WHY CAN'T WE FOLLOW THE AMISH WAY ?

by Adam Harbinson

How often have you heard cynics say: 'You can interpret the Bible to mean what you want it to mean'? And you can. Pull a scripture out of context here and it will almost certainly conflict with another that's been pulled out of context somewhere else. We are a perverse people who will go to any length, even the misuse of the Bible, to support our wicked and selfish ways.

You'll hear people justify revenge by quoting Moses; 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But Moses didn't mean if someone puts your eye out, you are empowered - much less commanded - to put his eye out. No, it was spoken as a limitation. He was saying,'If you must have revenge, it cannot exceed the injury you suffered.'

Another example is from Ezekiel who wrote; 'The soul that sins shall die.' Again, this has been gleefully grasped by hardliners who parade it as a promise of God's punishment, but it's nothing of the sort. Then, as now, people were promoting the noxious notion of 'generational curses': if I sin, my children will be punished. But God spoke through the lips of Ezekiel: 'Why do you quote this proverb: The parents eat sour grapes and the children's mouths pucker at the taste? As surely as I live, says the sovereign Lord, this is my rule: it is the person who sins who will die,' - not his son or grandson.

The truth is that many of us are vengeful people with long memories, and we worship a god of our own making, just like ourselves. Think of the Southern states of America, for example, and their thirst for the death penalty, particularly in Texas whose Governor, now US President, had already signed 150 death warrants by the time he took his place in the White House. And theysay it's the most Christian in the entire country? - maybe it's the most religious.

President Jimmy Carter takes up some of these questions in his excellent book; 'Faith & Freedom.' On capital punishment he says, 'It seems somewhat illogical to say, "You have violated God's commandment, Thou shalt not kill, so therefore I will kill you."' And he goes on to say that 80% of all the executions in America , are carried out in the Southern States, and yet they have a higher rate of murder than any other region - obviously the ultimate deterrent isn't working.

Ah, but then we look at the Amish people in Pennsylvania , and the shootings at the little one-room school at West Nickel Mines. To ask why Charles Carl Roberts IV could carry such evil in his heart for so long is not the point here, nor is there any purpose in asking the question, 'How can justice be done now that the perpetrator is dead?' We should simply remember that God said, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay'.

Let me share with you something I don't think I'll ever forget. Amid the terror and mayhem in the little Christian school that day, the selfless love of Jesus shone as a beacon that may have spared the little girls an even more grisly death than they suffered. Marian Fisher was the oldest of the Amish girls; she was only 13. And yet when the executioner lined all ten of them along the wall - and there's evidence that he planned to sexually assault them before killing them - little Marian stepped forward and asked her killer, 'Please shoot me first,' in an effort to buy time for her schoolmates. How proud her broken-hearted family must be.

'God already is using the deaths of these five girls by turning it into something positive', writes Johann Christoph Arnold, an American author. 'They have opened up to the whole world the Amish way of life, and their deep faith, which is able to overcome any tragedy.'

'We want to forgive,' they said. 'That's the way we are, return good for evil.' And they're more than noble words, for a day after the massacre, the local Amish community started to raise funds for the gunman's widow and children, as well as for the victims' families.

Violence will never extinguish violence. Hatred will never overcome hatred. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth will leave us all toothless and blind. Why don't we all follow the Amish way? Surely it can work in our violent society too?

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