How Can We Stop The Killing?

By

Eldridge E. Fleming, Ph.D.

New Hope Presbyterian Church

Biggersville (Rienzi, Mississippi)

March 28, 1999 -- Palm Sunday

Scripture:

Our Old Testament reading comes from Isaiah 50:4-9a. This is one of those sections from that part that’s called the suffering servant poems.

The letter to the Philippians is our Epistle reading for the morning -- 2:5-11.

The gospel reading comes from Matthew 27:11-54. This is a lengthy passage, and if you can and would like, would you please stand with us for hearing the gospel.

The Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

Sermon:

It’s interesting the way things work out in the providence of God, because this sermon title was not one that was selected because of the actions in Kosovo in the past few days. The decision for the topic was made several weeks ago -- in fact, over a month ago -- and as the title kept coming into my mind, it was not because of anything that was going on -- necessarily -- with the war in Yugoslavia. But it was selected because in our community and in our region almost daily on the news, we have someone reported to have been murdered, convicted of murder or armed robbery, rape -- all of those things that go on in a society that’s gone wrong. Those things that triggered some of my thoughts were centralized or focused in the experiences of two friends who got into a fight over something like five dollars and one of them killed the other. How can we stop the killing?

Can we stop it at all? Are we destined to have this kind of massacre of human beings going on always? That’s the question, and it comes based on the fact that we just keep seeing it over and over. Some of us are old enough to remember the participation in World War II. We learned something from World War I because we thought World War I was the war to end all wars -- that there wouldn’t be another one -- and within a very short period of time, in fifteen years, already the wheels were grinding that would bring us to the greatest catastrophe of all times in World War II. And when that was over in forty-five, we thought, well, we’re in a little better and wiser position and we aren’t so sure about what’s going on in the world. Out of that came that division of the world into the communist world and the free world, and then came the United Nations and NATO -- North Atlantic Treaty Organization -- two organizations built and developed for the purpose of maintaining peace. The objective was to not allow to happen again the ethnic cleansing that Adolph Hitler had put into practice in the world.

Those of you who were there and who lived then, it was a time of great tragedy for the whole world, and we all wondered when will it stop? Well, gradually it stopped. These two organizations were developed in the next three or four years to help to keep the peace in the world and since then we’ve been in skirmish after skirmish with different people, but we’ve never had the world in chaos or conflict since. Thanks be to God!

How can we stop the killing? As I reflected on that I came up with a couple of thoughts. First, we could organize the people and have a good organization in every place. Some of you might remember back in the sixties, The Organization Man, a very popular book read by some of you, I’m sure. It talked about how the world of business was so organized and the person who was so involved was given to the organization, and everything would run smoothly when everyone did their part as they were supposed to. Everything would work well and there would be peace and harmony and everybody could work and it would be great. The only problem was that "the organization man" was committed to the organization and that was the central focus and that was the goal of everything; and that same kind of organization took away individuality, to a sense, and certainly the freedom to choose what one would do from day to day.

If you organize things properly, there won’t be as much conflict. That is a given. And as we organize things -- both as families and as communities and as states and as nations -- and if we organize those things appropriately, it certainly makes life so much easier for we can do things sufficiently and expeditiously when we have things organized properly. Every social group has to have some form of organization, and if you do that, you have a basic premise that you operate on and that basic premise is that everyone is cooperative and they do what they’re supposed to do. When organizations have structures, rules and regulations and plans of actions, and when those organizational plans are put into place and everyone operates by them, everything seems to move along as it should.

But if we organize properly, could we not take care of this issue of harming others? Could we not stop this onslaught of murder and robbery and race and all these things that go along with them? Could we not do that? Well, the basic premise of that approach is that every one has to cooperate, and when someone then does not want to cooperate or someone rebels against the system, then you have the same trouble you have with other systems.

Which leads me to the second approach that we could use. We could use law. For the law is strong. The law is that which sets the organization in a certain legalistic position in approach to things. So why don’t we, then, just set up the laws and we agree to these laws and everything will be okay.

