Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution: a Theology of Christian Nonviolence

Having been involved with the Catholic Worker Movement for years now, I am aware of how many people deeply admire Dorothy Day, the co-founder (alongside the Peter Maurin) of the movement. They like her activism, her concern for the poor, and the fact that she put her faith into practice.

But many have been much more hesitant about her commitment to being a Catholic pacifist. She maintained her position in this regard even during WWII, publicly opposing participation in the war, and as a result The Catholic Worker newspaper lost thousands of subscribers. So I am aware that in broaching the issue of the legitimate use of force I am entering a minefield, so to speak.

Yet is seems to me that, headline news being what it is these days, this is an issue that Christians have to talk about. And it seems to me that there’s a way of discussing it that doesn’t involve drawing too many lines in the sand. For I think there’s plenty of important groundwork Christians can agree on before we come to the important questions of whether you’re for “just war,” or “pacificism,” or something else.

We can start, like Dorothy Day did, with Jesus.

What I propose to do in this article, then, is begin to take a look at some of the Gospel roots of the Christian commitment to peace – a commitment shared by all Christians, wherever we ultimately come down on whether this peace sometimes requires the use of violence. This will help us see what motivates the views of people like Day, while recognizing that this is a complex issue that serious Catholics of good will can legitimately disagree about.

Yet it will also go to show just how central Jesus’ message of peace is, and what a practical difference it can make to the life of the Church, and even to the daily lives of each of his disciples.

Jesus came on the public scene announcing “the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mk 1:15). In doing so he was giving life to the Old Testament promise, in books like the prophet Daniel, that a time would come when God would act to right the wrongs of the world and set up his kingdom once and for all. The prophets had promised, after all, not merely a spiritual kingdom, or a religious one, or an invisible kingdom in your heart, but a social and political order just as real, visible and tangible as Babylon or Rome had been (see, for instance, Daniel 2). God’s kingdom meant nothing short of a new society, which would finally be able to be the blessing to the world that God had promised the people of Abraham would be (see Gen 12:1-3). The bad guys are about to be taken care of, and the good guys are about to win. That’s what “the kingdom is at hand” means.

But Jesus wasn’t the only one with a vision of the kingdom. We know from history, including the Bible, that there were many other figures like Jesus in the century or two on either side of him who made similar announcements. And so Jesus steps into the limelight, talking revolution and a new social order, in an already politically charged situation.

We can divide these other figures’ visions into basically three different categories, which were the basic political options available to people at Jesus’ time.

First, there were the quietists. These Jews sat loose to the present social scene, said their prayers, kept the Law and prided themselves on being a separate, especially holy society, uncontaminated by the “world.” They even lived in caves. They did this in the belief that if they just sat back and focused on these things, God himself would bring his kingdom with fire and brimstone and an army of angels and take care of the bad guys without them lifting a finger.

Second, there were the violent revolutionaries. Good, valiant men of the sort we read about in the biblical books of the Maccabees. In the face of pagan oppression and the encroachment of their culture on the Holy Land, many of these “zealots” went around Judea and Galilee mustering popular support for militia to oppose Rome and other Jewish compromisers. The kingdom would come at the tip of a sword.

Finally, there were the compromisers themselves: the keepers of the status quo. These were those hierarchs and imperial bureaucrats based in the temple in Jerusalem: the High Priests, the Council, the scribes. These reasonable people kept the peace by collaborating with Rome, making the best of a difficult situation, keeping order for the sake of the people, and enjoying power and padded pockets for their efforts. Their kingdom was already here, and they had an interest in maintaining it.

This is the context in which we have to understand what we read about Jesus in the Gospels. And in particular we have to see that he was not just proclaiming a general religious or spiritual message about “how to get to heaven when you die,” but, like these other kingdom options, was gathering a community of followers that would to a significant extent be the kingdom he was announcing. For Jesus this kingdom was starting now, and you could join it today by being part of one of the many cells of disciples he was founding all around Judea and Galilee. The Jesus movement was God’s revolution, already getting under way in small communities living the Sermon on the Mount together. So Jesus’ kingdom vision, like the other “parties,” had a concrete, tangible, and visible reality to it. However much it differed from the other revolutions on offer, it was every bit as much a social and political project.

So the real question for your average Joe (or Ioseph, as it were) in Galilee who came out to hear this wandering prophet and potential messiah, just as he might have put it to one of the other wandering prophets he might have seen, was, what kind of kingdom did this Jesus guy have in mind? What was the new social order on offer here? What sort of way of life were his people engaging in?

