as I am concerned. This is the only world we have and in it we live and die. From star dust we come and to star dust we return. Ours is an elemental journey. For eighty years or so we are part of the elemental evolutionary thrust towards fullness of life – a fullness that I see portrayed in Jesus of Nazareth.

I am conscious, of course, that not everyone here this morning sees it this way. There is a wide range of belief in the Christian faith just as there is in the Muslim faith. There are Christian fundamentalists and Muslim fundamentalists and to suggest that all Muslims believe in suicide bombing is ridiculous. You have probably gathered that I see fundamentalists, Christian and Muslim both, as a menace to the welfare of the world.

What I am asserting this morning is that religious presuppositions lie at the heart of suicide bombing and much of the violence in the world, and that we need to recognise this. It is an elephant in the room. Bad theology lies at the heart of many of our problems.

The second elephant in the room is the central position of violence in our society. Violence is endemic in our world. As Walter Wink pointed out over twenty years ago, violence is the religion, the spirituality, of our world - he referred to it in terms of `the myth of redemptive violence.` Violence today is seen to be of the nature of things. It is seen as inevitable. It is what works. The idea of redemptive violence is accepted by Liberal and Labour alike. Right and wrong hardly enter the picture. Everything depends on winning.

What it is important to see is that violence is not only the way other people, other nations and other religions operate. Violence is not only the way terrorists operate. It is the way we operate. Indeed it can be argued that the greatest act of violence the world has ever seen was committed by a Christian country: the deliberate and intentional obliteration of a non military target, the city of Hiroshima. I disagree. The worst example of violence the world has ever seen was the destruction of Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima. The Nagasaki bomb killed 80,000 people outright and several hundred thousand by a lingering death due to radiation. The bombing of Nagasaki deserves the title of the world`s worst violence because it was done after witnessing the devastation of Hiroshima. It was committed by a nation that sent its troops off to war with the words `And may God bless America` and with the plane that took the bomb being blessed by the Chaplain of the squadron.
The point I am making is that violence is the operating principle of the world today. The worthship of violence, the worship of violence, is part and parcel, is integral to our world and this, more often than not, is based on the idea of a violent God or a God who approves of violence.

And into this world comes Jesus of Nazareth, the non violent Jesus of Nazareth speaking of a loving God and loving one`s enemies, and ending up living it out on a cross and opening up the possibility of a new humanity through which love can transform history. The fact that he ended up on a cross has nothing to do with a violent God demanding a sacrifice for the sins of the world. That is a self centred heresy that has bedevilled our world for centuries. The cross is non violence personified and deified, non violence in the face of terrible violence.

For me, there is no question that Jesus was non violent. For me this is a given and the attempts to present the so called cleansing of the Temple as violent are laughable and depend on a complete misreading and ignorance of the scripture passage. The so called `whip` relates only to the driving of the animals from the Temple grounds in much the same way as the drover cracks a stock whip. The Temple incident was, like the entry into Jerusalem, a `demonstration` which pointed up how the worship of God had been prostituted. It was no more violent than when Margaret and I occupied the office of Kim Beazley at the beginning of the Gulf War. We sure messed up his day but in no way could it be described as violent. Jesus was non violent and anyone who suggests otherwise hasn`t read the gospels.

Let me be very clear, however, that Jesus was against both violence and passivity. He engaged in active non violence. He `set his face towards Jerusalem`. He went to Jerusalem knowing full well the result of confronting the Roman and Jewish authorities. In Galilee he lived next to the town of Sepphoris which rebelled against Rome and had its streets lined with thousands of crosses. Crucifixion was not uncommon in those days. It was the form of capital punishment for enemies of the Rome. Jesus went to Jerusalem knowing full well the likely result. He was actively non violent.

How come then that that the Christian faith has become identified with violence of the most horrific kind - both in the past and in the present? It was very different in the first few centuries of the Christian faith. Christianity was non violent and Christians did not serve in the armies of those days. It would have been in contradiction of their faith. In the fourth century two things happened. The Emperor Constantine won the Battle of Milvian Bridge by adorning his shields with the cross and decided that this was great and Christianity would be the State religion. At the same time St Augustine came up with what later came to be known as the `just war` – that `Christians had a loving obligation to use violence to defend the innocent against evil`. The whole scene changed and led to Christians becoming known as amongst the most warlike and violent people on earth. The church and so called Christian soldiers marching off to war really lost the plot.

George Bernard Shaw was the one who highlighted this for me. I quote him to show that I am not anti American as some suggest. I am anti violence.

