Honk for peace

The election is over but bumper stickers are forever. Stuck in traffic, I am a captive student: "Make Love Not War"; "Iraq Nam"; "There Was Never a Good War or a Bad Peace"; "War Is Hell"; "Born Again Peacenick"; "War stops a beating heart"; "Peace Now, No Excuses" . . .

"Honk for Peace."

I want to honk. But the motorist proselytizing pacifism a car length in front of me has perhaps forgotten the idealism he plastered his car with back in the '90s. He will misunderstand my gesture and return a gesture unbecoming of his better angels.

But I am always stumped by the issue. Something there is in man that hates war. Something there is that loves war---or if not war, then the virtues that come alive in war: heroism, bravery, loyalty, self-sacrifice. Such ambivalence do we have that Robert E. Lee famously said, watching the carnage at Fredericksburg, "It is good that war is so terrible, else we would grow too fond of it."

I will not say the Lord is "ambivalent," but I will say he is not to be fit in anybody's box. He himself commands Israel: "'Avenge the people of Israel on the Midianites.'. . . So Moses spoke. . . . 'Arm men from among you for the war, that they may go against Midian to execute the Lord's vengeance on Midian'" (Numbers 31:1-3).

But then, after the last sword is wiped of its blood, God commands those who had wielded them: "Encamp outside the camp for seven days. Whoever of you has killed any person . . . purify yourselves . . . on the third day and on the seventh day" (v.19). Why must they purify themselves who did the Lord's bidding? I don't know. It was definitely the Lord's work, and needed doing but it would seem that it was a work distasteful even to him.

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