"I will send an angel before you," said God, as Moses set off for a land flowing with milk and honey, "and I will drive out the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites." (Exodus 33:2) Later, God handed over this rather nasty task of ethnic cleansing to the wanderers in the wilderness (Deut 7:1), and we may infer, from 1 Kings 9:21, that they were not entirely successful!
The unpleasant theme of ethnic cleansing runs like a thread through the historical books of the Old Testament, and there are still people around who take this too literally. The theme surfaced again in nineteenth-century Zionism, and underlies the unhappy story of twentieth-century Palestine. But it is one thread among several, and if we read our Bibles carefully, we can see that its barbaric aspect is one of the misinterpretations of God's will which Jesus condemned.
The Old Testament stories which stick in our mind are often of death and destruction. Think of the battle of Jericho (Joshua 6 and 7). Joshua today would have found himself before a War Crimes Tribunal, condemned as an Old Testament Hitler. Even Joshua's treatment of looters would not have excused him - Achan's execution (which included his sons and daughters!) was not for looting - it was for failing to carry out the command that everything must be destroyed.
Can anyone seriously believe that God would command such acts of genocide? Wars have been fought through the centuries in the name of religion, but where this has happened, it has been in the name of religion gone wrong. People have been known to kill for love, but the occurrence of crimes passionnels does not mean that love is a bad thing. And love lies at the root of religion.
If we read the Bible's historical books with attention, we find that "ethnic cleansing" is not about exterminating people who are of a different race or who practise a different religion. The rulers in the books of Kings and Chronicles who "pleased the Lord" (and there were precious few of them!) were the ones who stopped the Jewish people from worshipping sacred pillars and consorting with temple prostitutes. What was wanted was a cleansing of the hearts of God's own people.
We in the 21st century should take this to heart. God seeks us, seeks our hearts, seeks our love. God does not want us to destroy other people, or to ridicule their faith. That will never win their love.
We have heard a lot recently about a set of cartoons in the Danish press. No matter what the intention behind them was, they conveyed a misleading picture. To caricature Muslims as terrorists is like caricaturing Jews as money-grabbing swindlers or Roman Catholic clergy as paedophiles. All three religions in their own ways reject terror, greed and exploitation as evil. All three religions value peace, generosity and respect for others.
Jesus rejected the attitude that dehumanized people of other faiths. His friendship was not tied to a particular set of religious rules. The friend of tax collectors and sinners was also the friend of the Samaritan woman, and astonished her by saying that what she thought he believed was a caricature - God wasn't irrevocably linked to Jerusalem. He was the friend of the Syro-Phœnician woman, and, more importantly, listened to what she had to say and praised it (Mark 7:29).
We too are called to love and to listen. What we say may well be misrepresented or misunderstood, but two wrongs do not make a right - the command to turn the other cheek applies equally to our dialogue with people of other faiths (or even with different perceptions of the Christian faith!) Reprimand where actions are clearly wrong has its place, but first and foremost we are called to be channels of God's love and God's peace. Without us and our active sharing in God's work, that love will never fill the world.
HD