How Do We Know? On God and Nonviolence

 

How Do We Know?

On God and Nonviolence

September 22, 2020

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

Jesus Christ preached, lived, and died nonviolence. There simply is no doubt about that. He said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer.” Matthew 5:38. By resist he meant do not resist violently. He didn’t mean do not resist at all, but this statement is his most obvious and radical expression of and commitment to nonviolence. He said, “But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” Matthew 5:39. The late theologian Walter Wink has taught us that this saying isn’t advocating no resistance to evil either, but it certainly is telling us not to be violent. In all four Gospels Jesus stops his followers from using violence to try to prevent his arrest. Matthew 26:51-52; Mark 14:47; Luke 22:49-51; and John 18:10. He called for a spiritual conquest of the world not a military one. See Mark 5:1-13, where the demon named Legion who is possessing the man represents the way people had internalized the ways of Rome and needed to get Rome out of their minds and spirits nonviolently. Jesus was history’s greatest prophet of nonviolence. Other great prophets of nonviolence like Mahatma Gandhi and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., follow in his footsteps and stand on his shoulders.

Jesus taught, lived, and died for the cause of nonviolence, but why? It was a radical move. In his teaching of nonviolence Jesus overturned a part of his own Jewish heritage. Judaism celebrated God’s violence against the Egyptians. Judaism’s Psalms are full of prayers that God will destroy the prayer’s enemies violently. Judaism believed that God had told King Saul to kill every living thing among the Amalekites and had used the massive violence of the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires to punish first Israel then Judah for their faithlessness. It celebrated the violence of the Persian Empire against the Babylonian Empire that got the Hebrew people back home from the Babylonian exile. The book of the prophet Nahum, right there in the Hebrew Bible and thus in the Christian Bible too, is an ode to death and destruction in Nineveh, the capital city of the Assyrian Empire. It’s not that Jesus’ Jewish heritage only embraced violence divine and human. It didn’t. There are verses in the Hebrew Bible that speak of God bringing peace too. See for example Psalm 29, which celebrates God’s power in nature and ends with the line “May the Lord bless his people with peace!” Psalm 23 is an ode to peace with God. Still, Jesus’ Jewish heritage never rejected violence the way Jesus did. It accepted at least some violence and even thought that on occasion God is violent.

So why did Jesus break so radically with his faith’s acceptance of violence both divine and human? I can think of two reasons, one practical and one theological. It’s easy enough for us to understand the practical reason. Throughout his life Jesus’ Jewish homeland was occupied and oppressively ruled by the Roman Empire. Yes, Rome had established the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, by the time Jesus came along, but it had established that peace through the application of large amounts of violence. The Roman legions, that is, the Roman army, defeated all enemies militarily and maintained order throughout the empire by brutally suppressing all opposition to Roman rule, especially violent opposition.

Jesus grew up in Nazareth, a tiny hamlet about five miles or so from the city of Sepphoris. The Bible never mentions Sepphoris, which is odd because Sepphoris was the capital city of Galilee until Jesus was about twenty years old. In 4 BCE upon the death of the Roman flunky King Herod the Great a man named Judas of Galilee had led an armed revolt against Rome in which Sepphoris figured prominently. The Romans sent in the Marines so to speak and leveled Sepphoris. As a youth and young man Jesus may have been involved in the rebuilding of Sepphoris. His earthly father Joseph was a “tekton,” usually translated as carpenter but perhaps meaning something more like stonemason. It is reasonable that Joseph and perhaps Jesus found work in the nearby capital city. Whether Jesus was or not he certainly knew what the Romans had done to the city when the people rebelled violently against Rome.

So Jesus certainly knew how the Romans reacted to violent opposition. He had almost certainly seen the Romans crucify people they considered to be enemies. He knew that violent opposition to Rome would be suicidal for the Jewish people. He turned out to be right about that. The Jewish people rebelled violently against Rome in 66 CE. They had some initial success. They managed to drive the Romans out of Jerusalem. In 70 CE however the Romans returned, retook the city, destroyed the Jewish temple there, and drove the Jews out of the city. Jesus didn’t live to see those events, but he was certainly insightful enough to have seen the inevitable consequences of violence against Rome in his day. No wonder he counseled nonviolence against the Roman occupier.

