The way of Jesus is not only fiercely nonviolent, it’s also intrinsically non-retaliatory. In Christ, we are introduced to the God who comes and dies for his enemies, the God who absorbs the evil of his adversaries and neutralizes it within his own broken body. This radical, sacrificial love of God in Christ is the power of God unto salvation. It is the mechanism by which he recreates the world. To “believe in Jesus” is to love the cross-bearing God revealed in Christ and to trust in his counterintuitive redemptive process. We can’t even be a part of what he’s doing until we lay down the sword and follow him in taking up our cross.
Such in odd thing, in light of Christ’s teaching, that many American Christians have come to believe we can bear the cross and the sword together. As a result, we are preoccupied with our “rights” to use violence to protect what’s ours, we justify our greed, fear those who threaten our position of power and privilege, succumb to politics that validate and incite our grievances, frantically grasp for more imperial power, and gleefully relish the tears and “owning” of our ideological and tribal adversaries. I’m increasingly convinced that this fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanics of the cross—which is the confounding power of God—accounts for much of what has gone wrong within American evangelicalism. We have claimed allegiance to the cross and the kingdom while brazenly trusting in the instruments of the empire.
When we take up the sword, our actions shouldn’t merely be seen in terms of our disobedience to Christ’s clear commands (though they are that). Our reliance on the sword is nothing short of our failure to believe in the mechanism of the cross. The sword is not mildly incompatible with the cross; it is its opposite, and its use represents the outright and complete rejection of the cross and our crucified King.
