When I was a little girl, 8 years old I think, my family adopted a calico cat we named Marble Cake. We adopted her from the Humane Society, and she was beautiful. She was a little bit wild! The first time I held her, she extended her claws and exited by walking down my back. My parents thought she’d been mistreated earlier in her life, and assured us that if we were kind to her she would settle down.

The thing is, they were right. She changed in the matter of months. She was sweet and cuddly, a wonderful lap cat, and a fantastic companion for 18 years! Looking back on that moment when she settled into our lives, I’m especially grateful for my parents’ wisdom. Marble Cake needed to be able to establish her boundaries and have them be respected, so that the love we wanted to give her could break through. If we had ignored her, she wouldn’t have experienced love. If we had violated her boundaries, she never would have come to trust us. Worst of all, if we had fought back when – acting in fear- she hurt us, there would have been escalating violence.

I suspect that the story I just shared is particularly obvious to most of you. Hurting mammals respond with fear and fear often comes out as aggression. And any mammal who has been hurt needs consistent, gentle, loving care; and when it comes, miraculous changes occur. The irony is that human beings forget that we too are mammals, and we too need consistent, gentle, loving care. This forgetting causes problems on both the personal and the societal scale.

I want to look at the ways this plays out on the societal level. Let’s think for a moment about a group who is seen as a threat. This happens often enough! In fact, in the time of Jesus, the Jesus movement itself was seen as a threat. Conversely, from the perspective of the Jesus movement, the domination system of the Roman Empire was a threat!

Each of them responded VERY differently to the perceived threat though. The Roman Empire and its Roman appointed Jerusalem leaders worked the way most societies do throughout time. They decided to eliminate the threat, silence it, stop it. More concretely, they decided to kill Jesus to prevent the movement from continuing. Even though the Jesus movement was a nonviolent one, they stopped it violently. This is the most common way that the world works 🙁

Within the Jesus movement, those in power and authority were also a threat! The Jesus movement compromised primarily Galilean peasants whose lives were already threatened by the ways money flowed to the top in the domination system with didn’t leave enough for everyone to survive. They were further threatened when the Jerusalem leaders got scared of them. Jesus wasn’t trying to eliminate anyone though, he wasn’t even thinking of them as threats or as enemies. This is the man who taught love of enemies. Jesus was trying to change the system so that everyone benefitted, INCLUDING those who were currently oppressors.  His nonviolent movement was aimed at the commonwealth of God where everyone can thrive. Now, of course, the oppressed are the most harmed in any system of oppression, BUT the oppressors are always also dehumanized by their participation in the system. Jesus was trying to bring a fuller life and a deeper humanity to all people, he was trying to bless the oppressors.

Reflecting back on Marble Cake, the Empire hit back when the cats claws came out, and Jesus loved the cat. Sometimes this is easier to see closer to our lives today. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote,

To our most bitter opponents we say: “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.¹

Rev. Dr. King and his followers acted like Jesus and his followers. They followed the path of nonviolence that transforms violence itself with the power of love. It is not an easy path, but it is a transformative one.

The world in the time of Jesus, as it was before him and as it has been after him, tended towards the ways of violence, oppression, and domination. There is a contrast between the ways the world most often has worked and the ways God would have the world work. And the primary difference is that the world uses violence to uphold inequity while God calls us to nonviolence and profound equity. (As people normalized to a capitalistic system, this should be squirmy.)

Jesus threatened the domination system of his day, in many ways. He offered free healing, which upset the economic systems dependent on gaining wealth from people’s illness. He taught everyone who came to him, which flagrantly defied the rules of social order (most particularly that only men were worthy of studying God). His teachings illuminated the injustices of the world around him. He spoke in ways that called out those who benefited from oppressing others, including in his own faith tradition. Additionally, he engaged in nonviolent direct action against the injustices of the Roman-Appointed Temple and the Roman-Controlled Passover celebrations. Worse yet, he was profoundly popular with the masses who were rekindling the power of their own faith tradition to find hope, connection, and reasons to challenge the way things were.

