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Jesus clearly repudiated brutality and bloodshed
PETER MIKELIC
OPINION
"War is
a disease," wrote Frenchman Saint-Exupéry in Flight To Arras, 1942.
By fighting war with more war, we succumb to the sickness
without even
knowing it. It's akin to the 1888 warning from Friedrich Nietzsche in Will
To Power: "Whoever fights monsters
should see to it that in the process he
does not become a monster."
As millions of Christians around the world observe
Lent, the traditional 40
days of prayer, repentance and self-denial, how many regard Jesus simply as
a validation of
their own will to power and violence, especially in the
face of war? Engaging the Augustinian principles of "right cause"
and "right
motivation" - that war can be " morally just" - how many Christians utilize
God, faith and patriotism as
weapons to justify violence against tyrants,
whether half a world away or in one's household?
The unfeigned reality
is that wars, holy wars, civil wars and world wars
have all violated every standard of justice and civility, reason and
morality
in which the non-culpable have been sacrificed in untold millions.
Their names, which are legion, include not only Auschwitz
and Dresden,
Hiroshima and New York, but also Iraq and Afghanistan.
Given that war is morally bankrupt, anti-human
and only begets more war,
can justice and peace ever prevail if the actions for justice and peace mimic
the premeditated
violence and death upon innocent victims that these
actions are undertaken to prevent?
Though Jesus allowed violence
to nail him to a cross causing his death, he
himself repudiated brutality and bloodshed. "Do not return violence with
violence
... but give the other cheek." "Blessed are the peacemakers for
they are the children of God." "Love your enemies and pray
for them," said
Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount.
In The Powers That Be (Doubleday, 1998), Walter Wink writes that
Jesus'
peaceful resistance in the face of assault not only denies the
identification of God with aggression and warfare,
His is a clear affinity
with and care for those who are victimized by violence and war, poverty and
hunger, injustice
and inequality, suffering and despair.
To embrace a God for whom life is sacred means to change in systemic ways
the
chronic generational spiral of blood and war, whether politically,
militarily or personally motivated. Murder is morally
wrong and
indefensible. Period. Weapons of destruction only proliferate killing
fields and burial grounds.
Rather,
non-violent activism, peace strategies and conflict resolution
skills must be engaged in preventive measures long before
national and
global problems become crises requiring military "solutions." Otherwise, as
J.F. Kennedy said in 1961 to
the U.N. General Assembly: "Unless we put an
end to war, war will put an end to us."
To embrace a God of peace means
to take the crucifixion of Christ seriously
by demonstrating that enemies can be transformed by the power of peace and
non-violence,
love and forgiveness. Faith in the Almighty, whether his name
is Allah, Yahweh or God, means that anyone or any nation
can be transformed
because God's divine image is within each person, regardless of race,
religion or national origin.
Though
God's power is transforming, says Marcus Borg in Jesus: A New Vision (Harper, 1987), most people don't believe it because
the "dominant values of American life - affluence, achievement, appearance, power, competition, consumption, individualism
- are massively idolatrous and vastly different from anything recognizably Christian."
Like violence and war, these
values can only be crucified like Christ,
wrote martyred Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Letters And Papers From
Prison (SCM, 1971), when "we throw ourselves utterly into the arms of God and participate in his sufferings in the world."
"It
is one the church's greatest betrayals of Jesus," wrote Star columnist
Tom Harpur in God Help Us, "to have dropped his
teaching on non-violence in favour of just war."
The rejection of militarism and war is therefore not only seen as
an
exercise in futile idealism, but an impossibility in the face of centuries
of bloody addiction to warfare.
The
rejection of militarism and war is not an exercise in futile idealism,
nor an abandonment of peace and justice or even
resignation in the face of
abhorrent evil and centuries of bloody addiction to warfare.
The Gandhi-led independence
movement, the Martin Luther King-led U.S. civil rights movement, the initial Corazon Aquino-led People Power movement in the
Philippines, the anti-Vietnam movement and the current global anti-war
demonstrations lay bare the effective power of non-violence.
Look
at the modern countries re-formed without resorting to war: Gandhi's
India, Germany with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and
Russia with the
non-violent collapse of communism. Human power and domination were
crucified two millennia ago. The
non-violent power of God is effective when taken seriously and given a chance.
_____
Peter Mikelic
is a Lutheran clergyman and a writer specializing in
religion.
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