Unlearning Violence

But there was and is also an upside -- a vital thought obscured by the horror and grief caused by his execution. For in saying that they did not know what they were doing, he was not describing a hopeless situation. Instead he was expressing the hopeful, the inspiring conviction that humankind could learn, can by taught that there was and is a more fruitful way to live: a better way that could then and still can transform humankind's persistent, selfish, and too often violent acquisitive hostility. In "forgive them, for they know not what they do," Jesus was expressing the hope, the inspiring conviction that we are teachable, that we can learn. So, therefore, we can be transformed. And the way for that learning to start is by going back to our future by striving to be the Sermon on the Mount. (continued)

The Sermon on the Mount was necessary; Jesus was necessary, because humankind from the beginning of scriptural history had not responded to the opportunity to unlearn violence and learn how to be nonviolent instead. For instance, Genesis 4:6,7 tells how Cain missed his chance. The Cain story is the first scriptural account of humankind's unwillingness to learn how to turn away from violence. "The Lord said to Cain, 'Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.'" Those verses were God's warning to Cain to be neither rash nor violent, and to understand the implications of his anger that was threatening to turn into rage. I see a foreshadowing of the Cross in these words. In Cain's time God was performing both a teaching and therapeutic healing function that he later assigned to Jesus. Like a therapist he explained the nature and implications of Cain's anger -- jealousy and resentment that had very little to do with Abel but a lot to do with anger at God for withholding his approval. The approval would have been a sure sign of success to Cain. Then like a teacher God went on to explain that Cain had the power to rid himself of the sin, by mastering the anger. Here was scripture's first teaching on community building and peacemaking. The tragedy for posterity, the Bible makes clear, is that it went unheeded. Here was man's first opportunity to work against myth -- in particular violence as redemption; and he blew it!

What We Do To Others Is What We Truly Are

In revealing his startling new love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you wisdom, Jesus for the first time in history answered a crucial answer to an important question that had been bugging wise people in the Middle East and elsewhere for at least a thousand years. And the question was: how? Just how does one go about loving one's neighbor as oneself? And the answer simply knocked most people out of their socks, just as it has been doing ever since. He said that in order to love your neighbor as yourself, you start by loving your enemies.

So far what I have been saying about loving one's enemy is a relatively obvious interpretation of the commandment, although it is true enough. There is, however, a more subtle interpretation, which has to do with that earlier Old Testament commandment "love your neighbor as yourself." To explain, I am reminded of Pogo's insightful indictment, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

To understand what I am certain was in Jesus' mind and also in Pogo's mind, think about Peter, the apostle whom Jesus had to repeatedly correct, the apostle who never seemed to get it, the apostle whom Jesus angrily called Satan, and the apostle who, even at the end of Jesus' ministry, still had to be told by Jesus to put up his sword. Peter's worst enemy was himself.

I think that was what Jesus was trying to get at with Peter and us. How can we truly love our neighbor as our self, not to mention love our so-called enemies, if we are leading terribly self centered, aggressive, possessive, selfishly ambitious lives, which, too often, create a frame of mind that history has proved easily excuses violence and invites neighbors to become enemies? So what we do to others is what we truly are. That is why Jesus warned that an important step in learning how to love your enemies is by first acknowledging the log in our own eye which is stopping us from seeing that we may be our own worst enemy.

That surely was Peter until it was almost too late; and when he saw himself as he was in the process of being, it broke his heart. So, when our love is more for things like power, position, and palm pilots -- than it is for people, then we will surely live as we love. That means probably not loving people rightly and, as a result, becoming indifferent, or even worse, becoming accustomed to violence. Such people, without a dramatic turnaround in their lives, are probably going to be incapable of tension free relationships with others. The closest they will come to that will be a wary or even fearful accommodation.

Sis hit the nail on the head when she explained to an audience the ironic rationale behind redemptive violence, one of the most insidious forms of rationalizing violence. "Redemptive violence is doing a terrible thing," she said. "Then we baptize it." The same is true of reciprocal, retributive, and acquisitive violence. Walter Wink also hit the nail on the head when he reminded how deeply embedded redemptive violence is in "popular culture, civil religion, nationalism, and foreign policy, and that it lies coiled like an ancient serpent at the root of the system of domination that has characterized human existence." ^[14] The post-crucifixion world cannot afford to have such lessons, which rationalize violence, taught its children and grandchildren anymore.

Sis and Wink were articulating a truth that my father, more than fifty years ago illuminated in his studies of the impact of hero myths on culture and society. The greatest heroes of mythology as well as scripture, he pointed out, were targeted during infancy for extermination, often by their parents. This indicated, he wrote, that at the time the myths were created humankind was "not really sure what to do about their children." ^[15] So they glorified such cruel rejections by elevating and even making gods of some of those who had been its targets, i. e. by making heroes of those who had survived.

Mythologizing Jesus

My father was surely right as far as he went; but I believe that even greater more deeply embedded anxiety creating ambivalence drove the ancient mythmakers to fantasize and glorify heroic phoenixes arising from the ashes of violent child abuse and would be infanticide. Those terrible acts were a reflection of an even more basic and confounding moral and ethical uncertainty. The problem had far more to do with what to do about humankind's two minds with respect to its clearly violent nature (what my father described as the ancients' "fear of their own cruel impulses" ^[16]) than it did with what to do about their children. The answer was to glorify such violence so as to be able to logically excuse it.

