Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Easter 4, 26 April 2026

1 Peter 2:19-25
John 10:1-10

‘When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly.’

I have never before preached on today’s reading from the First Letter of Peter. Its apparent validation and valorisation of suffering make me uncomfortable, and I know I am not the only person affected this way, because the lectionary cuts the first verse of this passage. The verse that we do not hear is, ‘Slaves, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only those who are good and gentle but also those who are dishonest.’ (1 Peter 2:18) That verse would be great comfort to all those Christians who, down through the millennia, have justified slavery as biblically based. It definitely has no place in a twenty-first-century church.

Even without this verse, the rest of today’s passage is problematic. Does the church really want to tell those being abused, those who suffer unjustly, that they should accept their pain, and that enduring it without complaint is commendable? That is certainly not a message that I want to preach. My advice to people who are suffering unjustly or experiencing pain is to complain loudly. But then I am not writing to new Christians who are slaves in a society in which the heads of households have the right of life or death not only over them, but over their wives and children. I live in a world in which Christians are not a vulnerable and marginal group always at risk of abuse from powerful authorities. The author of this letter was writing in a very different world than the one in which we live, and in his world, his advice might have been life-giving, rather than life-destroying.

One of the commentators I read this week pointed out what today’s passage does not say:

Nowhere does it suggest that suffering is a legitimate condition for those who are abused, coerced or oppressed. Nowhere does it suggest a stoic tolerance for violence against anyone. Nowhere does it suggest that God’s name be invoked as the hand strikes or the belt comes out or the vestments come off.[1]

What it does suggest, though, is that people have more than two choices when they are attacked. They are not limited to accepting the violence or responding to the violence with further violence. They can, possibly, imitate Jesus, who, when he was abused, did not return abuse and when he suffered, did not threaten, but entrusted himself to the hands of God knowing that ultimately God would vindicate him. Every non-violent political resister throughout history has done this.

Enduring when you do good and suffer for it might not seem like the abundant life that Jesus came to give us, but neither is responding to violence with violence. Yesterday was ANZAC Day, and I always find it interesting that as Australians we choose to commemorate those who have served in wars on the anniversary of a great military failure. Other countries remember their dead on the anniversaries of victories or of armistices. We remember Australia’s dead on a date that reminds us of the futility of war.

One of my favourite authors is John Buchan, the son of a Scottish manse who became the Governor-General of Canada and wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps. Among his hundreds of other books, Buchan wrote a twenty-volume history of the First World War as the war was happening. The first volume was published in February 1915, and in it, reflecting on the fall of Antwerp in Belgium to the Germans in 1914, Buchan wrote:

Fighting has its own decencies, and when it is done on conventional lines of attack and counterattack by normal armies, our habituation prevents us from realizing the colossal unreason of it all. But suddenly comes some such business as Antwerp and unseals our eyes. We see the laborious handiwork of man, the cloak which he has made to shelter himself from the outer winds, shrivel before a folly of his own devising. All the sacrifice and heroism, which are the poor recompenses of war, are suddenly overshadowed, and etched in with bitter clearness we note its horror and futility. Some day the world, when its imagination has grown quicker, will find the essence of war not in gallant charges and heroic stands, but in those pale women dragging their pitiful belongings through the Belgian fields in the raw October night.[2]

The ‘horror and futility’ of war doesn’t end with the end of the fighting. John Buchan’s sister Anna wrote of the Armistice in 1918 that: ‘To many it was a day of hysterical joy and relief, to others it was the saddest of days … it made many of us realise, as we had not done before, how irrevocable was our loss.’ And she describes visiting a woman in her district who had lost two sons and who told her: ‘I was at the back beating my rug when I heard the noise. “What is it?” I asked. They told me, “It’s Peace.” I came in and shut the doors and the windows so that I wouldn’t hear the bells mocking me.’[3] John and Anna Buchan lost their beloved youngest brother, Alistair, in France.

In 1915, Sigmund Freud wrote about the First World War that it ‘tramples in blind fury on all that comes in its way as though there were to be no future and no peace among men after it is over. It cuts all the common bonds between contending peoples and threatens to leave a legacy of embitterment that will make any renewal of those bonds impossible for a long time to come’.[4] Freud was mostly right; we know that the bitterness left by the First World War was one of the causes of the Second World War. But there were always a few examples of reconciliation, even amid that bitterness, of which the most famous is the Christmas Truce of 1914. As recently as 2012 a letter from a Staff Sergeant Clement Barker was discovered which described the day to his brother: ‘A German looked over the trench – no shots – our men did the same, and then a few of our men went out and brought the dead in and buried them and the next thing a football kicked out of our Trenches and Germans and English played football.’ In later years, other attempts at holiday ceasefires were suppressed, but it remains as an example that peace and reconciliation are always possible.

Perhaps for us, the most immediate and obvious example of reconciliation is that each year Australians gather on the Gallipoli Peninsula to commemorate the Australian dead. The Australian Government tells participants that: ‘This service takes place with the permission and support of the host nation, the Republic of Türkiye. The commemorative sites at Gallipoli are the sovereign territory of the Turkish people, and holding the annual Anzac Day commemorative services is only possible with the cooperation and generous assistance of the Turkish Government.’ That is, the Government of the country that we invaded, a country that lost more than 80,000 people to the campaign, is willing to allow us to remember our dead along with theirs.

Later wars provide us with other examples of reconciliation among those on opposing sides. Historian Mark Dapin has wondered why Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop is ‘nationally feted’ by Australians when we have forgotten Albert Coates, the senior surgeon to the AIF, who became chief medical officer of a 10,000-bed POW hospital in Thailand. He suggests this might have been partly because ‘Weary’ is a more memorable nickname than ‘Bertie,’ partly because Dunlop was a more memorable figure than Coates, and partly because Coates died in 1977, but Dunlop survived until 1993.[5] I suspect another of the reasons we remember Weary is because we know that his compassion was not limited to those of his own side. Dunlop is remembered for holding a dying Japanese POW in his arms, trying to comfort him, and later writing that ‘the memory dwelt with me as a lingering nightmare … I was deeply conscious of the Buddhist belief that all men are equal in the face of suffering and death’.

At the end of every war, combatant nations sit down to negotiate together. The creation of the United Nations and the entire international legal order was an attempt to have negotiations precede violence. We now know, as Buchan predicted in 1915, that the essence of war is not in gallant charges and heroic stands, but in the suffering it inflicts on civilians. I have never experienced my country being invaded, my people being murdered, my rights being trampled, so I cannot say that I would never retaliate or respond to violence with more violence, and the UN Charter, which was written in an attempt to end war, says that states may use force to protect themselves from an armed attack. I can say that a world in which more of us imitate Christ and, when abused, do not return abuse would be a much better and more peaceful world.

‘For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.’ I talked last week about the perversion of Christianity that is currently justifying violence in the Middle East. Those who use the name of Jesus to justify violence have gone so far astray that it may seem impossible that they can ever return to the shepherd. But nothing is impossible with God. Jesus remains the gate even for those who make war, and if they enter by him they will be saved; they ‘will come in and go out and find pasture’. On this day after ANZAC Day, that can be our prayer, that even the warmongers of the world may find the abundant life that Jesus came to give us. Amen.

[1] Joy Douglas Strome in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 2, p. 436.

[2] John Buchan, A History of the Great War. Volume: 1. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), p. 310.

[3] Anna Buchan, Unforgettable, Unforgotten (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1957), pp. 163-4.

[4] Quoted in Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 1.

[5] Mark Darin, Lest: Australian War Myths (Cammeray: Scribner, 2024), p. 166