That I'm a Christian pacifist isn't too much a surprise. Thing is, most folks assume that pacifism is tantamount to being a doormat. That it's impractical in the real world. Even some of my sisters and brothers misunderstand what that means.
Many otherwise devout Christians simply dismiss Jesus' teachings about nonviolence out of hand as impractical idealism. And with good reason. "Turn the other cheek" has come to imply a passive, doormat-like quality that has made the Christian way seem cowardly and complicit in the face of injustice. "Resist not evil" seems to break the back of all opposition to evil and to counsel submission. "Going the second mile" has become a platitude meaning nothing more than "extend yourself" and appears to encourage collaboration with the oppressor. Jesus' teaching, viewed this way, is impractical, masochistic and even suicidal -- an invitation to bullies and spouse-batterers to wipe up the floor with their supine Christian victims. Not to mention how impractical it seems on the international level.
Surely that's not what Jesus meant. Well, let's be honest. It isn't.
Jesus never displayed that kind of passivity. Whatever the source of the misunderstanding (and there are plenty of them, I'm sure), such distortions are clearly neither in Jesus nor his teaching, which, in context, is one of the most revolutionary political statements ever uttered: "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. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile" (Mt 5.38-41; Lk 6.29).
The traditional interpretation of "do not resist an evildoer" has been nonresistance to evil -- an odd conclusion, given the fact that on every occasion Jesus himself resisted evil with every fiber of his being. The fifth-century theologian Augustine agreed that the gospel teaches nonresistance, and therefore declared that a Christian must not attempt self-defense. However, he noted, if someone is attacking my neighbor, then the love commandment requires me to defend my neighbor, by force of arms if necessary. With that deft stroke, Augustine opened the door to the just-war theory, the military defense of the Roman Empire, and the use of torture and capital punishment. Following his lead, Christians have ever since been justifying wars fought for
nothing more than national interest as "just".
Curiously enough, some pacifists have also bought the nonresistance interpretation, and therefore have rejected nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience as coercive and in violation of the law of Christ.
But the gospel doesn't teach nonresistance to evil. Jesus counsels resistance, but without violence. The Greek word translated "resist" in Mt 5.39 is ἀνθίστημι (from antistenai), meaning literally to stand (stenai) against (anti). What translators have over-looked is that antistenai is most often used in the Greek version of the Old Testament as a technical term for warfare. It describes the way opposing armies would march toward each other until their ranks met. Then they would "take a stand", that is, fight. Eph 6.13 uses precisely this imagery: "Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand [antistenai] on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm [stenai]". The image is not of a punch-drunk boxer somehow managing to stay on his feet, but of soldiers standing their ground, refusing to flee. In short, antistenai means more here than simply to "resist" evil. It means to resist violently, to revolt or rebel, to engage in an armed insurrection.
Here's the point: Jesus isn't telling us to submit to evil, but to refuse to oppose it on its own terms. We're not to let the opponent dictate the methods of our opposition. He is urging us to transcend both passivity and violence by finding a third way, one that is at once assertive and yet nonviolent. The correct translation would be the one still preserved in the earliest renditions of this saying found in the New Testament epistles: "Do not repay evil for evil" (Rom 12.17; 1 Thess 5.15; 1 Pet 3.9). The Scholars Version of Mt 5.39a is superb: "Don't react violently against the one who is evil".
The examples that follow in Matthew confirm the reading. For example, "turn the other cheek".
You're probably imagining a blow with the right fist. But such a blow would fall on the left cheek. To hit the right cheek with a fist would require the left hand. But the left hand could be used only for unclean tasks; at Qumran, a Jewish religious community of Jesus' day, to gesture with the left hand meant exclusion from the meeting and penance for ten days. To grasp this you must physically try it: How would you hit the other's right cheek with your right hand? If you've tried it, you know: The only feasible blow is a backhand.
The backhand was not a blow to injure, but to insult, humiliate, degrade. It was not administered to an equal, but to an inferior. Masters backhanded slaves; husbands, wives; parents, children; Romans, Jews. The whole point of the blow was to force someone who was out of line back into place.
