War or Peace?

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
October 3, 2004

War or Peace?
Isaiah 11:6-9
John 13:34-35


Pontius Pilate.
That’s a name we generally hear only during the Easter season.
You remember him, don’t you:
The man who so famously washed his hands
to seal both Jesus’ fate and his own.
He was the Roman Governor in Judea for 10 years, from 26 to 36 AD.
He was the one to whom Jesus was brought following his arrest.

If you read carefully through the four Gospel accounts,
you would probably conclude
that there was nothing particularly sinister about Pilate.
In fact Pilate almost comes across as someone for whom you’d feel sorry.
He seems to struggle with the Judeans
who are literally howling for blood.
Pilate finds nothing criminal in the charges against Jesus
and suggests that Jesus be flogged for wasting his time,
and then set free.
But even 2000 years later, we can hear the angry mob below him shouting,
“Crucify him, Crucify him!”

The mob prevails;
Pilate concedes,
and reaches for the notorious bowl of water.

But as with everything we read in the Bible,
indeed everything in life,
there is always more to the story.
We always need to dig deeper and read more carefully.

In the 13th chapter of Luke, a full ten chapters before Jesus
stands at trial before Pilate, we find a cryptic sentence:
“At that very time there were some present who told Jesus about the
Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.”
(Luke 13.1)
That’s the only other reference to Pilate we find.
But it is suggestive.
Jews from Galilee, the region from which Jesus hailed,
had apparently been killed, killed for their faith in God,
and their blood mingled with the blood the Romans
used in their pagan rituals.

The plot thickens, as the saying goes;
we need to dig deeper still.
Wouldn’t it be handy if we had a history book from that time?
A contemporaneous account of the times?
Something that recorded the historical events?
Happily we, do, a book written by a man named Josephus.
He lived in Judea during the time of Paul’s ministry,
about 30 years after the death of Christ.
He wrote a history of the era entitled “Antiquities of the Jews”.

Josephus was a good historian: he was comprehensive, thorough, complete.
And what Josephus tells us is this: Pilate was not a sympathetic character.
No, as that cryptic verse from Luke 13 suggests,
Pontius Pilate was a cruel, sadistic, vicious, man.
Few things in life gave him more pleasure
than inflicting pain on his enemies.
The Roman system may have been built on laws,
but Pilate could not have cared less.
If he wanted someone eliminated,
his security guards knew that they had better dispatch the individual;
failure or even hesitation would lead to their own death.

Pilate once sent a group of soldiers disguised as Jews
to infiltrate a meeting of Jewish leaders.
The soldiers all had daggers hidden under their robes,
and at an agreed upon signal, they brandished their daggers
and dispatched every single Jewish leader.
No trial, no concern for a person’s rights,
no worry about a person’s possible innocence.
Pilate had determined in his own mind that they were radicals,
each man a threat to the state,
a threat to the security of his governance.
Pilate was a madman,
bloodthirsty…….as cruel and sadistic as a person could be.

The Jewish leaders prayed for a Messiah, a savior, a warrior king,
who would lead them against Pilate and the Romans.
Their Messiah would be a worthy successor to King David,
a man who would see that the Pilate was more than a grave
and gathering danger to the Jewish nation, the people of God.
He would see Pilate for what he was:
a threat to their very existence.
And this Messiah would wield a razor-sharp sword,
a sword of righteousness,
and with it, in one powerful swing,
make the world safer for the children of God.

And God answered the prayers of his children,
as God always does.
God sent the people a Messiah, a Savior.
Only this Messiah came carrying no sword, no spear, no shield.
This Messiah didn’t come into Jerusalem astride a white steed,
a noble beast snorting his own contempt
for the enemies of the chosen people.
No this Messiah came riding on the back of a borrowed donkey.

And he came preaching not words of war,
not words designed to mobilize the people
to eliminate this oppressive, sadistic, cruel tyrant,
and make the world safer for God’s children.