`. . . the English are a race apart. No Englishman is too low to have scruples: no Englishman is high enough to be free from their tyranny. But every Englishman is born with a certain miraculous power that makes him master of the world. When he wants a thing, he never tells himself that he wants it. He waits patiently until there comes into his mind, no one knows how, a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who have got the thing he wants. Then he becomes irresistible. Like the aristocrat, he does what pleases him and grabs what he wants: like the shopkeeper, he pursues his purpose with the industry and steadfastness that come from strong religious conviction and deep sense of moral responsibility.

He is never at a loss for an effective moral attitude. As the great champion of freedom and national independence, he conquers and annexes half the world, and calls it Colonization. When he wants a new market for his adulterated Manchester goods, he sends a missionary to teach the natives the gospel of peace. The natives kill the missionary: he flies to arms in defence of Christianity; fights for it; conquers for it; and takes the market as a reward from heaven.

In defence of his island shores, he puts a chaplain on board his ship; nails a flag with a cross on it to his top-gallant mast; and sails to the ends of the earth, sinking, burning and destroying all who dispute the empire of the seas with him.

. . . There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles; he bullies you on manly principles; he supports his king on loyal principles, and cuts off his king`s head on republican principles. His watchword is always duty; and he never forgets that the nation which lets its duty get on the opposite side to its interest is lost.`

George Bernard Shaw was writing of the eighteenth century but it is much the same today. The Church and so the called Christian nations have lost the plot as far as violence is concerned. Notwithstanding the village of Ben Tre and destroying it to save it, you do not love your enemies by destroying them. The Church of today with respect to violence bears no resemblance to the Church of the first centuries. As Walter Wink so devastatingly puts it, `The removal of non violence from the gospel blasted the keystone from the arch and Christianity collapsed into a religion of personal salvation in an after life.` We indeed `live by the sword`.

Jesus on the other hand, as we heard in our scripture, speaks of loving one`s enemies. The word love in the scriptures is not a warm fuzzy feeling towards another. That may be Hollywood`s definition. It is not the biblical definition. Love is the scriptures means `unconditional goodwill`. Love in the scriptures is when another person`s welfare means more than your own. As Christina Rossetti puts it in her hymn: `Love is the key of life. Of all Christ is, of all he said, love is the key` (2)

What then is involved in `loving one`s enemy`? Love is the ability to get inside another person`s skin, to feel as another feels, to hear as another hears and to see as another sees. To live inside another`s skin is what love is about - and it is what our faith is about. Our faith is that love lies at the heart of life, that love is the name of the game for the human race and that there can never be really be peace and joy for any until there is peace and joy for all.

A good example of `getting into another`s skin` comes from Cloud Street, the novel by Tim Winton. Constable Quick is talking to his wife after a day when he had retrieved the body of Eric Cooke`s son from the river in a drowning accident.

`We all turn into the same thing, don`t we? Memories, shadows, worries, dreams. We all join up somewhere in the end.`

`What are you talking about?`

`The gaols are full of blokes we`d swear are different to us. Only difference is, they did things you and me just thought about.`

`That`s still a big difference`, said Rose.

`Maybe. A second`s difference.`

`What`s happened?`

`I pulled a drowned kid out of the river today. You wouldn`t believe this, but it just happened to be his kid.`

`Whose?`

`The Monster`.

`Geez.`

`I`ve pulled a kid out of the river before, Rose. When I was eleven years old. My own brother. I know how it feels. I know how that poor bastard feels. And I got to thinkin` about my childhood, my life. I did a lot of feelin` sorry for myself, those years. I used to see the saddest things, think about the saddest, saddest things. And those things put dents in me, you know. I could`ve turned out angry and cold like him. I can see how that evil little bugger might`ve just . . . turned, like a pot of milk.`

`So you`ve given away the old good and evil?` asked Rose, amazed at all this rare talk from Quick.

`No. No. But it`s not us and them anymore. It`s us and us and us. It`s always us. That`s what they never tell you. Geez, Rose, . . . there`s no monsters, only people like us.`

Empathy is what love is about and there is a fascinating area of research starting to emerge in the neurological world that there is within much of life what might be called `an empathic instinct`. This is not to deny genetic influence, nature red in tooth and claw, the selfish gene and so on - but it`s not quite as simple as Dawkins and Co would suggest. Indeed, `nature red in tooth and claw` is what is simplistic! What is being suggested by an increasing number of researchers is that we are not selfish creatures competing for survival at any cost but that our evolutionary wiring includes an empathic element whereby we feel how another is feeling and that this is the basis of us being social beings.

