Disarmed by God--July 6, 2020

Disarmed by God--July 6, 2020

"Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
    Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!

 Lo, your king comes to you;

    triumphant and victorious is he,

 humble and riding on a donkey,

    on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

 He will cut of the chariot from Ephraim

    and the war-horse from Jerusalem;

and the battle blow shall be cut off,

    and he shall command peace to the nations;

 his dominion shall be from sea to sea,

    and from the River to the ends of the earth." [Zechariah 9:9-10]

Here's a Monday morning confession from a preacher.  

As I heard these words being read yesterday in worship, I heard something in them I had never noticed before... and it has been rattling around in my brain ever since.  It's funny how often something like this happens, because these are words I have surely heard lots of times in my life.  The first part of this passage is usually read in connection with the story of Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem--the day that we church-folk have come to call Palm Sunday--when Jesus launched a sort of protest march that paraded into the city of Jerusalem in a certain parody of the Empire's annual show of force marching soldiers in full battle dress into the city to flex some Roman muscle and stifle unrest.  So I've heard the imagery of a king who humbly rides in on a donkey instead of an ominous war-horse now nearly forty times in my life.  

I've heard these words from the second-last book in our Old Testament, spoken by a pretty obscure minor prophet plenty of times before... but never noticed the move God makes to bring peace: God disarms us.

Wait... what?

Yeah, there it is: right there in the text.  This promised king, this one who rides a donkey humbly instead of projecting "greatness" by riding a white horse or a chariot, this one that Christians have for two thousand years identified as Jesus of Nazareth himself... he disarms, not his enemies, but his own people!  Look how the prophet says it: this king "will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the war-horse from Jerusalem," and along with those weapons, bows and arrows and whatever other arsenals they've got.  But notice whose weapons these are that the prophet says God is abolishing--they are his own people's!  The weapons of Israel and Judah (here identified by other place-names, Ephraim and Jerusalem) are the ones that the prophet says are "cut off."  Zechariah envisions peace for all peoples, from sea to shining sea, and so God insists that they won't need their weapons any longer. God disarms the very people of God, rather than leaving them a back-up plan "just in case."

This is radical!  This is upside-down!  This is scandalous!  And it certainly runs counter to the thinking we are immersed in all around us.  The conventional wisdom says, "Try to be nice to everyone... but you'd better be ready with your war-horse if someone else starts a fight."  The conventional wisdom says the way to guarantee peace is to have a bigger stick to threaten your potential enemies with, so they'll be too afraid to go to war with you (this was basically why the Romans had their little military dress-up parade marching into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, by the way--it was to intimidate any troublemaking Zealots or freedom-fighters by showing off the size of their armies).  The conventional wisdom says, "You have to keep your hand on the trigger to make sure you'll be left standing if trouble breaks out."  That was absolutely the thinking in the air in the late days of the Cold War as I grew up--where we all were taught that nobody wanted nuclear war, but that the way to prevent nuclear war was to have an ever-increasing arsenal of nuclear weapons to make sure everybody else was too afraid to use them.  It was the idea that you kept the peace by threatening everyone with "mutual assured destruction."  So much of our view of the world is soaked in the assumption that you have to be ready to destroy somebody else to make sure that you-and-you-group can come out on top.  And so much of what we assume is just "the way things are" depends on having my bow, my chariot, and my war-horse ready to kill my enemies if I feel threatened.  We have just been taught to accept that this is how the world has to be.

And yet, here--in words I have been reading and hearing all my life--there is this outrageous and upside down picture that turns all that reasonable-sounding conventional wisdom on its head.  God's way is to create peace, and then, not just to disarm "the bad guys" but also to disarm the ones who imagine themselves as "good guys," too.  It's not just Israel's enemies who have their sticks and swords and spears taken from them--it's Israel itself, too!  It's not just the opposing armies outside of Jerusalem that has their bows snapped over the divine knee--it's the weaponry of the capital city itself, too.  God's way here is not to leave "our side" ready with back-up weapons in case this whole peace thing doesn't work out. No, God's way, promised long before Jesus was ever laid in a manger, is to rule from a position that looks like weakness (donkey, rather than war-horse), and to disarm not only "those people" out there, but also "us right here."

I know it is tempting to say something like, "Well, that's all well and good for when Christ comes again, but now we have to live in the real world, where we lock our doors and have to deal with real evil all around us."  And I don't mean to suggest living naively with the thought that we can all just get along when there is certainly so much evil and wickedness in the world.  But I do think it is pretty significant that it took me four decades to even notice that these words were here... when I'm already so familiar with other parts of this passage.  I do think it's more than curious that I can recite the bit about the king on the donkey, but never realized that when the donkey-riding ruler comes, his way of bringing peace isn't just to smash the enemies while reloading his people's ammunition, but rather to cut off the weapons from everybody all around.  And I think I never saw that before, because like all of us, I have been steeped in a culture that assumed you have to keep your advantage over your enemy and you have to be ready to destroy somebody else in order to preserve your own interests.  And now I am drawn up short, because, well, because God envisions another way.  God creates a kind of life that isn't depended on threatening somebody else with death.

So much of the tension I think we are all feeling these days is that we have accepted the idea that we have to have someone to hate... someone to cast as the villain... someone who must be the "bad guy," and when we can't find one, we invent one.  And once we've accepted that there has to be a villain, we very quickly will justify anything to get rid of "them" and to assert "our" domination of them.  But maybe that assumption just isn't true.  Maybe there has been an alternative all along.  Maybe the thing we're hoping for is not a world where I keep the peace by pointing a weapon at somebody else, but where we all decide we will honor the image of God in one another enough that we don't have to threaten each other.  And maybe in the course of my day, I don't have to see every interaction as an "us versus them, good-versus-evil" competition. Maybe instead, I can see that, like Solzhenitsyn wrote, the line between good and evil runs through each human heart, and that there is rottenness in me that I need to address, as well as goodness in "the enemy" that I cannot honestly ignore.

And then maybe I can change the attitude I engage others with, even people I have a really hard time getting along with.  Maybe I no longer have to look for some advantage to defeat them, but I can risk the vulnerability of letting down my defenses toward them, and offering suffering love rather than harsh attacks.  Maybe I can risk learning something from the people I am sure are wrong... and maybe I can offer what I have to say in ways that aren't just trying to score points, or make them dig their heels in and get defensive.

Maybe the greatest gift of all we can be given in this life is to have God disarm us.

Maybe it's worth trying facing the world today with open hands and finding out.

Lord God, bring your kind of peace to us, even when it overturns our expectations and assumptions.