So, the Roman appointed Jerusalem leaders killed him. Yet, he maintained his commitment to nonviolence. He didn’t fight back, he didn’t flee, nor did he accept that what was being done was acceptable. He was killed, but he remained nonviolent and committed to God and God’s vision. He didn’t let the threat of violence, and the fear it induces, change his path.

This becomes particularly significant today. Marcus Borg said, “Easter is God’s YES to the World’s NO.” The World, with its preference for systems of domination and oppression, killed Jesus. The threat of violence became the punishment of death, and the world’s strongest commendation. But it failed.

Violence couldn’t force Jesus to comply, or conform, or even fight back and become a part of itself. Violence was powerless against Jesus! Death was powerless against Jesus, because they couldn’t change him or stop him! Because Jesus was able to face violence with nonviolence and disrupt its power, we know that we can too.²

Furthermore, the reason the Empire used violence against Jesus was to stop the Jesus movement. In that, it radically failed. Initially, their tactics worked. Peter was too afraid to claim Jesus, even after he’d followed him to find out what was happening. The disciples stayed away while he was crucified. (Exception being the female disciples who seem to have been there the whole time, although to be fair to the males, I don’t think they were seen as a threat and therefore weren’t threatened in the same ways. Likely they were mostly invisible to those who killed Jesus.)

So, the tactics of violence to induce fear worked BUT only temporarily. Then SOMETHING happened and changed things. Those same disciples who had denied Jesus and disappeared into the night became the leaders of the continuing Jesus movement and were unstoppable by the threat of violence from that point onward. All of the (remaining, male) disciples remained nonviolent while they were killed by the violence of the Empire. Whatever it was that changed the disciples from fear to fearlessness, from allowing violence to impact their actions to being impervious to violence, that’s what we call resurrection.

And it is our inheritance today. Jesus had a commitment to nonviolence, one that refused to be changed by the threat of violence. His disciples learned it. Today we celebrate it, and in our lives we are able to claim it! We are, today, the Body of Christ continuing his work and his legacy, and that requires that we use his means to seek his ends. To be followers in the way of Jesus “requires the unconditional and unilateral renunciation of violence.”³ Without that, we would easily fall into the other methods of fear, retribution, and fighting violence with violence. And Rev. Dr. King so clearly told us, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”⁴

The system of domination, oppression, and violence killed Jesus, but failed to stop his movement. God and Jesus can’t be stopped even by death! The Jesus movement got stronger.  God’s work in the world built strength!

Mark tells us all this with only an empty tomb. In this earliest of gospels, all we get is the already fearless women, the suggestion of resurrection through a messenger, the hope for the disciples, and the fear that ends it all. This is the original ending of the Gospel of Mark and it is strikingly abrupt. “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” The end 😉 Scholars think the ending is intended to motivate action, that the listener would think “well, if the women didn’t tell, I have to” and/or “if they were afraid, I can overcome my fear and participate in the resurrection that they’re missing!”

To live out God’s nonviolence, is to live out God’s love, and is to live the kindom of God in the now. Some of this living is in celebrating, and that’s our particular work today! We are to see, name, and celebrate. We see, name, and celebrate nonviolence, the kindom, and resurrection. It is all around us, when we are looking. It is in the decrease in worldwide poverty and hunger, but also in the loving way our breakfast volunteers greet our breakfast guests. It is in the work of UMCOR, but also in the loving greetings shared as people enter the church. It is in the long, hard, work to change the norms and laws of society for the better but also in laughter between strangers.

Nonviolence, its expansive love, and its incredible power have changed the world and will change the world. Their power is seen in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus AND in his followers throughout time. May it be seen in us, in the strength of our love, and in the clarity of our commitment to follow his ways of nonviolence. May it be seen as we celebrate the resurrection and the reminder that violence cannot stop the love of our God. Amen

1Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “On Loving Your Enemies” found athttps://www.onfaith.co/onfaith/2015/01/19/martin-luther-king-jr-on-loving-your-enemies/35907 on March 29, 2018.

2Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Fortress Press: 1993 it seems), 141.

3Walter Wink, 149.

4King (same sermon on “Loving Your Enemies”)

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Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady