Tribal creatures

Press the play button to watch the video above or press 'more' to read the transcript of the daily devotion below. Please read Esther 3:13-4:3 (use your own Bible or use the link above to access the in-App Bible).

‘There was great mourning among the Jews, with fasting and weeping and lamenting, and most of them lay in sackcloth and ashes.’ Esther 4:3

The Jews were threatened with annihilation, their despair is evident. We are not told that they prayed, but they must surely have done so in words like those of Psalm 83. Reading on in the story of Esther, we learn that God answered that prayer, and the Jews were saved from destruction. But we know that that has not always been the case.

I was reminded of this quite recently by the film White Bird which tells the story of Sara, a Jewish girl in Vichy France, who is saved from the Nazis by Julien, a crippled French boy treated as an outsider by his classmates. Sara survived where her mother and millions of other Jews did not. But the film reminds us that it was not only Jews who were caught up in the Holocaust, for Julien is captured to be taken to a camp. The Nazis targeted many groups: Roma, black and mixed-race people, gay men, and others who did not fit their idea of Aryan perfection. The Holocaust was an extreme and horrific example of human behaviour. But we are all tribal creatures who tend to exclude, and even demonise, people who don’t belong to our ‘tribe’.

Sadly, the Church is not free from this behaviour. Though we claim to believe in one Lord Jesus Christ we are fragmented into warring sects and factions by which people are hurt and diminished. But Our Lord Jesus commands us to love our enemies, and to pray for those who persecute us, for God loves them too. His teaching is illustrated in the Parable of the Good Samaritan in an act of kindness to someone from a different, hostile, ‘tribe’. Imagine the incident updated as kindness shown by a Palestinian to an Israeli. How would the Israeli feel? How would other Palestinians react?

Think of someone who seems alien because they do not belong to your ‘tribe’. What words or actions of yours they would regard as kindness? Pray that they may know themselves to be loved by God. Pray for grace to love them as God loves them.

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, may they know that you love them. Teach me to love them as you do. Amen.

Richard Carter, Licensed Lay Minister, Lancaster Priory.