First Parish Unitarian UniversalistWas Jesus a Pacifist?
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane D. Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
March 23, 2008 – Easter Sunday
In our worship so far this Easter morning, we have traversed several ways of appreciating Easter. We started with Easter as a metaphor for the waking up of Earth in the springtime of the year. Then, in the Meditation and in the hymn that followed, direct associations were made between spring imagery, “the green blade riseth,” and the Christian belief in the rising or resurrection of Jesus after his death on a cross.
Now, in the sermon, we will look at the teachings of this man that got him in such trouble he was crucified. Specifically, we will explore together his teachings relative to violence and non-violence.
We do that today, on Easter Sunday, because we Unitarian Universalists find meaning in our Christian roots via the religion of Jesus, not the religion about him—not in the church’s doctrines but in his teachings.
But first let’s acknowledge that, especially here in New England, the way we began the service, with a typical UU association of Easter with Spring, is almost always a dubious thing! And especially this year. Any Easter frocks in the pews today were covered by winter coats and bonnets surely must have been left at home in favor of something warmer!
This year, Easter falls almost as early as it can possibly fall.
It is a lunar holiday. Traditionally, Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon in spring. Thus, it can be on any of the days from March 22 to April 25 th. I read that this is the earliest Easter has been celebrated since 1913.
It wasn’t always scheduled this way. For the first three centuries after Jesus’ death, the resurrection was celebrated in relation to the Jewish Passover, as we would expect. Either it was on or just after the first day of Passover no matter on which day of the week that Passover occurred, or on a Sunday close to or on the first Passover Day. These scheduling methods made sense because we know from the scriptures that the last supper that Jesus had with his disciples was the Passover Seder and that it occurred that year on a Thursday night. He was crucified on Friday and his body was moved to a tomb before the Sabbath began that evening. When the Sabbath was over at sundown on Saturday, three women bought spices to anoint his body. They went to the tomb, the scriptures say, early the next day, Sunday morning, and found his body was missing from the tomb, as the story goes.
So why are Easter and Passover a month apart this year? It’s because the full moon happened so close to the Spring Equinox, whereas Passover is always on the fifteenth of the Jewish month called Nissan, which is several weeks away still.
I was curious about this intersection of the Jewish and Christian calendars this year. I hope you were, too. But, enough of that.
I want to have time to do justice to the question, “Was Jesus a Pacifist?” and also to ring our historic bell in memory of the nearly 4,000 U.S. soldiers and an estimated 400,000 Iraqis killed in the five years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. On this fifth anniversary, questions of war and peace, just war and pacifism, are on our minds.
The passage I read earlier from the Book of Matthew (5:38-41) in the Christian scriptures is one of several to which we might look in answering this question about Jesus and his views of violence and non-violence. In it, Jesus is given to say, “Do not resist an evildoer… turn the other cheek…give your cloak as well as your coat… go the second mile.”
On first reading, Jesus here seems to be advocating that his followers be cowardly, subservient, and to always do more for others than the next guy would, or in today’s parlance, to have very poor interpersonal boundaries. He seems to be saying, let people walk all over you, in my name.
If that’s non-violence, who wants it?
But in my preparation for this sermon today, I was helped to see this passage as being something far different. In the words of the Biblical scholar Walter Wink, it is “one of the most revolutionary political statements ever uttered, when given a fair hearing in its original social context.” [from Violence and Nonviolence in South Africa, published in 1986 for churches in South Africa, excerpts quoted in The Universe Bends Toward Justice: A Reader on Christian Nonviolence in the U.S., Angie O’Gorman, Ed. New Society Publishers, Phila., 1990, pp. 253-265].
Let’s hear what this Biblical scholar can teach us about the social context of Jesus’ times, the original words found in the text, and why he argues that Jesus is advocating a third kind of response to violence: neither fight nor flight, but militant non-violence.
Walter Wink says to consider first the expression “Resist not evil” as the King James Version of the Bible has it, or “Do not resist an evildoer” as I read from my New Revised Standard Version earlier. Wink says both are poor translations. The Greek word in the original text there refers to violent rebellion or armed insurrection, and that is how it is translated elsewhere in the Christian scriptures. He argues that a proper translation of Jesus’ teaching here would be “do not retaliate against violence with violence.”
I think it’s a rather practical, even strategic, teaching, considering that Jesus and his followers were Jewish subjects of the heavily-armed Romans. He would remember the Jewish rebellion in Galilee, where he lived, brutally squashed by the Romans only twenty years earlier. He was about ten years old then, old enough to have felt and remember the impact of seeing entire villages destroyed.
