No More Violence

Yesterday was a wake-up call for our country. Where will we go from here?

I am not the smartest guy in the room. I am not a prophet. But with warning signs in plain sight, I, like lots of social observers, saw something like yesterday coming. It is why, over the past months, I have written about non-violence in my Substack articles.

Yesterday will either be the moment we wake up as a country and say, “That is not the kind of people we want to be,” or we will look back and realize that those were first shots in a long season of political violence. 

In Jesus’ time, there were plenty of people ready to use violence to achieve their goals. Like our times, violence seemed to be a normal part of daily life. No one liked it when violence was used against them, but if something was deemed critical or desperate enough, well then, of course one chooses violence.

However, Jesus never said: Violence sounds good—let’s join them! Rather, his message of the kingdom and the example of his cross critiqued any and every form of political and social violence. Jesus called his followers to nurture a new non-violent heart from which kingdom words and deeds would flow. 

Love breaks the cycle of violence, and Jesus is our model.

[Jesus] won’t yell, won’t raise his voice;
there’ll be no commotion in the streets.
He won’t walk over anyone’s feelings,
won’t push you into a corner.
[But] before you know it, his justice will triumph.

(Matthew 12:19-21, MSG)

As N.T. Wright and Michael F. Bird wrote in Jesus and the Powers, I maintain that the kingdom spreads, not through conquest, but through the Spirit’s life-giving and liberating power being experienced by more and more people and through their life-giving contributions to the world…through suffering love, not violence.

Martin Luther King, Jr., writes in Where Do We Go From Here?: 

Violence is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it…violence merely increases hate.

He prophetically continues:

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation… If we will make the right…choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when "justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."

Whatever happens tomorrow and in the days that come, my prayer is that we can live into Peter’s ethical vision:

Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing.

(1 Peter 3:9, NIV)

Today I am asking all my friends and colleagues to do what you can in your sphere of influence to call for, practice, and model non-violence. I want all of us to cast the vision for the goodness of fact-based, honest engagement with ideological opponents, as we work for public policies that enact a moral, just, and equitable society on the terms set by Jesus and his vision of the inbreaking of God’s kingdom—the healing of his creation. 

We are students of Jesus’ way of life, learning to live in 2024 the way he would if he were in our time and place. The way, truth, and life (John 14:6) of Jesus rules out violence and centers the primacy of love—especially love of one’s enemy.