BBC Radio 4 20170814

Good morning. This week marks the 70th anniversary of the creation of the nations of Pakistan and India and the partition of the south Asian subcontinent. While a cause for celebration for the new nations, it has also led to two nuclear powers viewing each other with suspicion, and of course coincides with mounting tension between the US and North Korea.

In 1947, fearing an escalation of violence into civil war there was cautious hope among the British and some Indian politicians that this might be a peaceful solution. However, the drawing of the line of the new border after the creation of the two nations, led to millions of refugees. Oxford historian Yasmin Khan in her book ‘The Great Partition’ sees it as unleashing one of the worst calamities of the 20th century with hundreds of thousands dead due to ethnic violence and disease.

Partition is always a tragedy. It is often the result of war, injustice or perceived difference. It cuts across a common humanity, history, identity and culture. And barriers cause suspicion and threat, whether they are based on political ideology or religions including my own Christianity.

Yet one of the things that draws me to Jesus of Nazareth is his commitment to and ability to break down barriers. To eat with prostitutes and tax collectors subverted the cultural partition of the religious and the sinner. He told stories of how the real love of God was not about passionate patriotism but how a Samaritan cares for a mugged Jew thus transcending generations of religious and cultural hatred and division.

I once saw this graphically represented in the life of a young Christian couple in Belfast. They lived in a house on one side of the peace wall dividing Protestant and Catholics. Many nights, stones and sometimes petrol bombs would be lobbed over the wall onto their house accompanied by shouted threats and chanting. Each morning when the door in the wall was opened, the man would pick his way through the debris to go to work with young people on the other side of the wall. He did so out of a costly conviction that God wanted to heal communities separated by politics and religion.

It seems to me that the world is full of lines of partition. Within families or the workplace, to racial bigotry and hatred, and then on to national boundaries. They can become even more divisive through posturing and unthinking rhetoric. Or we can find common ground through a joint heritage of being human – whether in sport, art, music – or as James Mattis, the US defence secretary recently said by prioritising diplomacy over catastrophic war.