So, Jesus tells his followers to not react violently to their oppressors. Then he gives three brief examples to illustrate his meaning: turn the other cheek, give your cloak as well as your coat, and go the second mile. But, Walter Wink says that in their original social context these examples did not mean what we today think they meant. And, we have to remember, he says, who Jesus’ audience was: people who were subjects of the Roman imperial occupation.
In his first example, Jesus said, “If any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Wink explains, “Why the right cheek? How does one strike another on the right cheek anyway? Try it. A blow by the right fist in that right-handed world would have landed on the left cheek of the opponent. To strike the right cheek with the fist would require using the left hand, but in that society the left hand was used only for unclean tasks…The only way one could strike someone else’s right cheek with the right hand would be with the back of the hand. What we are dealing with here is unmistakably an insult, not a fistfight. The intention clearly is not to injure but to humiliate, to put someone in their place. A backhand slap was the normal way of admonishing inferiors. Masters backhanded slaves; husbands, wives; parents, children; men, women; Romans, Jews...We have here a set of unequal relations, in each of which retaliation would be suicidal. The only normal response would be cowering submission…So, Jesus suggests turning one’s left cheek. It robs the oppressor of the power to humiliate.”
In his second example, Jesus said, “if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.” Walter Wink explains that “this example is set in a court of law. Someone is being sued for his outer garment.” In Jewish law, if you lend money to someone who only has his outer garment to give as collateral, you must return it every evening at sunset, for that is all the poor person has to sleep in at night.
“The situation to which Jesus alludes,” says Wink, “is one with which all his hearers would have been all too familiar: the poor debtor has sunk ever deeper into poverty, the debt cannot be repaid, and his creditor has hauled him into court to try to wring out repayment by legal means.”
He says that indebtedness was one of the most serious social problems in first century Palestine. It was the direct consequence of Roman imperial policy. Emperors had taxed the wealthy so vigorously to fund their wars that the rich began seeking non-liquid investments to secure their wealth. Land was best, but it was not bought and sold on the open market as today but was ancestrally owned and passed down over generations. Little land was ever for sale, in Palestine at least. Exorbitant interest, however, could be used to drive small landowners into even deeper debt until they were forced to sell their land. By the time of Jesus we see this process already far advanced: large estates owned by absentee landlords, managed by stewards and worked by servants, sharecroppers, and day laborers (some of whom might have been the prior owners).
“It is no accident,” writes Wink, “that the first act of the Jewish revolutionaries in 66 A.D. was to burn the Temple treasury, where the record of debts was kept.”
So, why does Jesus tell the people to give up not just their outergarment—their coat--but their innergarment—their cloak-- also? Like with turning the cheek for another slapping, it’s a refusal to be humiliated. I think it’s a bit of street theater, in the court. You are nearly naked, and your wealthy creditor stands there holding both your coat and your cloak, which he does not need. The bystanders laugh, but they laugh at the judge and the creditor, not the debtor. It exposes the cruelty of the system and, in Wink’s words, “it burlesques its pretensions to justice, law, and order.”
Jesus’ third example says “if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.” This is another strategy for refusing to be humiliated. What it refers to is a Roman law that restricted how much forced labor a Roman soldier could put on a civilian: only one mile of carrying the soldier’s heavy pack, or the soldier would risk heavy punishment. So, Jesus says, refuse to give back the pack, carry it a second mile, and confuse the soldier, making him beg to get it back. It reverses the power dynamics. For a moment the subjugated is elevated, and the soldier—himself relatively powerless—sees the civilian as a peer.
Walter Wink’s book from which I have been quoting was written in 1986 right after he visited South Africa. Its Quaker publishing house mailed 3400 copies in plain brown paper wrappers to English-speaking clergy in South Africa in 1987. By the end of 1988, the Roman Catholic Church had sent copies to its eight hundred priests there.
This book moved churches in South Africa into the struggle against apartheid using non-violent tactics. This may have been crucial to the relaxation of apartheid laws a few years later and the subsequent joyous release from prison of Nelson Mandela in February 1990.
Was Jesus a pacifist? He was a champion of non-violent resistance against injustice. He preached it as a means for the oppressed—in Palestine then, or now…in Tibet, in Darfur, Iraq, and in homes where domestic violence holds sway—as a means for the oppressed to refuse humiliation, using surprise and humor to empower them or ourselves, to expose hypocrisy, and to challenge the powerful to change their ways.
No wonder the authorities wanted Jesus out of the way! No wonder his followers, shaken by the death of the one they loved, felt his presence afterwards to be so real they declared him alive again!
May his teachings of peace arise in those who follow him today.
Amen.