I have said that the history over which Jeremiah and Jesus wept is one history, repeated over and over through the centuries with crushing regularity. This very Chapter 4 of Jeremiah came home to a colleague of mine, Kosuke Koyama, as he reflected on his boyhood experience of the fire bombing of Tokyo, March 10-11, 1945. More people were killed on those two nights in Tokyo than in Hiroshima five months later. Koyama credits his survival to an incendiary bomb that clumped down a few feet in front of him but proved to be a dud. There is a difference between human and divine anger, reflected Koyama, God s anger is full of tears.
Human anger tends towards vengeance.
That is the question I yearn to answer for myself and my fellow Christians across the earth. Fellow Christians, it is high time for us to ask what is the way to peace on earth, for if we do not find out, our human race may yet succeed in abolishing itself. For our mutual reflection, consider four ways into the way of peace. I offer them to you in ascending order of importance. The first does not seem so impressive, but it is real.