What does the birth of the baby Jesus 2,000 years ago have to offer the violent, troubled world we live in? Or what would Jesus say to the NRA?
I want to suggest: a lot. A whole lot.
Jesus entered the world from a posture of absolute vulnerability -- as an unarmed, innocent child during a time of tremendous violence. The Bible speaks of a terrible massacre as Jesus was born, an unspeakable act of violence as King Herod slaughters children throughout the land hoping to kill Jesus (which the church remembers annually as the massacre of the Holy Innocents).
Perhaps the original Christmas was marked more with agony and grief like that in Connecticut than with the glitz and glamour of the shopping malls and Christmas parades. For just as Mary and Joseph celebrated their newborn baby, there were plenty of other moms and dads in utter agony because their kids had just been killed.
From his birth in the manger as a homeless refugee until his brutal execution on the Roman cross, Jesus was very familiar with violence. Emmanuel means "God with us." Jesus' coming to earth is all about a God who leaves the comfort of heaven to join the suffering on earth. The fact that Christians throughout the world regularly identify with a victim of violence -- and a nonviolent, grace-filled, forgiving victim -- is perhaps one of the most fundamentally life-altering and world-changing assumptions of the Christian faith. Or it should be.
So what does that have to do with the NRA? Underneath the rhetoric of the gun-control debate this Christmas is a nagging question: Are more guns the solution to our gun problem?
Everything in Jesus' world, just as in ours, contends that we must use violence to protect the innocent from violence, which is the very thing Jesus came to help us un-learn through his nonviolent life and death on the cross. Surely, we think, if God were to come to earth, he should at least come with a bodyguard -- if not an entire entourage of armed soldiers and secret service folk. But Jesus comes unarmed. Surely, we think, if God were about to be killed he would bust out a can of butt-kicking wrath; but Jesus looks into the eyes of those about to kill him and says, "Father forgive them." The Bible goes so far to say that the wisdom of God makes no sense to the logic of this world, in fact it may even seem like "foolishness" (or at least utopian idealism).
When soldiers come to arrest and execute Jesus, one of his closest friends defensively picks up a sword to protect him. Jesus' response is stunning: He scolds his own disciple and heals the wounded persecutor. It was a tough and very counter-intuitive lesson: "The one who picks up the sword dies by the sword ... there is another way."
That lesson that Jesus taught his disciple is as relevant to us, and the NRA, as it was the early movement of Christians in the first century. Violence will not rid the world of violence. You do not use swords to get rid of swords or guns to get rid of guns. There is another way.
Many Christians have begun to speak of Jesus as an interruption to the "myth of redemptive violence," the assumption that we can use violence to get rid of violence or that we can destroy a life to save a life. The myth of redemptive violence has many ugly faces. It teaches us that we can kill those who kill to show that killing is wrong. It teaches us to live by the law of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" a law that Jesus firmly spun on its head, saying, "You've heard it said 'an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth ... but I tell you..." There is another way. Killing to show that killing is wrong is like trying to teach holiness by fornication. The cure is as bad as the disease.
At one point Jesus even weeps over the violent world he lived in, lamenting that "they did not know the things that would lead to peace." The fact that Jesus carried a cross rather than a sword has something relevant and redemptive to offer our violent-possessed world. After all, the Bible has a lot to say about loving enemies, and "Thou shalt not kill," but doesn't even mention the right to bear arms.
So let's imagine. What would Jesus say to our nation, where these are things are true:
I'm not a religious sort, but maybe that's what he'd say?
I have a bumper sticker on my truck that asks: Who Would Jesus Bomb? I get so much anger from so-called Christians over that one, I was run off the road and cussed out once by a guy with Bush/Cheney, NRA and a christian fish stuck to his back bumper. It's a simple question...
In 1982, the Kennesaw City Council unanimously passed a law requiring heads of households to own at least one firearm with ammunition.
The ordinance states the gun law is needed to "protect the safety, security and general welfare of the city and its inhabitants."
Then-councilman J.O. Stephenson said after the ordinance was passed, everyone "went crazy."
"People all over the country said there would be shootings in the street and violence in homes," he said. "Of course, that wasn't the case."
In fact, according to Stephenson, it caused the crime rate in the city to plunge.
Kennesaw Historical Society president Robert Jones said following the law's passage, the crime rate dropped 89 percent in the city, compared to the modest 10 percent drop statewide.
If God allows evil to exist it means he is NOT all-knowing, all-just, and all-powerful.
If he does not know how to defeat evil he is not all-knowing.
If he is not strong enough to defeat evil he is not all-powerful.
If he has the knowledge and power to defeat evil and chooses not to do so. Then he is just a monster.
The mind of the fundamentalist like the pupil of the eye: the more light you pour on it, the more it will contract.
Jesus was crucified and die on the cross because that was what he came to do. he had to die to pay for our sins. Jesus had all the power of God and could have destroyed the Romans but his purpose for coming was to die on the cross. Jesus raised the dead, healed the blind, stopped a storm just by speaking. don't take my word for it or anybody else's just get a bible and read it for yourself.
Through Jesus the SON, GOD the Father healed and raised the dead.
I have a bible right here in one of my stacks of books here in this room. That is, one of the ?? how many translations ??
And there are many doctors in my family. God still heals through humans like Jesus. God works in MANY ways through humans if WE allow Him to.....yes ?
As a former Marine wife years ago, am I allowed to say Semper Fi to you ? Bless you onelamp.......