CONFRONTING THE POWERS THAT
BE
Jesus'
Third Way
Session 7
Nonviolence is no longer a concern limited to pacifists, but has
moved into the forefront of human events as perhaps the only viable means
to a desirable future. Nonviolence recognizes that the most basic of human
rights is the right not to be killed. One thing, at least, virtually all
Christians agree: though the coming reign of God will precipitate the frantic
opposition of a violent system, God's reign itself will be nonviolent.
(ETP 173)
Readings: TPTB - Chapter 5; ETP - Chapter 8
Jesus was neither violent nor passive. He was actively good and
actively in battle against evil in all its forms, but without engaging
in to the violence which produces only more violence.
Wink analyzes three teachings of Jesus on aspects of nonviolence
which Christians(and others) tend to consider ultimate ideals illustrating
life in the Kingdom of Heaven but impossibly impractical in this world.
He shows how, in each case, Jesus was giving an example of how a person
without power can expose and undercut the repression and violence of the
Powers. His call to "resist not evil" is clearly (from the Greek) a call
not to "stand against" the other as one army stands against an opposing
army. He is ordering not nonresistance but resistance without violence.
Turn the Other Cheek: To refuse to strike back when struck has been
interpreted by Christians as meaning one should be patient and humble rather
than an easily angered bully. Wink, however, points out that a blow on
the right cheek is a back-handed slap, intended by a powerful person to
demean and insult one without power, such as a slave or woman or child.
Turning the right cheek then presents a target for the fist. But a blow
by the fist would then recognize the inferior person as an equal. Unthinkable.
Thus, in a symbolic act, the demeaned person declares himself an
equal, a child of God. He may suffer worse punishment, but he has made
his point.In a small way the Powers have been disarmed and a new way pointed
out.
Strip naked: Jesus said that if one takes your outer robe you should
give him your inner garment as well. This pictures a poor man in a court
of law being sued for an unpaid loan. Wink writes:
Jesus is not advising people to add to their disadvantage by renouncing
justice altogether, as so many commentators have suggested. He is telling
impoverished debtors, who have nothing but the clothes on their backs,
to use the system against itself. (TPTB 103)
In giving up his underwear, the poor man would strip himself naked
and, inthe mores of the time, would heap shame on the person who was occasion
of his nakedness. It would be a clear and powerful nonviolent demonstration
against the injustice of the times, in which rich people used exorbitant
interest rates to wrest land from the poor making them tenant farmers or
slaves.
...By the time of Jesus we see the process already far advanced:
large estates owned by absentee landlords, managed by stewards, and worked
by tenant farmers, day laborers and slaves. It is no accident that the
first act of Jewish revolutionaries in 66 C.E. was to burn the Temple treasury,
where the record of debts was kept. (ETP 178)
Jesus' hearers also heard echoes from the Hebrew prophets who railed
against such accumulation of wealth and impoverishment of the many, and
also the commandment in the Law which ordered that if a creditor take a
poor person's garment in pledge he must return it, the man's only blanket,
before the cold night fell.
Go the second mile: This teaching has become a cliche; on extending
oneself to help others, even one's enemies. But to Jesus' hearers there
was a more important meaning. The Roman soldier could order a Jew to carry
his belongings a distance of about a mile, but he could be punished if
he required the man to go further. To offer to go further was to confuse
the soldier utterly. Was the civilian trying to be impudent, to get the
soldier into trouble? The oppressed again seizes the initiative to attack
the oppressive system nonviolently.
Jesus does not encourage Jews to walk a second mile in order to
build up merit in heaven, or to be pious, or to kill the soldier with kindness.
He is helping an oppressed people find a way to protest and neutralize
an onerous practice despised by throughtout the empire. (TPTB 108)
He is also saying, by implication, use your imagination. Find more
nonviolent ways to challenge and ridicule the system and so bring it down
peacefully. As blacks in South Africa scrawled on the walls: "We urinated
in your beer." The whites would not do without the blacks as waiters and
cooks and nurses for their children, but how they shuddered at reading
that writing on the wall.
To an oppressed people, Jesus was saying, Do not continue to acquiesce
in your oppression by the Powers; but do not react violently to it either.
Rather, find a third way, a way that is neither submission nor assault,
flight nor fight, a way that can secure your human dignity and begin to
change the power equation, even now, before the revolution. (TPTB 110)
For Discussion
1. Express all the negative feelings that this advice about nonviolence
stirs up in you.
2. Can you recall a time or times when you or someone you know used
nonviolent direct action creatively?
3. During your lifetime, what major social struggles have used nonviolence?
Did it "work"? Does that matter?
4. Discuss:
Those who lived by Jesus' words--Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. Gandhi,
Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, Adolpho Perez Esquivel--point
us to a new way of contronting evil whose potential for personal and social
transformation we are only beginning to grasp today. (ETP 189)
Copyright © 1998 by Vern
Rossman
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