Attempts to mythologize Jesus, I think, have had to do with humankind's historic propensity to rationalize violence. That is why a deeply embedded idiomatic statement with aphoristic stature is the one having to do with good coming from evil. That may have been O. K. for the Old Testament: good enough, for example, for the compilers of the Joseph story; but that logic should have died with Jesus on the Cross. In the real world, good may result despite evil, never because of or from it. Only in a mythological universe can good come from evil. Jesus died against cultural and mythological notions that rationalize violence, while other ancient cultural heroes provided crucial conceptual loopholes through which humankind has continued to craftily slip.

That is what has made the continual dishonoring of the concepts of nonviolence and love for enemies -- as exemplified by Jesus' life, teachings, and death -- so much worse for humankind since his execution than before it. Up to the moment Jesus first proclaimed those concepts, we could claim that humankind's naiveté, its ignorance actually, provided an excuse for both its mythic and historic confusion with respect to its clearly very often unrighteous and unjust violent conduct. But we cannot make that claim any more, because, once having been spoken and heard, his words, his ideas, his truths have become an irreversible element of our history and an indelible element of our collective memory of them.

If it is true -- and it is -- that his truths do march on, then we can no longer claim ignorance. Instead we must own up to our massive cultural obliviousness. So it is vital that we get on with the job, with the help of the Holy Spirit, of intentionally transferring, intentionally teaching such understandings as systemically, systematically and methodically to our young people as Jesus' did to the apostles, and as they did to those who followed them.

Based on remarks prepared for the "Journey To Jerusalem" Organizing Conference of Every Church A Peace Church, at Washington City Church of the Brethren, 1-2 March 2002
Copyright © by Jerry Levin
All Rights Reserved

Biography

Jerry Levin, while CNN's Middle East Bureau Chief reporting on Lebanon's civil war in early 1984, became the first of the so-called forgotten American hostages. After his escape to freedom eleven and a half months later, due to his wife, Sis', efforts to free him, he embarked on a campaign of writing and lecturing that focused generally on the futility of violence as a means of resolving individual, social, cultural, or political issues. He is currently working on a book reflecting on the experiences that led him to that viewpoint tentatively titled The Futility of Violence: Essays and Reflections on "Love your enemies."

The Levin's have been contributing to World Peacemaker since returning from Lebanon in 1985. They spent most of August 2001 in Palestine where they were part of a CPT (Christian Peacemaker Teams) delegation. During January the Levins completed four weeks of intensive CPT training in Chicago in nonviolent direct intervention methods and principles.

During the CPT training, the Levins along with other CPT members participated in a nonviolent demonstration protesting the continued operation in Northern Wisconsin of a Trident Nuclear Attack Submarine Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) communication center. As part of the nonviolent action, the Levins and two other couples carrying candles and crosses walked on to center property and were promptly detained by Federal authorities and charged with "criminal trespass." Their trial, which will take place in Federal Court in Madison, Wisconsin, is scheduled to take place in late May.

Following that they plan to return to Palestine for an indefinite stay.

Jerry Levin can be contacted at the following e-mail address: jlevin0320@aol.com

[1] André Schwarz-Bart, The Last Of The Just, (Woodstock, The Overlook Press, 2001)), 326. Of course, the post-Holocaust fall-out has resulted in the astonishing reversal of roles with respect to scapegoating. Main stream Zionism's (Jewish and Christian) adamant imperial policies and beliefs have transformed once monumentally abused and victimized Jews into monumentally abusive victimizers of the entire indigenous Islamic culture of the West Bank and Gaza, which had nothing to do with the Nazi perpetrated genocide.

[2] James W. Douglass, the Nonviolent Cross: A Theology of revolution and peace, (New York, MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc. 1968), 55, 58. For those interested, The Nonviolent Coming Of God, is the title of Douglass' most recent analysis of the bitter struggle between anthropology and Christology. It posits a hopeful Christ-centered interpretation of the Book of Revelation. (Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1991).

[3] Every Church A Peace Church (ECAPC) website is: www.ecapc.org

[4] Christian Peacemaker Teams website is: www.cpt.org

[5] Micah 6:8

[6] Walter Wink, Engaging The Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1992), 13.

[7] Ibid., 13

[8] C. T. Vivian, from his Keynote Address to the Organizing Conference of Every Church A Peace Church, March 1, 2001.

[9] Vivian, from his Closing Address to the Christian Peacemaker Teams Congress VI, September 23, 2001.

[10] Ezekiel 8:17

[11] Ibid., Vivian.

[12] The label, Holy Land, of course, as a depiction of things as they really are, is an oxymoron of disgraceful and potentially apocalyptic proportions.

[13] "Scriptural freeze framing is a shortsighted violence rationalizing practice that discounts later Old Testament prophecy, Jesus' ministry and the Cross. [It clings] to the applicability of ancient scriptural license for violence that is clearly superseded theologically and ethically by the Gospels." Levin, "The Heart and Soul of Just Peacemaking," (World Peacemakers, Summer 2001), 20

[14] Wink, Engaging the Powers, 13.

[15] A. J. Levin, The Oedipus Myth In History And Psychiatry: A New Interpretation, Psychiatry, Volume 11, Number 3, Aug. 1948, 287.

[16] Ibid., 287