Generous Peacemaking

The brother of Jesus once wrote that “human anger does not produce God’s righteousness” (James 1:20). Perhaps James was concerned with hotheaded young rebels or zealots who thought the way of Phineas and the Maccabee boys was the only way forward. Whatever the precise context, which is not easy to discern, the principle obtains: violence and justice are not virtue’s siblings.

Jesse P. Nickel, in his new and important book, A Revolutionary Jesus: Violence and Peacemaking in the Kingdom of God, summarizes the way of Jesus like this: “Jesus steadfastly rejected the option of eschatological violence, refusing to use violent force of any kind to accomplish the goals of his ministry.” He continues, “Jesus repudiated eschatological violence because of his conviction that violence, as a tool of destruction and death, has no place whatsoever in the kingdom of God, which is characterized by restoration and life. Peace, on the other hand, is entirely at home in this kingdom; in fact, it defines it.” True peace, he concludes, “exists when there is peace between human beings and God, human beings and creation, and among human individuals and communities.” Hear these wondrous words in our Bible:

The LORD bless you and keep you;
the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace (Numb. 6:24-26).

Wisdom’s “ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace” (Prov. 3:17).

“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns” (Isa. 52:7).

After his healing of two different women, Jesus said to each, “Go in peace” (Lk 7:50; 8:48).

Peace, for Nickel then, “is clearly about something other than an end to conflict.” It was “The peace of well-being and wholeness, the peace of restoration, the peace of harmony between the woman and those in her community, and between the woman and God.” To go in peace then is a mission statement: it is to live one’s life in the kingdom network and mission Jesus has formed.

Nickel turns to the Sermon on the Mount, then, for a sketch of Jesus and his way of peace. It’s about the kingdom of heaven, as Jesus says it in Matthew, and heaven here contrasts the ways of this world with the ways of God, and where God dwells, in heaven.

Jesus blesses the peacemakers (Mt 5:9), and Nickel turns to Jonathan Pennington’s important work on the Sermon in which he contends we are to define “blessed” by the Hebrew term ashre, and thus to see it as the “happy state of the one who lives wisely.” In other words, it means flourishing (and that is what happiness means). I’m persuaded this reduces the Greek term makarios, but I do agree human flourishing is to live the way God wants humans to live. That is, those who live as God wills will flourish.

The true origin of blessing in this sense is God, and there is an eschatological dimension to the meaning of blessing for Jesus. For sure, human flourishing can occur in the here and now but in the Gospels the fullness of that flourishing awaits the fullness of the kingdom. The two correlate. There is a conditionality to blessing, as we read in Deut 28 and Lev 26, but the emphasis in the beatitudes of Jesus in the Sermon is on people groups: these are the people on whom God dispenses his blessings of flourishing. Nor is this conditionality a covert command. Jesus is not advocating that people go out and do some mourning. Rather, he counters conventional ethics with an alternative set of examples, these people blessed in the beatitudes. The blessed here are in good relation with God, self, and others. Finally, the blessings of Jesus are reversals and contrasts, again, with conventional status in his world. The virtues implicit in the beatitudes then are not commands but startling reminders of the people whom God favors with his blessing.

Peacemaking is the way of a follower of Jesus, and Nickel turns to two examples in the Sermon: non-resistance at 5:38-42 and love for one’s enemies in 5:43-48. I don’t think Nickel would disagree with me that peacemaking involves all six of the contrasting statements Jesus offers in 5:21-48.

Not resisting is about eschewing the “necessity of the proportionate retribution” as Jesus pushes to the more he wants of his kingdom followers and to the beyond he expects of them even now. He wants to them not to pursue a passive resistance but an active, but nonviolent, resistance. He wants them to resist without becoming the evil they are resisting. It’s about “not focusing on getting what one is owed and exposing the effects of such acts of evil (dehumanization, injustice, shame, dishonor, etc.).” He pushes for generosity for his followers.

“Those who seek first the Kingdom and its righteousness respond to an evil act not by ensuring an equal amount of harm is repaid to the perpetrator, but in a way that reflects the character of the Kingdom. This means neither passively ignoring the evil, nor repaying it with evil in hand, but exposing evil for what it is, and the harm it does. It also means imitating the generosity of God, who has a loving father gives what is needed to his children who ask for it. In order to follow Jesus's command to give with boundless generosity one must trust that God will meet one's needs.”