Live and let live

Life is fragile: a newly-fledged great tit chick in my garden

Life is amazing, beautiful and tenacious. Buddleia sprouts from walls, foxes make dens on waste land. But life is also fragile. One estimate in January 2013 listed over 2,000 endangered species. Human life is fragile (and sometimes endangered) too.

We may be top of the food chain but violence, disease and self-centredness cause widespread physical and emotional suffering. Recently there were four highly-publicised murders of young people in the UK: April Jones (aged 5), Tia Sharp (12), Georgia Williams (17), Lee Rigby (25). Time, perhaps, to explore a Christian view of “life”.
 

Life is precious

All life owes its origin to God the creator and sustainer, whatever your view of how it’s developed over time. That’s not just claimed in Genesis 1; it’s in Psalm 104:24-30, Isaiah 42:5, Acts 17:24-28, and elsewhere, too.

They suggest that human life is unique because people “made in the image of God” (Genesis 1:26, 2:7) are able to seek and know God. Humans are also endowed with enhanced self-awareness and creative and communicative skills. We don’t just survive; we build culture. We’re so precious that God set his love on us and took human form in order to put us back on the path to fellowship with him and each other (Philippians 2:5-8).

Life is protected

Psalm 8:3-8 and 116:15 give people a higher status than animal life, but less than angelic life. Yet that doesn’t devalue animal life; common birds are still precious to God (Matthew 10:29-31). If we have anything precious, we care for it and look after it. The “creation mandate” of Genesis 1:28, 2:15 tells us to “nurture” not “exploit”; conservation and sustainability are ancient ideas recently re-discovered and not widely observed.

The unspoken answer to Cain’s rhetorical question “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9) is emphatically “yes”. People who care for others are commended and those who don’t are condemned (Matthew 25:31-46). We don’t have the right to rob another person of life. The imposition of the death penalty for murder in Old Testament times was a sign of the crime’s magnitude. In modern times, judicial execution has largely been abandoned (although there are still people on America’s “death row”): many people feel even that is a step too far.

Life depends on a mindset

For most people, killing someone is emotionally difficult. It’s often achieved by regarding victims as sub-human. US soldiers who went berserk in the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam “didn’t consider the Vietnamese human” ¹. Hutus who slaughtered Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 saw their victims as cockroaches to be exterminated². And abusive US guards at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq said: “It was told to all of us, they’re nothing but dogs”³.

Murder begins in the mind. Jesus virtually equated hatred and anger with murder (Matthew 5:21,22). He was saying “as people think, so they are”. We may not hurt or kill a person, but our attitude further poisons that relationship, contaminates others, and is toxic to our own spirituality. Hating someone diminishes my ability to receive God’s love for myself and to reflect it in the world. It shrivels the soul.

That’s important to remember when we look down on the local gangs as “pondlife”, wish ill on a difficult neighbour or work colleague, or even feel pleased if something befalls them; “it serves them right”. But Jesus said “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you (Luke 6:27). Flowers or a card achieve more lasting good than private or public curses.

Hard as it seems to us, God loves the people we can’t stand. If I value life, I will cherish all human life, and not physically, mentally or verbally trash the people who irritate or annoy me. We’ll explore another aspect of this in my next article.

Think and talk

1.  Look up the biblical references above. List the things they suggest about the value of human life. Which of these do we most easily forget or ignore, and why?

2.  A basic biblical command is “love your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:31). Yet the world is full of conflict. What little things can we do to reduce tension and promote harmony?
3.  Jesus said God cares for the sparrows, but we’re more valuable than they are (Matthew10:29-31). How might caring for non-human life help us become more sensitive to other people’s fragility?
4.  Jesus also said he came to bring fullness of life to people (John 10:10), yet “religion” is often viewed negatively. What do you think he had in mind?

References

1.  Reported by Celina Dunlop in The archive hour, BBC Radio 4, 15 March 2008
2.  Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer effect, Rider 2009, p. 14.
3.  Ibid, p. 352.