This was a question with many different aspects to it, obviously. But one of the most pressing was about how the kingdom would get here. Quietist prayers? Revolutionary sword? Or status quo compromise?

It would have been clear that Jesus was not a quietist, for he was not merely sitting around praying for an apocalyptic intervention. He was building a movement in whose communities the kingdom was breaking in presently.

It was even more obvious that he was not a fan of the status quo – his critiques of the leadership and the temple, which we see on nearly every page of the Gospels, made that clear.

But what many may have been wondering about was his relationship to those other “revolutionaries” – those “zealots” who, like Jesus, were actively building their constituencies.

Like many of them he gathered a popular movement, critiqued the temple-state and all its trappings, and claimed, at least implicitly, to be the new focal point of Israel’s history. It would only be natural, given this, if Jesus turned out to follow in the motto of the Maccabees: “Give your lives for the Law and ancestral traditions!” “Take up your sword and follow me!”

It was certainly understandable why people were attracted by such an agenda. The common peasant in the Galilean countryside had a rough go of an already difficult situation. The Romans, like every superpower, imposed heavy taxation on their vassals. These were collected by the status quo keepers via local imperial bureaucrats – tax collectors – who, in addition to the normal Roman tribute, were expected to impose their own mark-up in order to make their own living.

If payments were not forthcoming, massive debts accrued, which eventually meant forfeiture and seizure of land. This sort of dynamic, by the way, is the reason so many of Jesus’ parables are about debts and landowners. Many times peasants became wage laborers on their own former property, moving between starvation and the tip of an imperial or Jewish sword. And then there was the additional tax to be paid to the temple in Jerusalem. Yet even this was ambiguous, for didn’t it go to the same people who facilitated the Roman tax?

To add insult to injury, all these tributes were typically in-kind payments of the toil of their own hands, from their own (now appropriated) fields. The produce was, in a very tangible way, an embodiment of their own suffering, flesh and sweat, of their prayers and fears, as they anxiously hoped for a yield that would feed their families. The harvest was an extension of their person, as well as the object of their religious tradition – of the bounty that the Lord promised in his land to his own people – if they would be faithful. Their crops were part of themselves – now only to have sometimes half of them taken – to further impower the regime that took them. They were being forced to conspire in their own oppresssion.

In such circumstances, revolt didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Wasn’t this the promised land, after all, where Israel should be free? And wouldn’t Yahweh fight for those who fight for themselves, just like he had for Joshua, and for the Maccabees? Our children are hungry – don’t we have to stand up and do something? Here, probably many people thought, with Jesus, was a new Joshua, a new Judas Maccabeus, who would make this all happen. Look at all the people he’s gathering! What an army that would make!

And what does Jesus say?

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for theirs is the kingdom of God” (Mt 5:9).

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit this land” (Mt 5:3).

“Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5:44).

“You have heard it said, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ But I say to you, do not even be angry with your brother” (Mt 5:21-22).

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person (Mt 5:39)

“If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also” (Mt 5:40).

In all of these passages, and many more, Jesus is responding more or less directly to the suspicion that his revolution was a violent one. He is giving his disciples some detailed instructions for what to do when confronted with specific situations that arose all too often in their world. But more than that, he is indicating a general posture of social engagement for his communities. This, very clearly, was not just a “spiritual” revolution, but it was also not a Maccabean-type revolt.

Rather, paradoxically, this was a social revolution of the peacemakers.

You want to really be in charge? Here’s the way.

• Your land – that you’ve been bullied off of – you want that back? – then you have an interest in being meek.

• Your overlords – whose tax collectors the rebels in the neighboring village drove out with rakes and clubs last week? Pray for them, and love them. Not only are we not going to kill them – even though they make our children hungry – we must root out all anger and hatred for them. We are not going to simply oppose their violence with more violence. That would not be a different kingdom, that would just be more of the same, with new faces in charge.

Jesus’ commitment to nonviolence ultimately ended him up on a Roman cross. This saying is hard. Who will accept it?

Colin Miller is a member of the Maurin House Catholic Worker (Columbia Heights, Minnesota) and the Director of the Center for Catholic Social Thought at the Church of the Assumption in St. Paul, where he is also the Director of Pastoral Care & Outreach. Miller has written a book, We Are Only Saved Together: Living the Revolutionary Vision of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, published by Ave Maria Press.