Two of his closest followers, the brothers James and John, went ahead to a Samaritan village to arrange somewhere for him to stay. The village would not have him.
So they came back with a suggestion. Say the word, and we will call fire down out of the sky and burn the place.
They were not inventing that. They had a story in mind and they said so. Elijah, a prophet from the old books, had called fire down on men, and these two had grown up hearing it.
He turned around and rebuked them.
But he turned, and rebuked them... And they went to another village. (Luke 9:55-56)
One note, because we would rather tell you than have you find out later. Many Bibles carry a longer version of that verse, with him saying ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. The oldest copies of Luke do not have those words, and most scholars think a later scribe added them. We would love to use the longer line. We are not going to.
What the earliest copies say is enough. Two men asked to burn a village full of people, and he turned and shut them down, and they walked on to the next town.
What he said about the sun
He explained the reasoning somewhere else, and it is worth having in front of us before we go any further.
He told a crowd to love their enemies and pray for the people who mistreated them. Then he gave the reason, and the reason is about weather.
He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. (Matthew 5:45)
The sun does not come up over the good farm and skip the bad one. The rain does not fall on the kind man's field and stop at his cruel neighbor's fence.
If God sorted people, the weather would show it. It does not. That is his argument, and he is pointing at the sky when he makes it.
And then we asked him to pick a side
For as long as there have been Christian armies, there have been Christians asking God to help them win. Not to comfort them. To win.
The clearest case is a war where both armies came out of the same churches.
In the American Civil War, both sides had chaplains, and the largest single group of them on both sides came from the same denomination. The same church supplied men in blue and men in gray. The same prayers went up from both camps, in the same language, to the same God, asking him to defeat the other camp.
And the man presiding over one of those two sides said so out loud, in public, while the war was still going on.
The sentence a president said in 1865
Abraham Lincoln was the president of the northern states. In March of 1865, with the war nearly over, he stood up to give a speech and said this about the two sides.
Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. (Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865)
Sit with what that is. He is the head of one side. He is standing in front of his own people. And he refuses to tell them God is on their team.
He goes further in the next breath. He says it may seem strange that anyone would dare ask a just God for help in taking their bread from other men's sweat, and then he stops himself and quotes Jesus back at his own audience: let us judge not, that we be not judged.
A politician in the middle of a war, declining to claim God. It is one of the strangest things in that whole century.
The words on the belt
There is an object that makes the point better than an argument does.
For about a hundred years, German soldiers went into battle wearing a belt buckle stamped with three words. Gott mit uns. God with us.
Those words are not a slogan somebody invented for an army. They come out of the Bible. They are what the angel says about the baby in the Christmas story. Matthew writes it down and then translates it for his readers, in case they missed it.
They shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us. (Matthew 1:23)
The line the angel spoke over a newborn ended up stamped on the belt of a man being sent out to kill.
And in the trench on the other side of that field were men praying in English to the same God, for the opposite result.
We should be plain that this is not a point about Germany. Every side has done a version of it, and the churches that blessed those armies were our churches. There is even a written service in the old Catholic books for blessing a sword. We wrote a ceremony for it.
Now the part that matters most
Here is where it would be easy to say something untrue, so we are going to slow down.
The people who go with armies to pray are not the villains in this story. The evidence runs hard the other way, and anybody who has met one knows it.
A chaplain is forbidden to carry a weapon. That has been the rule almost from the beginning. Under the international agreements that govern war, he is not even counted as a combatant. What he actually does, most days, is sit with terrified young men, bury the dead, and write letters to mothers.
In 1943 a troopship called the Dorchester was sunk in the North Atlantic. There were four chaplains aboard. Three were Christian, from three different churches, and one was a Jewish rabbi. When the life jackets ran out, all four gave away their own, and all four went down with the ship.
A priest named Vincent Capodanno was killed walking unarmed into open ground in Vietnam to reach a wounded man. Another, Emil Kapaun, died a prisoner in Korea after going out through gunfire to drag men back.
Every one of them went out unarmed. And on that ship, one of the four was not even a Christian.
If this teaching landed on those men it would be attacking the people in the story who look the most like Jesus.
So who is it about
It is about the institutions. The crown and the bishop and the buckle. The war is blessed at the top, and the man at the bottom is the one who goes out unarmed and dies pulling somebody in.
And that distinction is not ours. A pope drew the same line in 2025, saying the job of a chaplain is to be a listening ear, and that it is not his job to bless the wars, as has sometimes happened.
There is also this, which is my favorite fact in the whole teaching.
In 1914, in the first months of the war, an Englishman and a German met at a railway station in the German city of Cologne and parted for the last time before their countries started killing each other. One was a Quaker, one was a Lutheran. They promised each other that they were one in Christ and could never be at war, whatever their governments did. Then they went home and founded an organization to say so.
While the bishops were preaching the war, those two were at a train station refusing it. Same religion. Same year. Opposite answer.
What he did with a real chance
He had one opportunity to do the thing all of this was reaching for, and we know exactly what he did.
Armed men came for him at night. One of his own drew a blade and cut a man's ear off. Luke says what he did next.
And Jesus answered and said, Suffer ye thus far. And he touched his ear, and healed him. (Luke 22:51)
With the sword still out and the men still there to take him away, he healed the one who came for him.
If you have prayed for your side
Most people have. It is one of the most human things there is, and if somebody you love is in danger you will pray for them and you should.
But the sun came up this morning over the person you are frightened of, the same as it came up over you. He said that was the whole point, and he said it as the reason to love them.
To God there were no outsiders in that trench. Not on either side of it.