Christianity
Jesus Christ: Model of the Nonviolent Human Being
by John Dear
Given our worldwide violence, most people, especially in North America, have concluded that it is impossible to become nonviolent, that we might as well not even bother. Cultural violence naturally leads to such rock-bottom despair. The spirit of violence tells us that we have no other alternative; it insists that violence is our very nature.
The God of nonviolence tells us otherwise. In the life of Jesus, God invites us to become the people we can be. Anyone can practice nonviolence; everyone is called to practice nonviolence. God would not have invited us to this life of peacemaking if it were impossible. The church, unfortunately, has often taught the ideal but at the same time insisted that the ideal is impossible to live and gone on to present an "interim ethic" of justified violence. But as Jesus revealed, God never calls us to violence. Over the centuries the church has done a great disservice to God and humanity by blessing violence and warfare. The gospel is much stronger. It insists that nonviolence is not just an option, it is a commandment. We are commanded by Jesus to practice nonviolence. Humanity is charged with the grace of God; our sin is the conscious choice not to act in the grace of nonviolence. Given our violence, we need to ask the God of nonviolence for the grace to become like God, to renounce our violence and join faith communities of nonviolence to help us live lives of active love. God has promised that the grace is ours for the asking.
Nonviolence is possible for every human being, for every violent person, if we but turn to God and ask for grace. To be fully human means to open up our hearts to the grace of God, to allow God to disarm our hearts, to transform our hearts and souls into instruments and channels of God's nonviolent love.
History is filled with people who learned God's way of nonviolence. From Gandhi and Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jean Donovan, to Wang Weilin (the Chinese student who stood before a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square in June 1989) and the thousands of Filipinos, Russians, and Lithuanians who nonviolently resisted tyranny, our age is brimming with noble practitioners of nonviolence. They model what it means to be human in today's world.
These peacemaking people point us back to the peacemaking Christ. Jesus presents the fullest image of what it means to be human because he lived and taught nonviolence to the fullest. He models the God of nonviolence. He shows us what it means to be human in his nonviolence, that is his love, compassion, mercy, truthtelling, and nonviolent resistance to evil. He leads us in hope and fidelity to the God of peace.
Jesus is the model human being because he is nonviolent. He is just, faithful, and unconditionally loving. He loves enemies; serves people; tells truth; builds community; prays to the God of peace; and risks his life in active nonviolence, even to arrest, torture, and execution. Because of this steadfast nonviolence, God raises Jesus from the dead to uphold his life for all humanity to emulate.
Violence so dominates our world that it has corrupted our image of God. We have created God in our own image — a god of violence who waits to destroy us all in an explosion of anger and violence. The reverse side of this perversion is our own desire for (violent) power-the desire to be God. In this mad attempt to be superhuman, to be divine, we assert our egos over one another and our national ego over other nations. We seek to become God, when we are invited merely to be human.
The great irony of this error is that while we seek to be God, God desires to become human. In Jesus, God fulfills this desire and demonstrates to us how to be human. God becomes one of us and lives humanly. As Walter Wink explains:
Woodcut by Rita Corbin
The essence of sin is the desire to be God, which is in effect to enter into mimetic rivalry with God.... We are meant to imitate God ... but sin enters when imitation turns to envy and God becomes the ultimate rival. Desire thus transforms God into an idol on whom human beings not only project their own violence and hatred, but whom they also depict to themselves as the sanctifier of the violence at the heart of all religious systems. To desire to usurp the place of God inevitably leads a person to create God after the image of a jealous rival, and fosters an unconscious death wish against God. The human desire to be God is countered by the divine desire to become human. God reveals the divine weakness on the cross, leaving the soul no omnipotent rival to envy, and thus cutting the nerve of mimetic desire.... Jesus absorbed all the violence directed at him by people and by the Powers and still loved them. But if humanity killed the one who fully embodied God's intention for our lives, and God still loves us, then there is no need to try to earn God's love. And if God loves us unconditionally, there is no need to seek conditional love from the Powers who promise us rewards in return for devotion. When the early Christians proclaimed that "there is salvation in no one else" (Acts 4:12), this should be taken as literally true: only through Jesus is the scapegoat mechanism exposed and the spiral of violence broken. "Salvation" here is an anthropological, not a theological term. It simply states a fact about human survival in the face of human violence… The problem is that, once the gospel has deprived a society of the scapegoating mechanism, that society is defenseless against the very violence in which it trusts. For us today, the only alternative to love and nonviolence is apocalypse. And it is not a vengeful God who ushers in apocalypse, but ourselves. The "wrath" or judgment of God is precisely God's "giving us up" to the consequences of our own violence (Romans 1: 18- 32). It is now a race between the gospel and the effects of the gospel: either we learn to stop mimetic violence and scapegoating, or having been stripped of the scapegoating mechanism as an outlet for our violence, we will consume ourselves in an apocalypse of fire. In a world of nuclear weapons, even more urgently than in that of the Roman empire, scapegoating must be exposed and eradicated, or we will destroy ourselves. (Engaging the Powers, pp. 151-152. Reprinted by permission, copyright 1992, Augsburg Fortress).
In Jesus, we see "God in trouble for being human," as Daniel Berrigan writes. It is precisely God's humanity — God's nonviolence — that gets God into trouble. Jesus is executed by the empire for his nonviolent resistance to evil, for his love for his fellow humans.
"The only vocation to which a Christian is called," William Stringfellow observed, "is to be a mature human being." (A Second Birthday, pp. 67-68). An anthropology of nonviolence asks, in light of today's global violence, What does it mean to be a human being? It concludes that a human being is a person of nonviolence, a peace maker in a world of war, a seeker of justice in a world of injustice, a channel of compassion in a world of apathy. A mature human being worships the God of nonviolence by living at peace with every other human being. It asks: What does it mean to be alive in the nuclear age? In light of the peacemaking Jesus, an anthropology of nonviolence answers that a full human life worships the God of life and gives over its own life so that all humanity may live in peace with justice, without the threat of violence. To be human is to be nonviolent.
This article is excerpted from The God of Peace: Toward a Theology of Nonviolence by John Dear, SJ. Used with the permission of Orbis Books, Box 308, Maryknoll, NY 10545. (Available from FOR, $17.50 plus postage.)
This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