Yet if Jesus’ opposition to violence came only from fear of Rome it wouldn’t mean much to us. We might learn from it that we need carefully to weigh the risks against the benefits of any decision to act violently, but that’s about all. Those of us who consider ourselves to be committed to and advocates of Christian nonviolence are fond of advancing a second and to us far more important reason for Jesus’ commitment to nonviolence. We say that Jesus was nonviolent because he knew that God is nonviolent. Yet how do we know that Jesus knew that God is nonviolent? There are I think two answers to that question, one Christological and one biblical.

First briefly the Christological answer. Jesus knew that God is nonviolent because Jesus was God Incarnate. Classical Christianity confesses that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine at the same time. He was two natures in one person with neither nature in any way diminishing the other. If Jesus was nonviolent, and he was, we know that God is nonviolent. In Jesus’ nonviolence we see God’s nonviolence because in Jesus we see God. That’s the first way we know that Jesus knew that God is nonviolent.

The contention that Jesus knew that God is nonviolent because Jesus was God Incarnate works for those of us who cling to the ancient Christian confession of Jesus as God Incarnate as part of our own Christian faith. It doesn’t work at all for anyone who does not make that confession. So we need to look for other ways in which we can see that Jesus knew that God is nonviolent. We find another way in two Gospel passages from which Jesus’ knowledge of God as nonviolent appears. They are Matthew 5:43-45 and John 18:33-36.

At Matthew 5:43-45 we read:

 

 You have heard that it was said ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

 

Jesus tells us here that it is love of enemies not violence against them that makes us children of God. Why? Because by loving your enemies rather than killing them you demonstrate that you have inherited the ways of God and are indeed a child of God. As nonviolent you are a child of nonviolent God. The necessary implication is that as violent you aren’t, or at least not so much one. Jesus also tells us here that we see God’s commitment to nonviolence and to peace in the way that in nature God treats the righteous and the unrighteous equally. God treats the violent and the nonviolent equally. God loves all people equally including people we may want to hate or even harm. Jesus tells us here that his message of nonviolence isn’t just from him, it is from God. We are to be nonviolent because God is nonviolent.

At John 18:33-36, another passage from which we see that Jesus knew that God is nonviolent, Jesus has been arrested and handed over to Pilate, the Roman Governor of Judea. John has it that Jesus and Pilate have a most interesting and revealing conversation. We read:

 

Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’ Jesus answered, ‘Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?’ Pilate replies, ‘I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?’ Jesus replied, ‘My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.

 

Jesus’ problem is more that he’s been handed over to the Romans than that he was handed over to the Jews, but never mind. We learn here that Jesus’ kingdom is not “from” this world. The correct translation here is not “of” this world as it is in the King James Version and the New International Version of the Bible. The Greek preposition here “ek” means from not of. It refers to the kingdom’s origin not its location. Jesus’ kingdom has its origin in heaven with God not on the earth. That’s why Jesus’ followers are not using violence to try to save him. Jesus’ kingdom embodies God’s values not earthly values. His kingdom is nonviolent because God is nonviolent.

That’s how we know that God is nonviolent. God Incarnate tells us so. Things Jesus says in the Bible tell us so. There is however another way that we can know that God is nonviolent as well. This way flows from the truth that God is love. 1 John 4:8. We Christians, along with the followers of all of the other major religions, confess that God is love and that God loves all people. Violence is the opposite of love. Violence hurts, maims, and kills people whom God loves. We may hate the people against whom we use violence, but God doesn’t. God loves them, therefore God cannot possibly be violent against them. As a bumper sticker I saw once said, when Jesus said love your enemies I think he probably meant don’t kill them. God isn’t going to kill them either, for God is nonviolent. Since God is love God must be nonviolent. If God loves all people and therefore is never violent against anyone, then we must never be violent against anyone either. God is nonviolent because God is love. Violence harms God’s beloved. Nonviolence is then God’s way. It must therefore be our way too.

So we know these things to be true. Jesus taught us to be nonviolent. He taught us to be nonviolent partly for practical reasons but much more importantly for theological ones. He taught us to be nonviolent because he knew that God is nonviolent. We can know that truth too. We know that God is nonviolent because we know that God is love. Violence was never Jesus’ way. Violence is never God’s way. It must never be our way. May it be so. Amen.