As I sit down to prepare this coming Sunday’s sermon, I am still reflecting on last Sunday’s! It is such an affirmation when someone who has heard a sermon tells me that it has provoked further thought, although it is unusual for me to be the one provoked. I am normally ploughing headlong into the next sermon.

What has stuck with me is the Temple Police who were ordered to arrest Jesus but came back empty handed. Despite the powers they had been given, and the authority which sent them, they decided there was no basis for this arrest.

I am reading this in the light of what is happening in the United States with ICE. These ‘agents’ have been given the power to use unlimited force to arrest and detain people they believe might be ‘illegal immigrants’. It is horrifying. families are torn apart, children ‘abducted’, and people of all colour murdered. Not one ICE agent has been reported of returning back to base empty handed. At not point has an agent said, ‘there is no reason for this.’

And the authority, which comes direct from the President, has not been challenged by his own people. When the Pharisees and Chief Priests, their authority challenged, questioned (I could say verbally abused, I sense anger behind the words) the Temple Police, Nicodemus speaks up:

Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?

John 7:51

To all those ‘Bible believing Christians’ who support their president as having been divinely appointed, where are your voices?

The US is not alone in using power inauthentically. In our own country, the UK, people are being arrested for peaceful and even silent demonstrations. Why are our police not questioning the legal grounds on which they are being ordered to do this? However, it is the way that those in authority are hiding behind a false religion to validate their behaviour which has had me churning over this passage for the past week. Americans, please read your Bibles. Not just searching for the passages which can be twisted to back up your own dark desires, but for the truth, as Jesus lived it.