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For Christians, the ways we interpret scripture are so foundational to how one’s individual faith plays out. Perhaps as seminarians, more than most, we understand the ways scripture can and has been twisted, misinterpreted, and manipulated to reflect political, socio-economic, patriarchal (the list goes on) interests. What do we do when the Bible is used to justify unthinkable things?
One of my favorite verses in my early college years was Micah 4:3-
He shall judge between many peoples
and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
neither shall they learn war any more; (NRSVUE)
This verse was a lighthouse to me, clearly beaming into the clouds of confusion of our world, that there was another way, a better way. I can remember following Christian activists who would do gun buy-backs or donations to publicly hammer them into shovels, spades, rakes – implements of growth and peace out of symbols of violence and death.
So you can imagine my surprise when I entered my OT class at seminary, only to learn that while yes, this image is a captivating one, and certainly one that is repeated in places like Isaiah 2:4, there exists within the Hebrew Bible the exact opposite sentiment.
Joel 3:9-10
Proclaim this among the nations:
Consecrate yourselves for war;
stir up the warriors.
Let all the soldiers draw near;
let them come up.
Beat your plowshares into swords
and your pruning hooks into spears;
let the weakling say, “I am a warrior.”
Now I had long since disillusioned myself of the notion that the Bible speaks with a singular voice, but embraced the idea that the word of God chose to reveal itself through people, deeply contextual people, speaking in their time and place to a particular context.
Still, it was hard to stomach.
I bring this all up because I’m sure for people, very different from myself, the Joel passage asserting that God was urging them to stand up for themselves, to form weapons and tell whatever voices had profited off their “weakness, “no more – is a revolutionary concept. Marginalized peoples could view this as God witnessing their struggles and standing in the utmost solidarity with them. Though we might look at the Micah passage and say that contextually, it was written to people that had been exploiting the weakest among them, and so the Day of the Lord was one of peace and prosperity, with no groups exploitation, those in power, that wish to maintain it, might look at Joel 3 as justification for exactly the opposite.
While I don’t pretend to be an expert on the Judaism or the history of Zionism – I do feel I have a leg to stand on when understanding American Evangelicals that use their faith to justify supporting a genocide. “It’s God’s people’s land. It’s biblical,” they might say.
Biblical.
I have stopped asking myself if a behavior is biblical. One can find justification for just about anything in Scripture. There is much in our sacred text that would be harmful and wrong in our modern culture, as well as much that was just as harmful and wrong in the time it was written. There is ethnic cleansing. There is misogyny. There is genocide.
The question for me has become “is it Christ-like?”
Dismissal of women may be biblical, but Jesus wanted women to be the first preachers of the resurrection. Religious segregation might be biblical, but Jesus made a hero of the Samaritan and healed Romans. Violence is biblical, but Jesus stopped stonings and condemned violent systems that benefited the powerful.
War is biblical, but Jesus – prince of Peace, a Palestinian Jew publicly executed by an occupying force, who declared the Peacemakers blessed – told his friend that to take up the sword is to die by it.
Picking and choosing texts is a good way to write your own gospel. I would rather live by the ethos of Jesus of Nazareth, the Way of living he inaugurated and invites us into – one of stubborn hope, solidarity with the oppressed, and life defeating death in all its forms.
Free Palestine.