I have neither the time nor the ability to outline the science of mirror neurons how, when we see another suffering, we suffer in solidarity, but it rings so many bells for me. For example, it may offer an explanation for autism`s inability to read another`s intentions and feelings. This could well be as a partial breakdown in the mirror neurons of the brain. Psychopaths, those who are unable to experience another`s feelings, would be then a total breakdown. Simon Baron Cohen suggests that the empathy element is not an on/off light switch but is more like a dimmer switch - a dimmer switch that can be moved - and that it isn`t simply a matter of genetics determining our lives. I find such ideas a welcome relief to the scientific determinists with their chant of que sera sera and whom I invariably find to be obsessive and unattractive people.

Charles Darwin who in his later years spent much time in observing the social nature of creatures, wrote at one point, `as soon as this virtue is honoured and practiced by some few of us it spreads through instruction and example to the young and eventually becomes incorporated in public opinion.` (3)

This empathic impulse also explains so much of what I have experienced over the years. I think for example of a nineteen year old American soldier I met when the troops rolled into Baghdad and who sought out the `old git` who stood there with a large sign saying `War is Terrorism`. He poured out to me how he was at a check point and had been ordered to open fire on a car that did not stop. He did so and had to pull out of the car the bloodied bodies of a mother and her four children. He said he had not slept a wink since that day and was on drugs to keep him going. What happened to him I have no idea. I suspect that like so many other veterans he took his own life. More veterans have committed suicide than there were American soldiers killed in the war. They are terrible figures and point up the fact that notwithstanding the dehumanising training of the army it takes a lot to over ride our empathic wiring.

The idea of empathic response mechanism also offers a context for the advancement in women`s and black rights. The boundaries of race and sex are thank God being demolished and in the last 50 years or so we have seen change of huge proportions. There is still a long way to go but we are on the way. It also for me reinforces the idea of Jesus as the man from God`s tomorrow: `homo empathicus`. `Love one another as I have loved you. Love God and love your neighbour as yourself. Love your enemies,` Bruce Sanguine expresses it well: `the intelligence, the compassion and empathy exhibited by Jesus represents the heart of reality . . . he is where the evolutionary trajectory is headed - the future, now. He defines human nature.` (4) What Sanguine is saying is that Jesus embodies ahead of time what is real. Ted Peters says much the same thing: `In Jesus we see life articulated ahead of time . . . It is new life in the midst of old life`. But of all those I have read and met it is Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer whom I find so confronting. I met him briefly at midday prayers at the Church of the Saviour in Washington DC and his words and ideas continue to haunt and inspire me. If you think I`m hard on fundamentalism you haven`t met Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer! He sees our basic problem as thinking of God as violent and is very critical of the traditional atonement theories which present the cross as meeting the needs of a violent God. `As long as we promote violent images of God, then the non violence of Jesus will be rejected and ignored . . . I embrace the non violence of Jesus as a revelation of a non violent God . . .To see God as violent cuts us off from the central challenge posed by Jesus to his world and our own, namely, the need to revision the meaning and modes of power, including God`s power` . . .The important task for Christianity and Christians is to allow Jesus and the God he reveals back into our collective and individual lives` (5)

And that about sums it up - words to live by: `The important task for Christianity and Christians is to allow Jesus and the God he reveals back into our collective and individual lives.`

Those wishing to read further on empathic response could do worse than reading Jeremy Rifkin`s `The Empathic Civilsation`. If a 600 page book is too daunting have a look at Rifkins RSA and addresses on the Web.

Notes
(1) Many of the early Christians also did not believe in life after death. The gospel of Thomas, unearthed in 1945, dates back to the first centuries and breaks with the idea of an afterlife as presented in the New Testament gospels. The Gospel of Thomas represents the teaching of early Christian communities who called themselves `Gnostics` – from the Greek `to know`. The Gnostics saw Jesus as a fully developed and self aware human being with some scholars drawing parallels with Buddhist teaching. The Gospel of Thomas has no miracles, virgin birth or bodily resurrection. A good theological friend of mine (let the reader decide whether the good refers to my friend or his theology) refers to me as `an old Gnostic` – which I deny, notwithstanding similar views on the virgin birth, bodily resurrection and the after-life. I am averse to labels and am a person of the twenty first and not the first century.

(2) Whenever I sing this song I end up with a grin on my face as I remember a room in Amsterdam reached by one of those narrow winding staircase so loved by the Dutch. I had struggled up the staircase with 3 bags - and found that the key didn`t work. With some degree of exasperation I acquainted the owner of this by sign language. He then took me to the door, inserted the key and opened it with the words `With love! With love!` - and I had indelibly imprinted on my mind that love is the way to open the door of life.

(3) quoted `The Empathic Civilisation` Jeremy Rifkin p91

(4) `The Advance of Love` p5

(5) `Jesus against Christianity` p288, 299, 353