Review: The nonviolent Jesus
(iStock)After spending hundreds of hours in courthouses, enduring scores of arrests and marking time in countless jails throughout the country, the California-based Catholic priest and author John Dear knows a life of nonviolent activism is not an easy sell. Getting attacked by the public, abandoned by your friends or apprehended by law enforcement are all occupational hazards, he warns. And he wouldn’t have it any other way.
A committed pacifist and widely traveled speaker, Dear has spent decades—in books, sermons and actions—promoting an image of Jesus as a nonviolent revolutionary who led an “illegal, underground campaign” of peaceful resistance against a bloodthirsty Roman state. Drawing upon the thought of fellow peace activist Kazu Haga, Dear defines nonviolence as more than an ethical argument or a political philosophy. It is a manner of living, perfectly embodied by the subversive and startlingly radical ministry of Jesus as chronicled in the Bible.
In his latest work, The Gospel of Peace, Dear embarks on a kind of spiritual experiment: interpreting the three synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) through the lens of nonviolent activism and uncovering connections between first-century Judea and modern-day America. Throughout this engaging and often surprising commentary, he finds in the New Testament a suffering servant who proclaims a God of peace, rejects appeals to power, befriends outcasts and pariahs in intentional defiance of established customs, and chastises people who resort to force, even in his own defense.
Dear’s primary evidence for asserting nonviolence as the foundation of Christianity stems from the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:1-12), which he describes as woefully overlooked and understudied. Here Jesus instructs his disciples to be meek, merciful and pure of heart—and that peacemakers will be named the Sons of God. “If this is Jesus’s quintessential message,” he writes, “then the lack of attention to it is shocking.” Inspired by the moral leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi—both non-Catholics who understood and admired Christ—Dear encourages readers to study the Sermon on the Mount daily (as did Gandhi) and to make the Beatitudes “the basis of our lives.”
Dear also pays particular attention to the Beatitude that predicts persecution and harassment from others (Mt 5:11). “If we are not facing rejection, harassment, attack, even arrest and death threats,” he writes, “how can we claim to be followers of the nonviolent Jesus, who was harassed, rejected, arrested and executed?” When I first spoke with Dear in 2018, while I was a student at Fordham University, he nicely asked if I had been arrested yet. This was not so much a push to go spend a night in prison as a question of commitment. For Dear, we must be willing to go all the way.
There is an imaginative quality to Dear’s commentary, a prophetic ability to extract Christ’s opposition to violence even from unlikely or less-than-obvious passages. Beyond the Beatitudes and Christ’s commandments to love your enemies and “do good” to your persecutors (Mt 5:44, Lk 6:27), Dear finds that nonviolence permeates every aspect of Jesus’ public ministry.
For example, he identifies the “unforgivable sin” described in Scripture with the support of violence by any follower of Jesus (Mt 12:31, Mk 3:28-9). “That would include nationalism disguised as religion, greed disguised as service, hate disguised as love, evil disguised as goodness, warmaking disguised as peacemaking, racism and sexism disguised as democracy—but done in the name of Christ,” Dear writes.
He contrasts the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem, on a donkey, with the entrance of the Roman governors, routinely flanked by hundreds of soldiers in a military parade. Scripture notes that Jesus sat atop the animal to “banish the war chariot from Ephraim and the warhorse from Jerusalem” (Zech 9:9-10). What about when Jesus banishes the moneychangers from the temple area using a whip of cords? Dear writes that Christ engages in what we today would call civil disobedience, but not violence. And at the Last Supper, instead of instructing his disciples to go break the bodies of those who will come to arrest him, he offers his own flesh and blood for the salvation of the world.
During Christ’s arrest in Gethsemane, when Simon Peter draws a sword and severs the right ear of the servant Malchus, Jesus offers a strong rebuke. “Put your sword back into its sheath, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword,” he proclaims (Mt 26:52). Dear identifies these words as Christ’s last to his disciples before they flee from him.
“After all [Jesus] has taught and shown them about the universal way of nonviolence, he now resorts to the most primal teaching: Put down the sword. Thou shalt not kill,” he writes. “We are back to square one.” In this passage, he echoes the sentiments of the late Daniel Berrigan, S.J., one of his mentors, during a 1981 trial in Philadelphia: “Our plight is very primitive from a Christian point of view. We are back where we started. Thou shalt not kill; we are not allowed to kill.”
Dear’s text includes few references to named biblical experts and, unfortunately, no footnotes that would encourage further investigation. (There is a list of recommended readings—including 14 of the author’s previous works—in the back.) His volume is at times repetitive, and Dear notes as much in his introduction. “Few people read commentaries straight through,” he observes, considering The Gospel of Peace as more of a reference work.
The book sometimes takes on the flavor of an extended encyclical rather than a biblical commentary, and perhaps it would have been stronger (and made for a slimmer book) to focus his attention on a selection of passages. But this was not the project he set out to complete, and a detailed look at how the synoptic Gospels emphasize nonviolence is a sorely needed contribution in a country and a church that blur the stark lines between Christianity and militarism.
While reading Scripture from a 21st-century activist’s viewpoint encourages unique insights, it can present academic problems. Are we correctly understanding the context in which these events occurred? Are we more focused on promoting a message than investigating the text? Are we seeing what we want to see?
Dear’s prose is direct, unabashedly political and often blunt. He ridicules just war theory as akin to defending “just rape,” calls displaying the American flag in church blasphemous, states that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were “merely a sign of the greater violence to come” and identifies Satan with any imperial force—including the United States. His anti-nationalist zeal, absolutely sincere and rooted in Christ’s disobedience to the Roman Empire, will likely alienate some readers who do not imagine an inherent conflict between their Catholicism and their patriotism. Yet Dear seems less interested in winning friends than in obeying his conscience and holding fast to Christ’s teachings.
Despite his focus on the violence of our times—the interminable parade of armed conflicts, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the exploitation of the poor, the waste of trillions of dollars on weaponry—his outlook is ultimately not one of despair. He frequently lauds the spirit of tranquility and the mindfulness practices of his longtime friend Thich Nhat Hanh, the late Buddhist monk whom Martin Luther King Jr. nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. Dear notes that a lifelong commitment to nonviolence sets us on a path of hope and offers us a better way of being human.
“Every day is Easter Sunday for us because we are now people of resurrection,” he writes, “people who practice resurrection.”
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