There is no group that probably had no better organized legal system than the Jews in the day of Jesus, because they had volumes or scrolls of rules and regulations for everything. And certainly, killing was not one of their sanctioned options. Killing was not what they were supposed to do. They had rules for not killing: Thou shalt not kill -- one of the basic rules of that time. But the law -- in and of itself -- did not stop that from happening, and when we look at Jesus, we see a whole different story. This was the law that allowed this to happen. Oh, the Jews themselves couldn’t do it because they had been overrun by the Romans, but in their system, you could actually kill someone. Like Jesus. Not only that, but in the Roman law, you could not only kill them, you could crucify them.

Crucifying was the most gruesome of deaths, especially if the person had to engage in what Cicero referred to as "the intermediate death." In other words, there was the conviction and the death sentence, but before you were actually crucified, you had this intermediate death that you had to go through. And in the case of Jesus, when Pilate washed his hands of guilt and proclaimed to the group to do with him as they wished, he turned Jesus over to the centurion for scourging. It was one of the most awful things that could happen to anyone.

This scourge of leather thongs was loaded with lead or armed with spikes of bone which lacerated one’s back, chest, and face until the victim sometimes fell down before the judge a bleeding mass of torn flesh. Dr. C. Truman Thomas, a medical doctor who meticulously studied the scourging and crucifixion of Jesus in 1965 for the magazine, Arizona Medicine, wrote: "Finally, the skin of the back is hanging in long ribbons and the entire area is an unrecognizable mess of torn, bleeding tissue." That’s what Cicero referred to as the intermediate death. If one could survive the scourging, and they usually did, then death could be a relief from all of that pain.

That’s how Jesus was treated, and it was perfectly legal. Perfectly legal. The law allowed that to happen to an innocent man. That law, then, that allowed that to happen, that prohibited killing in some other circumstances, is not going to stop the killing.

So we may organize ourselves into the best of organizations, we may develop for ourselves the best of the laws in the world, but they do not stop the killing. When we look at new budgetary proposals from the federal government, we find again and again the emphasis upon stopping criminal activity in the country. We make law upon law, and in our area it seems to me -- for the last few years -- the killings have been coming more often.

How can we stop the killing? If organization doesn’t do it, if law doesn’t do it, then how are we going to stop it?

Well, it seems to me that there was a driving motive in the life of Jesus that caused him, though he was scourged, though he was crucified, to not kill anyone -- and that driving force, that driving power was love. So I propose that we can stop the killing by activating love, but it has to be a love that reaches deeper and stronger than most of us can think. It has to be the kind of love that even if we are in the position that we would be able to kill someone to get what we want, we would be able to say, "Not me! I won’t kill my brother or my sister!"

How does that kind of love operate? How is it different than the kind of love we normally talk about?

It’s that kind of changed love that makes us -- even under the most strenuous of circumstances -- be to able to think for a moment about what it’s like to have someone and hold them in our arms and love them, even though we’re angry at them. You see, that’s different. That’s powerful. That’s what Jesus did when his arms were unmoveable because of spikes through them and he said, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do."

That’s the kind of love I’m talking about. It’s the kind of love that accepts a person the way they are and moves them forward. It’s that kind of love that takes one’s heart and turns it upside down so that which was counted as right in the past that got them into trouble would not get them out of trouble and keep them out. It’s that turning one’s self into becoming an object of giving love. You give love, not just receive it. You give it!

There is a story that I read -- as we think about the situation in Bosnia and we think about the changes in Kosovo and about what’s going on in Yugoslavia -- that made me think about this love and how powerful it is and how sometimes we get caught up in our own stuff and we forget how our love can be pre-empted and not be what it should be. Yesterday we lost the first STEALTH B-17 and we don’t know what else we’re going to lose in the process. We may have some experiences where we may have to demonstrate love of a different sort, so I want to close with this today as we think of how we can stop it. We can stop it with love and it has to be the real thing.

How can we stop the killing? Amen.