Blessed are the Peacemakers
Joshua 11:10-15
If I were ever given an opportunity to decide that a single book could be removed from the canon of Holy Scripture, the decision would be easy for me: the book of Joshua.
It’s a book full of violence and stories that glorify violence. It’s a book in scripture that seems to claim God commanded Joshua and the Isrealites not only to conquer the lands of Canaan, but to brutally eradicate towns like Hazor where they “put to the sword all who were in it, utterly destroying them; there was no one left who breathed, and (Joshua) burned Hazor with fire.” (Joshua 11:11 NRSVUE)
This week in the US, we experienced another episode of our President’s behavior that has been so consistently repeated it has earned an acronym of TACO: “Trump Always Chickens Out.” And this acronym refers to the predictable pattern where our President makes a gargantuan military threat, tensions rise, the time approaches for the threat to be carried out, and then suddenly there is an escape hatch—a ceasefire, a truce, etc.
What started with us witnessing the President threatening to bomb civilian infrastructure in Iran in an expletive-laden social media post on Easter of all days, led to the promise of the “death of an entire civilization” the following day. Thankfully, TACO became true and as of the writing of this reflection to you, we are currently in a two-week ceasefire with Iran.
And all of this has led me to feel the need to point out that all of this reveals that we have a worship of violence problem in our country. We spend exponentially more on weaponry than any other nation on the planet. We have seen our current administration boast of its military exploits and mock its adversaries while also affixing the words of scripture to some of their communication. We have heard our Secretary to the Department of Defense (this presidential administration is choosing to call it a Department of War) liken a rescue mission of airmen who were shot down in Iran to the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
I found one social media post from our department of Homeland Security striking in its decision to quote “Blessed are the Peacemakers” over a video montage of war activities.
Worship of violence has gripped our culture and our politics. We either ascribe mildly to the myth of redemptive violence, where real solutions to certain problems are believed to only be possible to solve with tools of violence and domination, or we glorify it outright.
Our government is cashing in on an almost grotesque display of the worship of violence with the content they choose to produce and distribute. Videos of congressmen and secretaries of the President’s cabinet are depicted as medieval crusaders. The Secretary of Defense chooses to lead his press briefings with a moment of Christian prayer. Troops are told by their superiors that Trump’s war on Iran was “all part of God’s divine plan” and that decisions to go to war with the likes of Iran were made to fulfill purportedly Christian eschatological beliefs about armageddon and the second coming of Jesus.
We must reckon with our acceptance of violence as a means of progress and the absurd notion that peace can only be made through war. We must never tolerate when any one with the power to enact it calls upon the death of an entire civilization. War is hell. May we reject any worship of it.
