Sacred Violence?

But decapitation—and this takes us back to David and Goliath—is also a "public sacrament," a "way of making the violence holy," and, write Benjamin and Simon, "an act redolent with the sense of sacrifice and the literal execution of God's law, which to the jihadist means death for infidels and apostates."

Wow. How do we connect with this? At the moment let us take the scripture at face value and believe that God really used the acts of David to demonstrate his power in the face of unsurmountable odds. How do we take what surly that day was a sacrament of violence with our world. We surely cannot respond with violence when Jesus told us to love.

I can't recall anyone who made this point better than the German pastor Martin Niemoeller (1892–1984), who protested Hitler's anti-semite measures in person to the fuehrer, was eventually arrested, and then imprisoned for eight years at Sachsenhausen and Dachau (1937–1945). He once confessed, "It took me a long time to learn that God is not the enemy of my enemies. He is not even the enemy of his enemies." When God hates all the same people that you hate, you can be absolutely certain that you have created him in your own image (Lamott).

As much as I like to identify with Don Quixote, one thing I can't jive is his vocation. He claims his holy profession of arms. Is there such a thing? Can prophet, priest, or king excercise the sacrement of violence?