The Fall Of A Sparrow

Today's (Sunday June 22) text was Mathew 10:24-39 containing Christ's celebrated observation that not even the fall of a sparrow is outside God's concern. "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?  Yet not one of them fall to the ground outside your Father's care" is the modern day translation into English, and for some reason Google won't come up with the King James version.  The passage was used to good advantage by Shakespeare when Hamlet shrugs off his own death saying (V.2):
"There's a special providence in
the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be
not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come:
the readiness is all.
In the same exhortation in Mathew Jesus is quoted as saying:
"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth.  I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother . . . ."
It is a horrific vision, and yet both passages taken together work so well with the news of the world as reported in today's Times--the Israelis versus the Palestinians, the Ukrainians versus the Russians, the Shiites versus the Sunnis, the Buddhists versus the Moslems, one religious war after another (even those that do not on the surface seem to be over religion, e.g., Putin's actions, which are perhaps more nostalgia for Stalin than a new found allegiance to the dastardly Russian Orthodox Church).  All these, however, are the end result finally of a god against whom it is useless to resist.
The monotheism of the religions of the Book, as they are called, is frightening in its implications, the demand for blind belief, and what else could it be, since none of us knows anything about the world beyond our senses.  The sparrow falls and is seen by no one, because it does not matter.  Will this great truth ever be recovered?  Will those who insist upon fighting against their fellow man because they have the truth, that the sparrow in them is being constantly watched, will they ever realize that all their killing, their maiming, their cruelties, are simply the outcome of their fragile beliefs in the unknowable?  Sunday's text is a terrible text, humankind's absolution from their actions, because responsibility rests with a higher authority.  As the sparrows fall in Iraq, Syria, all over the Near East, Southeast Asia, thither and yon, it god's eye that beholds and is accountable.  The humble human perpetrator satisfies his instinct for blood lust and is not responsible.  As a student of ancient culture I have always been more comfortable with religious belief that stems from a notion of a deity or set of deities who have all the human frailties and as such will inadvertently trample on humans, in a childish rage kill humans, in an irrational passion favor a faulty human, a deity or deities who is an acknowledged force but not something to be obeyed, since one never really knows what is involved.  Today's Old Testament reading was the story of God's commanding Abraham to cast out Hagar and his love child to placate his old wife Sarah, and how Hagar and baby suffered in the desert until God was done with his sadism and said enough is enough and found her a good husband and good things ensued.  Abraham's absolute loyalty to God is the underlying subject and it is rewarded finally in the hapless Hagar's successful marriage.  Such misery and rejection, and the happy ending because Abraham did cruelly as he was told.  It's a perfect fit with what Jesus had to say today.