Why the “Weak” Jesus Demands Pacifism
Onward in Our Journey
This week I continue with an examination of the scriptural basis of the pacifism that Jesus call us to embrace. As always I lean heavily on War and the Gospel by Jean Lasserre. Specifically, this week is focused upon Part II Chapter 5 “Weakness According to the Gospel”. Rather than strictly following Lasserre’s argument I will offer my own thoughts as to what the “weakness” of Jesus means for us.
An Embarrassed Christianity
There is an embarrassment at the heart of modern American Christianity, and most believers will not name it. The embarrassment is Jesus. Specifically, it is the Jesus we actually find in the Gospels, the one who refused to fight, refused to flee, refused to call down the legions of angels he plainly says were available to him. The one who, when the moment of testing came in Gethsemane, told Peter to put away his sword, and meant it. The one who stood silent before Pilate. The one who was beaten, mocked, stripped, and nailed to a cross by an empire he could have shattered with a thought.
This Jesus is, by every standard the world recognizes, weak.
The Real Jesus Hidden by Rationalization
And here is where we must pause, because the church has spent two thousand years, and especially the seventeen hundred years since Constantine, trying to explain this weakness away. We have allegorized it. We have spiritualized it. We have quarantined it inside the Cross itself, as if the meekness of Jesus was a one-time atoning performance, useful for our salvation but utterly irrelevant to how we are supposed to live. We have invented a robust, sword-bearing, culture-warring Jesus to rescue ourselves from the actual one. Then, having done so, we feel free to organize our politics, our foreign policy, and our personal grudges around values He never displayed and would not recognize.
“Weakness” is a Feature Not a Bug
I want to suggest, in the strongest terms I can muster, that the apparent weakness of Jesus is not a problem the pacifist must overcome. It is the foundation upon which the whole pacifist case rests. It is the core of the argument. The refusal of Jesus to use violence, even when violence was ostensibly righteously available, even when violence would have saved His own life, even when violence would have rescued the innocent, is itself a revelation of who God is and how God has chosen to act in the world. And if it is a revelation of God, then it is a revelation of how we are to live. There is no escape hatch here. There never has been.
Let me put this another way. Christians believe, or claim to believe, that Jesus of Nazareth is the exact representation of God’s being. Hebrews tells us this in its opening lines. He is not one revelation among many. He is not a partial revelation to be supplemented with the conquest narratives of Joshua or the imprecatory psalms. He is the final and authoritative Word, a perfect finished plan. So, when we look at the Cross and call what we see “weakness,” we are saying something staggering. We are saying that God Himself, when given the choice between dominating His enemies and absorbing their violence, chose to absorb it. We are saying that the very nature of divine power, properly understood, looks nothing like the power we have been taught to admire. It looks like a man bleeding out under a Roman sky.
This should change everything. In most Christian lives, it changes nothing.
The standard move, the one I have heard from many Christianistas my whole life, is to claim that the meekness of Jesus was a unique vocational requirement of His atoning work. He had to die. He had to be the lamb. Therefore, we are told, His refusal to fight back has no normative force for the rest of us. We can support wars, train for combat, cheer the bombing of foreign cities, vote for candidates who promise to project American power, all while singing hymns about the suffering servant on Sunday morning. The bifurcation is total. The hypocrisy is complete. And it is theologically incoherent from top to bottom.
We Know the Real Jesus
Because here is what Jesus actually said. He did not say, “Watch how I handle this; you do something else.” He said, “Take up your cross and follow me.” He said, “A servant is not greater than his master.” He said, “Love your enemies.” He said, “Do not resist an evildoer.” He said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” He said these things as commands, not as suggestions. He gave them as the normative ethic of His Kingdom. And He demonstrated, in His own body, what obedience to these commands looks like when the world responds with maximum violence.
The Cross is the proof of concept. It is God showing us, in the most graphic possible way, that this is how His people are to live in a violent world. We absorb. We do not retaliate. We bear the wounds rather than inflicting them. We die rather than kill. The Cross is not an exception to the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount; it is the Sermon on the Mount carried to its terrible and beautiful conclusion.
The Strength of “Weakness”
And let us be very clear about something. The “weakness” of Jesus is only weakness from the perspective of Caesar. From the perspective of the Kingdom, it is the most powerful act in human history. Rome killed Jesus on a Friday afternoon, confident that it had solved the problem. By Sunday morning, it had not solved the problem. It had, in fact, created a problem from which the empire would never recover. The Resurrection vindicates the Cross. It tells us that the way of self-giving love is not a noble failure but the very engine by which God redeems creation. The meek, it turns out, really do inherit the earth. They just have to wait for it.
This is why the early church, before Constantine bought it off, was overwhelmingly pacifist. Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen, the writers we now treat as quaint embarrassments, all understood that following the meek Jesus meant refusing to take up arms. They understood that you cannot worship a crucified Lord and simultaneously train to crucify others. They understood the indivisibility of the Christian conscience. There is no civilian self that loves enemies and a uniformed self that kills them. There is one self, redeemed by one Lord, called to one ethic. To divide that self is to deny the Lord.
Applying This Truth
The implications for how we treat one another are immediate and severe. If the apparent weakness of Jesus is in fact the strength of God, then our daily relationships must be reordered around it. We do not get to dominate our spouses. We do not get to bully our employees. We do not get to humiliate our children. We do not get to wield our political power as a weapon against those we disagree with. We do not get to fantasize about the destruction of our enemies, foreign or domestic. We do not get to participate, even by quiet acquiescence, in the violence of a state that exists, as it always has existed, by the sword and the threat of the sword.
Instead, we are called to the harder, slower, more humiliating work of love. We are called to absorb insults without returning them. To feed the enemy who is hungry. To pray for those who persecute us. To wash feet. To take the lower seat. To prefer one another in honor. To meet evil with good and watch, sometimes for a very long time, to see whether good prevails.
It often does not, in the short run. The Cross teaches us this too. The pacifist is not promised victory in this lifetime. The pacifist is promised faithfulness, and a Lord who has gone before, and a Resurrection on the other side of every Friday.
This is the way. It is the way of our Lord, and it must be our way as well. The “weakness” of Jesus is the strongest argument the pacifist has, because it is not an argument at all. It is a Person. And He is calling us to follow Him, all the way down.
Praise Be to God
