The Rev. Dr. Timothy Ives

First Congregational Church

Chappaqua, New York

January 21, 2001

Luke 4:12-30

Pakistani thinks he has already killed at least 100 people. Maybe more; he isn't really sure.

“Muhammad Khaled Mihraban, a polite, soft-spoken 26-year-old. "My goal was not to kill," he said. "But I had a line to follow, an Islamic ideal. I knew that Muslims needed their own country, a real Islamic country."

Mr. Mihraban found that country when he came to Afghanistan in 1992. Having decided "to consecrate my life to jihad" while studying Islamic law at Punjab University in Lahore, he said, he joined a Pakistani militant group that was fighting India in the disputed province of Kashmir. His training took place in Afghanistan.

"We learned how to plant mines, how to make bombs using dynamite and how to kill someone quietly," he recalled.

A gifted student, he was soon asked to train others in group camps near Khost. "But I wanted to act, not teach," he explained. So after a stint waging war in Kashmir, he returned to Kabul to fight alongside the Taliban forces that control most of the country.

Mr. Mihraban, who was captured by the rebels fighting the Taliban in northern Afghanistan, said in an interview in a bleak prison that if he were released, he would "stay right here and fight again for Kabul." If he were asked to do so, he said, he would go to London, Paris or New York and blow up women and children for Islam. "Yes, I would do it," he said quietly, “without hesitation.”

This was a part of a three-part series that ran in the New York Times this past week. If you read it you were probably as frightened as I was. The thought of random and senseless violence that really could catch anyone at any time for no reason at all frightens me a great deal. But I also pause when I read such articles because I believe that there is a tendancy for us in the west to easily misunderstand Muslims especially when we read an article like this. I think that it can make it very easy for us to equate Islam with violence.

But the truth is that it is not the religion that is the problem. It is the way that the religion is being interpreted. In this article it spoke of fifty thousand Muslims being trained as terrorists in Afghanistan in the last few years. The number seems like a very large number but if you compare it to the total Muslim population in the world, 1.1 billion people, it is a very small number. It is a fraction of one percent of the total Muslims in the world. Even if we assume that the number of radical Muslims is four or five times that in the world, I am speaking of people who would commit terrorist violence, the percentage is very small to the whole. That is why I am uneasy about the number of times we read in the paper about violent Muslim terrorists. After a while it seems as though Muslims are violent people and the truth is that they are no more violent than, say, Christians.

Actually the number of Muslim terrorists noted in this article is comparable to the estimated “militia” members in this country. These militia members all seem to claim a Christian identity. Again, the problem is not the religion it is the way that people want to interpret it.

The sadness is that this tragedy seems to follow religion around. Religion and religious violence seem to go hand in hand. If there is an organized religion there seems to be someone who is willing to do violence to it or for it.

Last week we celebrated Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday. He, as a Christian, was an advocate of nonviolence. I would say that he was following the way of Jesus, not the people who feel they must blow up an abortion clinic. But the truth is that in scripture you can find words that will support almost any position that you want to take. It is frightening, isn’t it? Mr. Mihraban can be convinced that he should kill for his religion because it says so in his scripture. Timothy McVeigh can believe that he ought to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City because of what he believes about his religion.

It is powerful stuff, this faith. I said so last week. I will say it again. Faith is the most powerful motivator on the planet. The problem is that it can be used for peace and it can be used for war.

In the Bible reading for today Luke describes a scene that is filled with violence. And it too gives me pause for the same reason the Times story, about Mr. Mihraban, gave me pause.

In the story a group of angry Jews, Jesus’ own people, from his home town rise up against him to kill him because he has said that he is going to bring his message, his healing, his ministry to those beyond the boundaries of Judaism. If you read the story closely you will see that it is Jesus who is the antagonist. Jesus, after everyone has thought well of him for his sermon in the synagogue, asserts that God will bless those outside of Judaism before God will bless the Jews again. He argues against the Jews even though they have done nothing to him. It is as if we, the readers, came into an argument that had been going on for a while and we have no idea how it got started. Everyone thought well of Jesus and then all of a sudden Jesus is dressing them down telling them that God will not favor them.

This doesn’t seem like the Jesus I believe in. But if I were trying to justify violence against the Jews or any other group who was outside of the way I thought I might want to believe that Jesus was very much a militant against his own people. And I might believe that he had a right to be because look what they do to him in this story. They take him out in order to kill him because he has annoyed them.

It really is a minor incident but in this story we have the people who know Jesus best ready to kill him because he has said some things about God maybe not favoring the Jews all that much. He has not committed any crime, he has not blasphemed, he has not claimed to be anything that he shouldn’t and the Jews in this story are about to kill him! And we wonder how violence and the Bible go together.

And here it is again this feeling like we walked into an argument that has been going on for a while. These words alone would never provoke good synagogue-going Jews to want to kill. Killing was against the law, it would be the most desperate of desperate acts. Therefore, I really have to wonder if it happened this way.

And that is the key question for anyone who is trying to find the will and the way of God. You can’t just take the words of scripture at face value or else you might end up like McVeigh or Mirhaban.

If you took this story at face value you would not spend the time to find out that this passage most certainly reflects a situation that came about long after Jesus was gone. You would know that Luke has an agenda that includes making the Jews out to look like the people who rejected Jesus and then killed Jesus. And Luke wants to use this accusation not to destroy the Jews or even hurt them but to give them good motivation to repent and return to God. Just read the first few chapters of Acts and you will discover that Peter uses this accusation to convert the Jews of Jerusalem.

Yes, violence would develop and continue between Christianity and Judaism but not because Jesus believed in it or wanted it. It developed and is reflected in scripture for many human reasons that have very little to do with the will of God.