On and off today I have found myself enmeshed in various social media exchanges about last night's decision to extend British military activity into Syria. In short, to bomb Syria. Some are regretful but supportive; others are uncompromising in their support to bomb Isis off the map. On the other hand a sizeable minority believe it is wrong to bomb anybody, some of them as an absolute principle that bombing is state funded indiscriminate violence that inevitably kills and maims innocent civilians.
Others oppose bombing at this time on the pragmatic grounds that to justify bombing there needs to be a coherent overall strategy that includes but is not limited to the following: i) cutting off Isis funding from banks which begins by identifying these financial institutions, ii) closing the conduits that enable Isis to sell oil (and asking who it is that is buying it), iii) blocking the channels through which weapons are supplied to Isis, some of them so sophisticated they can bring down a commercial airliner, iv) seeking a UN resolution to create and deploy a UN coalition of ground troops. v) dealing with the disastrous aftermath of previous incursions into the sovereign territories of Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya. That is a huge, complex, costly and precariously poised shopping list of elements which might begin to sound like a strategy.
Add to that list the requirement for a clear exit strategy, a set of recognised criteria that would indicate the need for military action was over, a long term presence and security to ensure political stability and safety of citizens, and no coherent let alone at this stage realisable political serttlement that would come close to satisfying the major players in the region – Iraq, Syria, United States, France, Turkey, Russia, Iran, Israel and now Britain.
All of the above is the stuff of debate, discussion, agonising and exhausting in its intensity, for those who take seriously the cost and consequence of firing modern munitions with their enhanced payloads and blast range, into targets which must have civilians present, and from a height of 35,000 feet and distances measured in tens of miles.
However what I found interesting though not surprising was the diversity of Christian voices arguing about what Jesus meant about loving enemies, what the cross is about, and what the message of the cross in a world confronted with Isis. Claim and counter claim as to whether the Book of Revelation is about God the warrior or the Lamb in the midst of the throne, was given further edge by arguing about whether Jesus was non-violent and even a pacifist, and if not what was the relationship between the ethic of Jesus for disciples and the duties and rights of a state to wage war in self defence and in defence of the weak and oppressed.
Here too there are no straightforward answers, no short cuts to clarity, no privileges of claimed certainty and no court of appeal that can rule definitively on how we should live in the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Even a plain reading of Jesus words about loving enemies, and turning the other cheek, became an exercise in exegetical evasions, qualifications and exceptions. Similarly a reckoning with Paul's fuller and even more specific words in Romans 12 about out-manouevering the enemy by doing so much good the person who sees me as enemy could find no purchase on the levers of the Christian believer on which to compel a reciprocal hatred.
I am not troubled by difference of opinion; I expect that. Nor do I need only to hear what supports and confirms what I already think – I try to hear and to weigh the words of those who think I am naive, radical, unrealistic or plain daft to take Jesus words so seriously. I am however intrigued, and singularly concerned when such discussions and differences are fuelled by our strong opinions and convictions so that we become tone deaf to Scripture, colour blind to green and red and looking for ways of construing Scripture to give our views the green light and wave in front of others arguments and opinions a red light.
It is at this point something deeply embedded in my own Baptist tradition comes into its own. If only all those interlocutors today could have gathered in an open public space, say the seating area in a shopping mall. Each of them, me included.
And then we had prayed together our fears and angers, our urges to violence and longings for peace, honestly confessing our bewilderment and admitting "Lord we don't know – we think we do, we shout we do, but we don't know." If in that praying we were not trying to persuade each other, win arguments, prove ourselves right, or shrewd, or pragmatic, or tough, or informed – if in that praying, instead, we were humble and determined to hear what the Spirit of God is saying, to seek the mind of Christ, to discern a way for Christians to be faithful to the Crucified and Risen Lord, I wonder what might have happened in our hearts, in our minds, and then what we might do and say?
I don't know. But I wish I'd had the chance to find out.
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