Notice Jesus' audience: "If anyone strikes YOU". These are people used to being thus degraded. He is saying to them, "Refuse to accept this kind of treatment anymore. If they backhand you, turn the other cheek". (Now you really need to physically enact this to see the problem.) By turning the cheek, the servant makes it impossible for the master to use the backhand again: His nose is in the way. And anyway, it's like telling a joke twice; if it didn't work the first time, it simply won't work. The left cheek now offers a perfect target for a blow with the right fist; but only equals fought with fists, as we know from Jewish sources, and the last thing the master wishes to do is to establish this underling's equality. This act of defiance renders the master incapable of asserting his dominance in this relationship. He can have the slave beaten, but he can no longer cow him.
By turning the cheek, then, the "inferior" is saying: "I'm a human being, just like you. I refuse to be humiliated any longer. I'm your equal. I'm a child of God. I won't take it anymore".
Such defiance is no way to avoid trouble. (Ask Dr King.) Meek acquiescence is what the master wants. Such "cheeky" behavior may call down a flogging, or worse. But the point has been made. The Powers That Be have lost their power to make people submit. And when large numbers begin behaving thus (and Jesus was addressing a crowd), you have a social revolution on your hands. (Again, ask Dr King. Or Gandhi.)
In that world of honor and shaming, the "superior" has been rendered impotent to instill shame in a subordinate. He has been stripped of his power to dehumanize the other. As Gandhi taught, "The first principle of nonviolent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating".
When you understand what Jesus is saying, you realize how revolutionary he is. Instead of telling battered wives to take it, he is asking them to stand up in the face of aggression, but to do so nonviolently. That's what I mean when I call Jesus a "pacifist".
Because this was more than interpersonal ethical theory. In the face of Roman political aggression (namely, his own flogging and crucifixion), he confronted the Powers That Be, but he did so nonviolently. To victims -- personal or communal -- Jesus advised, "Stand up for yourselves, defy your masters, assert your humanity; but don't answer the oppressor in kind. Find a new, third way that is neither cowardly submission nor violent reprisal".
Jesus isn't advocating nonviolence merely as a technique for outwitting the enemy, but as a just means of opposing the enemy in a way that holds open the possibility of the enemy's becoming just also. Both sides must win. We're summoned to pray for our enemies' transformation, and to respond to ill treatment with a
love that is not only godly but also from God.
The logic of Jesus' nonviolent resistance to evil goes beyond the alternatives of inaction (flight) or overaction (fight). His response comes out of love -- a divine love that flows through Christians, too -- that both liberates the oppressed from evil AND frees the oppressor of sin. Christians don't react violently to evil, we don't counter evil in kind, we don't let evil set the terms of our engagement -- and that's what's so revolutionary about Jesus.
Jesus, in short, abhors both passivity and violence. He articulates, out of the history of his own people's struggles, a way by which evil can be opposed without being mirrored, the oppressor resisted without being emulated, and the enemy neutralized without being destroyed. Those who have lived by Jesus' words -- Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, Muriel Lester, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, Hildegard and Jean Goss-Mayr, Mairead (Corrigan) Maguire, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and countless others less well known -- point us to a new way of confronting evil whose potential for personal and social transformation we are only beginning to grasp today.
Even if nonviolent action doesnt immediately change the heart of the oppressor, it does affect those committed to it. As Dr King, attested, it gives them new self-respect, and calls up resources of strength and courage they did not know they had. To "those who have power", Jesus' advice to the powerless may seem paltry. But to those whose lifelong pattern has been to cringe, bow and scrape before their masters, and who have internalized their role as inferiors, this small step is momentous. It's comparable to the attempt by black charwomen in South Africa to join together in what will be for some of them an almost insuperable step: To begin calling their employers by their first names.
Instead of the two options ingrained in us by millions of years of unreflective, brute response to biological threats from the environment: Jesus offers a third way. This new way marks a historic mutation in human development: the revolt against the principle of natural selection. With Jesus a way emerges by which evil can be opposed without being mirrored:
1. Seize the moral initiative
2. Find a creative alternative to violence
3. Assert your own humanity and dignity as a person
4. Meet force with ridicule or humor
5. Break the cycle of humiliation
6. Refuse to submit or to accept the inferior position
7. Expose the injustice of the system
8. Take control of the power dynamic
9. Shame the oppressor into repentance
10. Stand your ground
11. Make the Powers make decisions for which they are not prepared
12. Recognize your own power
13. Be willing to suffer rather than retaliate
14. Force the oppressor to see you in a new light
15. Deprive the oppressor of a situation where a show of force is effective
16. Be willing to undergo the penalty of breaking unjust laws
17. Die to fear of the old order and its rules
Many otherwise devout Christians simply dismiss Jesus' teachings about nonviolence out of hand as impractical idealism. And with good reason. "Turn the other cheek" has come to imply a passive, doormat-like quality that has made the Christian way seem cowardly and complicit in the face of injustice. "Resist not evil" seems to break the back of all opposition to evil and to counsel submission. "Going the second mile" has become a platitude meaning nothing more than "extend yourself" and appears to encourage collaboration with the oppressor. Jesus' teaching, viewed this way, is impractical, masochistic and even suicidal -- an invitation to bullies and spouse-batterers to wipe up the floor with their supine Christian victims. Not to mention how impractical it seems on the international level.
