Murder Most Foul

Murders, passion killings, assassinations, hired killings, suicide bombings, televised beheading... all these and more fill the papers and the online news daily, in this country and all over the world. How red our planet must look to God, with all the shed blood. It has been this way since the days of Adam and Eve, when Cain killed Abel, the first homicide,nay, fratricide, precedent to countless others. Now we have patricide, matricide, parricide, femicide, genocide, infanticide, suicide... and more.

Why, O God? Why do we go on hurting and killing one another?

Not too long after Jesus had been crucified, buried and resurrected, James wrote these words: "What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don't get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures." (James 4:1-3)

And the prophet Jeremiah wrote many hundreds of years before Jesus came: "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" (Jer. 17:9)
He answered his question in the next verse when he quotes the Lord saying: "I the LORD search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve."

The crux of the matter is that we're all sons of our forefathers, Adam and Eve, and we all share the same nature and heart: deceitful, desperately corrupt, covetous, selfish and murderous.

Has this or that one committed murder? Condemn him not alone. We are all as guilty. Given the same circumstances and pressures and trials, who can say that we would not have done the same or worse.

Jesus said: "You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders shall be subject to judgment.' But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca (an Aramaic term of contempt)', is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, "You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell." (Matt. 5:21-22)

Who then can stand? Lord, we need you to save us and to give us the power and teach us to love, to truly love you and one another as you have loved us.