George Pitcher

This essay is edited from a sermon by The Revd George Pitcher at St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, on Sunday 30th July 2006

Not being a particularly scripturally-based Christian, I tend to miss the subtleties in Bible stories, the little phrases and grace notes that make the texts real and human. One such is the John's gospel account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, a miracle narrative that has lots of iconic moments - the loaves and fishes, the baskets left over - that eclipse one little opening order from the tired Jesus of Nazareth to his burly bodyguards and associates, as he faces a large, hungry and potentially hostile crowd: "Make the men sit down". It's a peaceful, ameliorating, hospitable, even feminine, injunction and speaks against the male grandeur of the Judaic tradition.

Miraculous feeding stories were not new to Jews. The greatest of Hebrew prophets, Elijah, who is figuratively seen talking with the Christ and Moses at the Transfiguration, had performed, nine centuries before Jesus's ministry, many of the miraculous acts that would later be ascribed to Jesus Christ. He healed the sick and raised the dead. He was said even to have transcended death himself, in a precursor of Christ's resurrection. And when the first fruits of the harvest are offered to this great high priest, the scriptures say that he fed 100 men with just 20 loaves of barley. Jews venerate Elijah at their Passover meals and such is the impression that he made on his people that his return was held by exiled Jews to be a necessary prelude to the deliverance and restoration of Israel.

The Jews were to be fed in perpetuity by this "promised land". But 20 centuries after the Christ and nearly 30 since the time of Elijah, it's hardly a land flowing with milk and honey - at war with its neighbours, suffering terrorist attacks and blasting the civilian population in southern Lebanon apparently indiscriminately in retaliation. The recent history of Israel might lead us to conclude that, if this is God's chosen people, he may not have chosen very carefully.

You will actually struggle to find much reference in the Bible to the Jews as a chosen people. But it is the belief that is at the root of Neo-conservative American support for Israel. Forget the "Jewish lobby" in Washington - American Jews predominantly vote Democrat. It is the southern Baptist view of Israel as God's chosen elect that drives George W. Bush's foreign policy in the Middle-east. Chillingly, it's a policy that will support Israel, right or wrong, because that is the will of God. It's also a man's gospel.

That's not a gospel that I recognize. As the bloodied and terrified faces of desperate Lebanese families, some holding the bodies of their dead children, appeared on the front pages of our newspapers, I realized that I'd had enough of balanced, "on the one hand, on the other" journalism that declines to take a position. Israel has suffered terribly from terrorism. But no democratic nation state should meet terrorism with terrorism, as Israel has done. When Britain faced "Irish" terrorism, it didn't respond by bombing Dublin. As with Britain's incendiary bombing of German cities in the Second World War, there can be no justification for responding to slaughtered innocents by killing more children. Israel's response to Hizbollah has been an abomination of Biblical proportions.

But simple condemnation is an inadequate response. The Christian paradigm does not condemn. But it doesn't prevaricate either. The example from our scriptures is definite and direct. When a crowd threatens to stone an adulterous woman, the founder of our faith doodles in the sand, but says "let he who is without sin throw the first stone". He holds his tongue before the Roman governor, but then makes it clear that he has no earthly power other than that granted by God. Truly extraordinarily, he prays forgiveness for his judicial murderers even as they nail him to the cross. And on a plain in the mountains of Galilee he faces a crowd that could at any moment turn ugly with words that must have struck the young apostle John as important enough to include: "Make the men sit down".

Men under pressure tend to stand their ground and look hard, get belligerent, spoil for a fight. When the fighting starts they try to assert and control and, in war zones, to grab what they can and to kill to defend their families. But it's difficult to throw your weight about when you're sitting on the grass, having a picnic, at the same eye level as the women and children. I doubt many men of war could bomb children if they looked them in the eye.

In the end, the fighting in southern Lebanon ended when the men were made to sit down. But the fighting will start again - there, or in Iraq, or Iran, or Afghanistan, or North Korea, or Darfur. And it may be for the women witnesses, faced with men of aggression and violence, whether Hizbollah, or Israeli militia or the Government of the United States, to echo the Christian imperative that is held in five words that ring down the centuries.