Surely that's not what Jesus meant. Well, let's be honest. It isn't.
Jesus never displayed that kind of passivity. Whatever the source of the misunderstanding (and there are plenty of them, I'm sure), such distortions are clearly neither in Jesus nor his teaching, which, in context, is one of the most revolutionary political statements ever uttered: "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. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile" (Mt 5.38-41; Lk 6.29).
The traditional interpretation of "do not resist an evildoer" has been nonresistance to evil -- an odd conclusion, given the fact that on every occasion Jesus himself resisted evil with every fiber of his being. The fifth-century theologian Augustine agreed that the gospel teaches nonresistance, and therefore declared that a Christian must not attempt self-defense. However, he noted, if someone is attacking my neighbor, then the love commandment requires me to defend my neighbor, by force of arms if necessary. With that deft stroke, Augustine opened the door to the just-war theory, the military defense of the Roman Empire, and the use of torture and capital punishment. Following his lead, Christians have ever since been justifying wars fought for
nothing more than national interest as "just".
Curiously enough, some pacifists have also bought the nonresistance interpretation, and therefore have rejected nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience as coercive and in violation of the law of Christ.
But the gospel doesn't teach nonresistance to evil. Jesus counsels resistance, but without violence. The Greek word translated "resist" in Mt 5.39 is ἀνθίστημι (from antistenai), meaning literally to stand (stenai) against (anti). What translators have over-looked is that antistenai is most often used in the Greek version of the Old Testament as a technical term for warfare. It describes the way opposing armies would march toward each other until their ranks met. Then they would "take a stand", that is, fight. Eph 6.13 uses precisely this imagery: "Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand [antistenai] on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm [stenai]". The image is not of a punch-drunk boxer somehow managing to stay on his feet, but of soldiers standing their ground, refusing to flee. In short, antistenai means more here than simply to "resist" evil. It means to resist violently, to revolt or rebel, to engage in an armed insurrection.
Here's the point: Jesus isn't telling us to submit to evil, but to refuse to oppose it on its own terms. We're not to let the opponent dictate the methods of our opposition. He is urging us to transcend both passivity and violence by finding a third way, one that is at once assertive and yet nonviolent. The correct translation would be the one still preserved in the earliest renditions of this saying found in the New Testament epistles: "Do not repay evil for evil" (Rom 12.17; 1 Thess 5.15; 1 Pet 3.9). The Scholars Version of Mt 5.39a is superb: "Don't react violently against the one who is evil".
The examples that follow in Matthew confirm the reading. For example, "turn the other cheek".
You're probably imagining a blow with the right fist. But such a blow would fall on the left cheek. To hit the right cheek with a fist would require the left hand. But the left hand could be used only for unclean tasks; at Qumran, a Jewish religious community of Jesus' day, to gesture with the left hand meant exclusion from the meeting and penance for ten days. To grasp this you must physically try it: How would you hit the other's right cheek with your right hand? If you've tried it, you know: The only feasible blow is a backhand.
The backhand was not a blow to injure, but to insult, humiliate, degrade. It was not administered to an equal, but to an inferior. Masters backhanded slaves; husbands, wives; parents, children; Romans, Jews. The whole point of the blow was to force someone who was out of line back into place.
Notice Jesus' audience: "If anyone strikes YOU". These are people used to being thus degraded. He is saying to them, "Refuse to accept this kind of treatment anymore. If they backhand you, turn the other cheek". (Now you really need to physically enact this to see the problem.) By turning the cheek, the servant makes it impossible for the master to use the backhand again: His nose is in the way. And anyway, it's like telling a joke twice; if it didn't work the first time, it simply won't work. The left cheek now offers a perfect target for a blow with the right fist; but only equals fought with fists, as we know from Jewish sources, and the last thing the master wishes to do is to establish this underling's equality. This act of defiance renders the master incapable of asserting his dominance in this relationship. He can have the slave beaten, but he can no longer cow him.
