A Thought For The Week Of May 29, 2017

"When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?” (Luke 9:54) We live in a world, unfortunately, in which religious enmity and hatred has become pretty commonplace. We see examples of that all the time. It's only a minority of believers, of course, but it's not unknown for people to kill others in the name of their "god" primarily because they believe in a different "god." It's very tragic. Perhaps one of the saddest verses in the Bible is this verse from Luke's Gospel, where we see that mindset in two of the disciples of Jesus. Before this verse we read that the people in a Samaritan village had refused to welcome Jesus. Why? Because, the account says, he was going to Jerusalem. That would have been an issue for them because Jerusalem at the time was the centre of the Jewish religion, and Jews and Samaritans didn't get along very well. To the Samaritans it must have seemed that if Jesus were going to Jerusalem he had thrown in his lot with those who despised them. Why should they welcome him? So they cast him aside. But what was even worse in this passage was the response of James and John. Simply because the Samaritan village had refused to welcome Jesus, James and John wanted to destroy it. In the name of God! That's what you call extremism - not unlike the acts of religious extremism that you see being committed by supposed followers of various religions all over the world. To some (thankfully - hopefully! - only a few) serving God means saying "agree with me or I'll kill you." And that sort of attitude has led to a lot of tragedy over the centuries. Fortunately, though, we have the example of Jesus. He seems to have accepted the rejection of the Samaritan village in good spirits, and his only action in this passage is to rebuke his own disciples for having had the horrible thought of destroying the Samaritan  village because the Samaritan village didn't act as they felt it should have. That's a good lesson from Jesus, and should be the characteristic of a Christian: always stand against violence and hatred; always rebuke those who want to engage in violence and hatred. That's a lesson that the church needs to proclaim and that the world so desperately needs to take to heart.