No, this Messiah came preaching a message of peace,
of love, and of mercy.
Where the Scriptures taught of God’s law of an eye for and eye,
a tooth for a tooth,
this Messiah rejected that message and said,
turn the other cheek,
forgive,
pray for your enemies.

This Messiah spoke of the day that his father in heaven hoped for,
a day when, “the wolf would lie down with the lamb,
the leopard with the kid,
the calf with the lion,”
a day “when the earth would be full
of the knowledge of the Lord.” (Isaiah 11:9).

Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ calls all who follow him to be peacemakers,
calls all his disciples to carry on his ministry of reconciliation in this world,
calls you and me to turn the other cheek,
calls you and me, as difficult as it may be, to pray for our enemies.

Our Lord was as clear as he could be when he said,
it is by our love that we will be known as his disciples.
By our love.
Not by our military might.
But by our love, our love for all humanity,
and our trust in God.
A love that is strong enough to allow us to do just what
Jesus did with Pontius Pilate:
he turned him over to God.

On this World Communion Sunday,
a day in which we focus on peace,
we reflect on a world in which armies fight
not only in Iraq, but in Chechnya, in Darfur,
a newspaper article this morning reported about a skirmish
in India;
China still threatens to invade Taiwan if Taiwan should ever try to
declare itself independent.
More tin-pot dictators than anyone would ever want to count,
many trying their best to emulate Pilate for cruelty.

We do not live in a peaceful, peace-filled world.
We cannot hope to live in a peaceful, peace-filled world
until we eliminate the causes of war.
And we can’t hope to eliminate the causes with bigger weapons,
bigger armies, more force.
No, we learned that in the arms race with the former Soviet Union.
The only place that path leads us is M.A.D.:
Mutually Assured Destruction.

Eliminate the causes of war.
That’s what you and I are called to do
as followers of Jesus Christ.
And before you and I are anything else,
you and I are disciples of Jesus Christ.
That must always come first.
Creating peace means eliminating the conditions that cause warfare.
Causes such as poverty, ignorance, ill health,
racism, hopelessness, poor housing, poor nutrition.

Do you know the main reason why young men join violent gangs
in cities like Los Angeles and New York City?
They don’t join for money or prestige.
They join because the gang culture provides them with a sense of family,
a sense of belonging,
a communal sense that they don’t have in broken homes.
Eliminate poverty, provide good schools, provide jobs,
and we’ve gone a long way to eliminating the culture of gangs.
That’s peacemaking at its best.
That’s peacemaking that Christ calls us to.

Chris knew Pilate was a bloodthirsty monster.
He could have destroyed Pilate with a wave of his hand,
Our Lord did not even need a sword.
But history shows that when you kill one madman,
another springs up somewhere else.
We have had tyrants, despots, cruel dictators throughout history.

No, our only hope is to work for peace, work for reconciliation.
Work to reach out not with rifles and tanks
but with food and education and mercy and understanding.
St. Augustine once wrote,
“it is a higher glory still to stay war itself with a word,
than to slay men with the sword,
and to procure or maintain peace by peace,
and not by war......”

Here’s something I’d like everyone to do:
Pick one nation, one region, one culture,
one you are not familiar with,
and learn about it.
Make that your goal, that somehow someway you will learn
about a group that you consider to be foreign, different,
even strange, a danger, a threat,
even an enemy.
And then work, not to destroy, but to reconcile
to build a bridge between yourself and them.
Start by learning, by becoming familiar,
by seeking understanding.
You do that, and you will go a long way to eliminating the causes of war.

As you come to this table, remember how many different people
are also coming to this table on this Lord’s Day:
men and women, old and young, white and black,
Asian and Latino, pan-Arabian and North American,
everyone a child of God.

Come to this table, but even more important,
leave this table and go out into the world
with the words of our Lord on your lips,
“by your love for one another,
shall you be known as my disciples.”
Amen