By turning the cheek, then, the "inferior" is saying: "I'm a human being, just like you. I refuse to be humiliated any longer. I'm your equal. I'm a child of God. I won't take it anymore".
Such defiance is no way to avoid trouble. (Ask Dr King.) Meek acquiescence is what the master wants. Such "cheeky" behavior may call down a flogging, or worse. But the point has been made. The Powers That Be have lost their power to make people submit. And when large numbers begin behaving thus (and Jesus was addressing a crowd), you have a social revolution on your hands. (Again, ask Dr King. Or Gandhi.)
In that world of honor and shaming, the "superior" has been rendered impotent to instill shame in a subordinate. He has been stripped of his power to dehumanize the other. As Gandhi taught, "The first principle of nonviolent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating".
When you understand what Jesus is saying, you realize how revolutionary he is. Instead of telling battered wives to take it, he is asking them to stand up in the face of aggression, but to do so nonviolently. That's what I mean when I call Jesus a "pacifist".
Because this was more than interpersonal ethical theory. In the face of Roman political aggression (namely, his own flogging and crucifixion), he confronted the Powers That Be, but he did so nonviolently. To victims -- personal or communal -- Jesus advised, "Stand up for yourselves, defy your masters, assert your humanity; but don't answer the oppressor in kind. Find a new, third way that is neither cowardly submission nor violent reprisal".
Jesus isn't advocating nonviolence merely as a technique for outwitting the enemy, but as a just means of opposing the enemy in a way that holds open the possibility of the enemy's becoming just also. Both sides must win. We're summoned to pray for our enemies' transformation, and to respond to ill treatment with a
love that is not only godly but also from God.
The logic of Jesus' nonviolent resistance to evil goes beyond the alternatives of inaction (flight) or overaction (fight). His response comes out of love -- a divine love that flows through Christians, too -- that both liberates the oppressed from evil AND frees the oppressor of sin. Christians don't react violently to evil, we don't counter evil in kind, we don't let evil set the terms of our engagement -- and that's what's so revolutionary about Jesus.
Jesus, in short, abhors both passivity and violence. He articulates, out of the history of his own people's struggles, a way by which evil can be opposed without being mirrored, the oppressor resisted without being emulated, and the enemy neutralized without being destroyed. Those who have lived by Jesus' words -- Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, Muriel Lester, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, Hildegard and Jean Goss-Mayr, Mairead (Corrigan) Maguire, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and countless others less well known -- point us to a new way of confronting evil whose potential for personal and social transformation we are only beginning to grasp today.
Even if nonviolent action doesnt immediately change the heart of the oppressor, it does affect those committed to it. As Dr King, attested, it gives them new self-respect, and calls up resources of strength and courage they did not know they had. To "those who have power", Jesus' advice to the powerless may seem paltry. But to those whose lifelong pattern has been to cringe, bow and scrape before their masters, and who have internalized their role as inferiors, this small step is momentous. It's comparable to the attempt by black charwomen in South Africa to join together in what will be for some of them an almost insuperable step: To begin calling their employers by their first names.
Instead of the two options ingrained in us by millions of years of unreflective, brute response to biological threats from the environment: Jesus offers a third way. This new way marks a historic mutation in human development: the revolt against the principle of natural selection. With Jesus a way emerges by which evil can be opposed without being mirrored:
1. Seize the moral initiative
2. Find a creative alternative to violence
3. Assert your own humanity and dignity as a person
4. Meet force with ridicule or humor
5. Break the cycle of humiliation
6. Refuse to submit or to accept the inferior position
7. Expose the injustice of the system
8. Take control of the power dynamic
9. Shame the oppressor into repentance
10. Stand your ground
11. Make the Powers make decisions for which they are not prepared
12. Recognize your own power
13. Be willing to suffer rather than retaliate
14. Force the oppressor to see you in a new light
15. Deprive the oppressor of a situation where a show of force is effective
16. Be willing to undergo the penalty of breaking unjust laws
17. Die to fear of the old order and its rules