Vengeance is a visceral and violent response to what is perceived as morally unacceptable. Those who say vengeance is itself ethically indefensible adopt a moral standpoint that sometimes overlooks the complex mixture of tragic loss, indescribable suffering, inexplicable wickedness and downright dehumanising violence that triggers the desire to pay back, to seek satisfaction, to punish, to lash out in rage at those who perpetrate violent cruelty and mindless slaughter on other human beings.
The Taliban have sworn vengeance on coalition forces in Afghanistan following the brutal murder of 16 Afghan civilians by one US soldier. Expressions of shock, regret, condolence and determined pursuit of explanation and justice are not likely to break the power circuits that trigger chain reaction violence. The tragic nihilism of cyclic hatred and self-perpetuating violence simply means more people will be maimed and murdered as a way of putting right what is universally recognised as wrong. Moral cliches like two wrongs don't make a right overlooks the all but irresistible urge, erupting from the molten core of human pain, to redress the balance of one community's grief by inflicting equivalent grief on the other. This isn't about reasoned calculation, but an instinctive scream of rage at the facelessness of fate, and the known human face of the enemy. There are no words I as a Christian can offer to the Afghan people, other than those of the penitent, the sorrowful and the heart diminished by the deaths of others.
Neither are there words I can use to comment on the deaths of seven young British soldiers, killed by that same vengeance seeking Taliban. The oscillation of rage and outrage, makes it impossible to speak words that would be heard. The desperate search to find some tenuous strands of hope that can somehow be woven together, requires not so much words spoken, as heart going out to heart. And the abyss of sorrow and loss into which relatives are plunged, place a finger over our lips, so that nothing is uttered that interrupts the necessary anguished work of grieving. Perhaps all we can say, and should say, and must say, are those words that must always be said with utmost honesty, sincerity and awareness of what goes on in our own hearts:
Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison.
I have in my study a station of the cross panel, of Jesus being crucified, a gift from Professor Sandy Stoddart. It is a powerful statement through understatement, of the brutal banality of human cruelty. Not vengeance, but forgiveness, not hatred but love, not power but vulnerability, and not punishmment but mercy, are the springs that move the heart of God. At my best, I look out at our world, and pray "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do". Other times I look at that same world filled with despair because, more often than I might think, they know exactly what they do, and I find it harder to pray for their forgiveness.
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