The Sermon on the Mount… I’ve been turning it over again and again and it has been tough reading. I’ve been trying to get a sense of why these words are so exacting.
Then I was reading a story in the newspaper last Saturday and things started to become a whole lot clearer.
In April 1979, under the cover of darkness, Samir Kuntar, along with three other men travelled by rubber dingy, from Lebanon – 5kms into Israeli territory. They came ashore onto the beach at the town of Narhariya. Keep in mind, Samir Kuntar was only 16 yrs old at the time.
It was close to midnight. At random the four – who were members of the Palestinian Liberation Front – chose an apartment block where a young Smadar Haran lived with her husband & two young children.
Amid gunfire & exploding grenades, Kuntar and his accomplices stormed the flat and seized Mrs Haran’s husband, Danny and their four year old daughter. Kuntar forced them down to the beach, where he shot Danny and threw his body into the ocean. The little girl – Einat was forced to watch her father’s die. Then with the butt of his rifle, Kuntar smashed little Einat’s head against a rock until she too was dead.
Back in their apartment, Smadar Haran was hiding in the attic, with a neighbour – cradling her 2 yr old daughter, Yael. Fearing her other daughter’s cries would alert the terrorists, she covered Yael’s mouth with her hand. She accidently suffocated her own child. By night’s end, Smadar Haran’s entire family was dead.
Overwhelmed by the immense tragedy, Smadar Haran faced two choices – to live or to die. Smadar chose life. She trained as a social worker, she remarried a psychologist and today has she two teenage girls.
For the past thirty years the terrorist Samir Kuntar has been a prisoner in an Israeli jail. This last week the Israeli cabinet decided to release Samir Kuntar in exchange for two Israeli soldiers who were taken prisoner two years ago in Lebanon & who are probably dead.
As much as Smadar Haran wanted to escape the ties that bound her to Samir Kuntar, she could not. Now there is an extraordinary twist to the story. The family of one of the abducted Israeli soldiers – Ehud Goldwasser – lives around the corner from her in Narhariya. The two families are close family friends and Smadar Haran even attended the abducted soldier’s wedding.
This last weekm the Israeli cabinet wanted to know how Smadar Haran would feel if Samir Kuntar was released from prison, in exchange for Ehud Goldwasser.
Smadar Haran took a while to answer…
Finally she said, “It’s so delicate and I can’t close my eyes to other people’s pain and I can’t close my heart… Sometimes the best interests might not be my interests, maybe.”
This last week she wrote to the Israeli cabinet freeing it’s members from any guilt they may feel, “Kuntar is not and never was my own private prisoner”.
“Turn it over and turn it over again, for everything is contained in the Scriptures. Regard it, grow old in it and never abandon it, for there is no greater virtue.”
The teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount seems so demanding because most of us live life within a fairly narrow bandwidth… comfortably, safely ! We are careful with our relationships, associating mostly with people like ourselves.
Yet when I look at the gut wrenching, shattering life experience of Smadar Haran, whose family is murdered and who in fear and terror, suffocates her only other child, a watered down, less demanding version of the Sermon on the Mount just doesn’t cut it.
Jesus says don’t let anger be your response to the world because anger distorts your judgement, anger gives way to bitterness and shuts us down emotionally, even to the ones we love. Jesus says don’t strike back in revenge but give and forgive those who wrong you because revenge hardens hearts and sets up cycles of violence that take on a life of their own. Jesus says love your enemies because love even allows a poor widow to powerfully protest and transcend institutional evil and the selfish, conflicted ways of men.
The Sermon on the Mount. These words of Jesus are life, abundant, generous & open. They create the space for us to live life BIG, even when the storms of life come.
