War Is Hell

Jesus said to his disciples: “Beware of men, for they will hand you over to courts and scourge you in their synagogues, and you will be led before governors and kings for my sake as a witness before them and the pagans.  When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say. You will be given at that moment what you are to say. For it will not be you who speak but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.  Brother will hand over brother to death, and the father his child; children will rise up against parents and have them put to death.  You will be hated by all because of my name, but whoever endures to the end will be  saved” (Matthew 10:17-22). 

I’ve always wondered why Matthew would have Jesus say these very troubling things.  Why would family members betray each other and send loved ones to their death?   Children will put to death their parents?!   How does that fit with the Commandments, especially number six: “honor your father and mother?”  What in the world would cause this upside-down world?   What has hatred of Jesus got to do with all these horrific betrayals of loved ones?

The answer is simple: war and what must have seemed like the end times for the Jewish people and Matthew who wrote a decade or two after Mark in the 80s, most likely.  Importantly, Mark was the main source of information and text for Matthew, as well as Luke.  
The vicious Roman war against the Jews was raging in the 60s.  The Roman assault on Jerusalem occurred in 70; therefore, it appears that the author of Mark was writing when Jerusalem fell to the Romans who ringed the Temple Mount with crucifixes and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Jews.  Ghastly!  The Holy of Holies was ruined, and everyone was terrified.

According to James Carroll in his new book “Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age,” “…Recall that the Roman War against the Jews began in Galilee, a rocky mountainous region difficult to subdue.  In 67 and 68 some 60,000 legionaries killed and enslaved something like 100,000 Jews, mostly in Galilee, before moving on to the siege of Jerusalem…”

Carroll goes on to say: “The portrait of Jesus Christ given in the Gospels grows as much out of the stresses of war as did the already defining texts of Jewish religious understanding, from Jeremiah to Daniel…The war with Rome sparked civil war among the Jews, and the Gospels are the literature of that civil war.”  War can bring out the worst in people when terror and fear are rampant. 

Today, the day after Christmas, we’re reminded that Jesus was born into a world none of us can imagine.  Yesterday was one of food, friends, family and fun.   Today is one for reflection and remembering that war is hell and can release the demons in all of us, even within families.  Demons certainly were on the prowl during Jesus’ days and especially during the time of Mark and Matthew, thanks to the Romans.

Deacon David Pierce