Living Alongside the World

Living Alongside the World
ROMANS 12.14-21

The headline said one word, in thick black letters right across the top of the front page: REVENGE.

The story was a classic tale of spurned love. A woman whose husband had cheated her and gone off with her best friend had bided her time, waited for her opportunity and then killed them both, not instantly but in a way which allowed her to extract maximum satisfaction by giving them maximum terror.

A nasty, sorry, sordid story of course. But the reason it made the front page was, I suspect, that deep down a lot of us know someone we would like, as we say, to ‘get even with’. Someone has done something to us which we have allowed to fester. If we had the courage, or the folly, we would love to get our own back. More worrying still, at any given moment there is probably someone who would love to take revenge on us. The desire for revenge is like a deep itch somewhere right down inside. The newspapers know that if we can’t scratch that itch ourselves we like reading about someone else who could and did...