Disturbing Bible Passage

Today's Lectionary (March 7, 2015) includes Deuteronomy 9.1-12.

As I read it this morning, I was disturbed, seriously disturbed, by the ease with which the writer speaks of "dispossessing" nations, with great cities, well-fortified, "a strong and tall people" ... offspring of the Anakim, i.e., a bastardized race.

But don't be afraid, says the writer, the LORD will go before you so that you may dispossess and destroy them quickly. I chilled when I read those words.

Sure, the writer wants to keep Israel's ego in check by reminding the readers that all of this has nothing to do with their sterling character, but rather God's promise and because these nations are "wicked."

Wicked? You bet. Thus, demonizing a people who are otherwise worthy, strong, creative, talented, with families and farms and hopes and dreams, but they have what we want, and so we're gonna take it, and take it violently, because these people are unworthy to own the land, and besides, they're wicked, because they worship "other" gods, and shame on them, and thus have no right to even exist. Dedicate them for destruction.

I'm in the midst of reading a WW2 novel, featuring a Polish girl held in Ravensbrück and the hideous medical experiments performed on her by another young lady, a German doctor ... who, like all the Nazis, demonized the Poles and other nationalities as "bastardized," half-human, or sub-human, not worthy of life in the Third Reich, and not worthy of life at all.

I think of the Europeans coming to America and looking upon the land as if it were Canaan, and the peoples here were not entitled to this land, because they were "wicked," i.e. they weren't christian.

Victory of Joshua over the Amalekites, Nicolas Poussin, 1625

And, then, of course, slavery - millions of good and decent people yanked from their homes, with families broken, put on slave ships and condemned to a brief and brutal life of harvesting sugar cane or cotton.

But it was okay, you see, because the slaves were "wicked," i.e. not christian, and slavery at least saved them from the darkness of their paganism, and in spite of their slavery (because they were not fully human anyway), this gave them a chance to become christians and go to heaven when they died. That they should live in hell here is fitting, because of their sub-human character and their history of wickedness.

Jesus offers some serious alternatives to this bloody self-justification that to this day undergirds the State of Israel's abuse of Palestinians and America's continuing racism, homophobia, and, as of late, Islamophobia.

And, of course, all of this "dispossession and destruction" of peoples is undergirded by religion, because people doing horrible things to other people need to feel "good" about it, and no greater "feel-good" potion than religion, when twisted and turned to self-interest.

Sure, it's a human problem, spread around the globe and defining virtually all of human history.

But I can't accept any of it, because of what I know of Christ, and because of Christ, it's something that I have to fight against, with all that I have, of mind, body, spirit and strength.

Because God so loved the world ... and in Christ, reconciles the world to God, and the world to itself.

Passages like Deuteronomy have to be soundly and quickly denounced for what they are: lies that we tell one another to justify the most brutal of behaviors toward one another.

And as for me, God never said it ...

Or if God did, then God apologized in Christ ... God got out of the land business, for it sullied God's hands, and filled God with self-loathing, as this kind of behavior always does.

If God said it, then God no longer says it.

If God never said it, then we have to come to grips with the sad that truth that we said it, and still say it, "creating god in our own image," to satisfy our bloodlust and justify our inhuman treatment of other humans, deemed unworthy and wicked.

Christians have to read the text carefully, and so must Jews and Muslims ... every sacred text has more than its share of bloodlust, but also of love and the grandeur of mind and heart ... to either pick up the sword and kill one another in some fit of self-interest, believing that god justifies this violence, or turn the sword into a plowshare, so we can feed one another unto life.

The choice is ours. May we choose wisely.