How is it, that as Christians - and some sects of Christianity that explicitly embrace a personal call to follow Jesus, that Christians have failed to assume the Gospel nonviolence that Jesus taught to his friends and students? The early church lived the nonviolence of Jesus, by sharing their lives with the poor and marginalized and each other in small, communal lives. They resisted state violence and oppression by living outside such systems of injustice and were then martyred for their prophetic outrage to such state domination. Have we forgotten that Jesus is an enemy of the state? Jesus was even enemy of the church, because of how he called the church to conversion and conscience.
We 21st century Christians have gotten off easy. We believe in a personal Jesus that loves us dearly but makes no personal claims on how or why we live our lives. The nonviolent Jesus is one of love, sure, but also one of conflict, one of faith and conscience, one of peacemaking and works of mercy. Is this the Jesus that is followed in most of our churches and communities? Is this the Jesus that the stranger knows, the enemy knows, the oppressed know?
Let us begin to reclaim the Jesus that our Gospel stories and traditions reveal to us. Let us remember the nonviolent Jesus.
