that shows a couple of urchins spotting a man in the village walking by:
“Who’s ’im, Bill?”
“A stranger!”
“‘Eave ’arf a brick at ’im.”
Is it the strangeness in us, then, that triggers hate? The mere fact that some of us are white and others Black? Or some Christian and others Jewish or Muslim? Or some straight and others gay? In this sermon, David Read tries to get at the sad, sick secret of prejudice while pointing to Jesus as the one in whom God kills the hatred in our hearts by submitting himself on the cross to the worst that it can do.
Jesus, the Killer of Hate
A Sermon preached by David H. C. Read at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church on September 9, 1973
“For he is himself our peace. Gentiles and Jews, he has made the two one, and in his own body of flesh and blood has broken down the enmity which stood like a dividing wall between them; for he annulled the law with its rules and regulations, so as to create out of the two a single new humanity in himself, thereby making peace. This was his purpose, to reconcile the two in a single body to God through the cross, on which he killed the enmity.” Ephesians 2:14–18 (NEB)
A couple of weeks ago, many miles from here, I found myself sitting reading this passage in the French of the Jerusalem Bible. At my feet lay the newspaper that I had just finished. I don’t know exactly what had been in it that morning, but it had left me with the usual feeling of depression at the amount of violence, corruption, and terror that fills our world. In Marseilles an Algerian worker had run amok in a bus, killed the driver, and wounded several passengers. In the following few days four Algerians had been found murdered in the same city. In London a secretary had her hand blown off by a bomb planted in a letter she was opening. In Stockholm four bank employees were being held day after day at the mercy of a couple of desperadoes. From the Middle East came tales of murderous threats and sabre-rattling speeches. From the United States, apart from the usual stories of violence, one learned that corruption had now reached the level of the soapbox derby. Strife, conflict, hate, murder—of course, one knows that such things make news, but somehow it all seemed just a little bit worse than usual this summer.
I didn’t pick up the Bible to forget it. For that I turned to the adventures of Inspector Maigret or the amiable lunacies of Bertram Wooster. Having been through Genesis in the French Bible, I had discovered enough murder, war, crime, corruption, and violence to satisfy any reader of the tabloids. But here I was in Ephesians reading about Jesus. And from this striking passage one sentence leaped out at me as it never had in our English versions. “Il a tue la haine,” I read. “He has killed hatred.”
“He has killed hatred.” Here is this writer summing up the story of Jesus who, to the secular historian, was simply one more among millions of victims of human cruelty and hate, as a victory over hatred itself. In the New English Bible we read of the “cross, on which he killed the enmity.” This is either nonsense, or else it contains the ultimate secret of hope and confidence for a despairing world.
The newspapers at my feet seemed to say that it was nonsense. If Jesus killed hate, they seemed to say, how do you account for this mess we are living in two thousand years later? If Jesus killed hate why have these so-called “years of our Lord” been filled with wars, persecution, and vicious animosities even among his own followers? This is a hard question for the Christian to answer in any age, and perhaps harder than ever in this age of disillusionment when so many hopes of sixty years ago have been shattered in the fires of war and persecution.
“Jesus killed hate.” We are here this morning because we believe that, in spite of all that has happened, of all that is still poisoning our world, and of the evidence of our own hearts, these words have meaning. In them is the secret of a faith that can nerve us to face the hate-filled world in which we live, to overcome the hostilities that smoulder in our own lives, and to be instruments of peace in the place where God has set us. We are not prepared to write off the Gospel as an illusion or the testimony of the saints as pious fraud. And so we are ready to listen again to what the Bible means when it speaks of the victory of Jesus over the powers of hate.
It doesn’t take long to realize that the writers of the New Testament were as aware as we are that the brief life and early death of Jesus did not immediately and miraculously banish hatred from the earth. These men, a generation after the crucifixion, were surrounded by the forces of hate, and exposed to its cruelties every day of their lives. They were hated by every section of the community, except perhaps the poor. The world around them seethed with hatred just as if Jesus had never lived and died. So what did they mean when they pointed to that Cross and said: “He has killed hate?”
I believe they were talking about the very center of the Gospel—the good news that “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.” They were saying that God had released into the world a power greater than all the legions of hatred and division, a power that would never be extinguished before mankind had found its ultimate unity and harmony and “the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ.” In the very teeth of their own experience of violence and hatred they proclaimed Christ’s victory of love. Like their Lord they looked beyond the battlefield to the place of ultimate decision and saw “Satan as lightening fall from heaven.”Since faith, according to the New Testament, is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” they lived in this conviction that “Jesus has killed hate,” that love is the final victor, and that all who truly live in Christ share in his reconciling power. After all these years we have still the same choice to make: either this is a chaotic and meaningless world where hate runs rampant until human beings blow one another to pieces, or there is a God who has injected into the human family a redeeming and reconciling force that works in everything for good with those who love him.
We can understand how Jesus has killed hate only from the Biblical perspective where hate is seen as a consequence of human rebellion against God. This is illuminated for us dramatically by the myth of the Tower of Babel. As an attempt to explain the origin of the multiplicity of human languages this tale can be read as a picturesque piece of folklore. What it is really saying, as the Word of God to us, throws a light on our human situation as brilliantly today as when the Book of Genesis was compiled. The confusion of languages is a perfect symbol of the breakdown in communication, the suspicions and misunderstandings, the barriers of race and culture, which breed the hatreds and the wars that afflict the human race. This summer the old farmer who was next door to our summer home in the south of France was watching our little boy one day as he tried to communicate with his grandchildren. As he saw the frustration and vexation of children who couldn’t understand each other’s language he shrugged his shoulders, grinned, and said to me: “La Tour de Babel.” What this story does is to link this confusion and division to the arrogance of humanity in seeking the place of God. “Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach into heaven.” The rivalries of mankind stem from the ultimate rivalry, the desire to play God and the rejection of his rule. The chasm between groups of human beings is a measure of the chasm between them and their God. They begin to hate another because, in their pretension, they hate the Lord who made them.
Another way of describing this predicament is the picture of humanity as designed to form a great circle facing inward to the light of God. When they turn round and face outwards, not only has each one lost the central Light but can no longer see his neighbor’s face. The answer, then, to the hatreds that burn in the human race lies in a turning back towards the face of God. Reconciliation between human beings depends on a common reconciliation with our God.
It is in this light that we are asked to look again at the mission of Jesus. The Gospel is nothing less than a summons to accept the reconciliation that he brings. Every word and act of Jesus has to do with his reconciling power, and for him the breaking of the barriers
