The Peaceful Revolution
What do you think of when you hear about a revolution? For the most part, I suggest, we think of a political event where a governing body and ideology is overthrown and a new governing body and ideology is put into place. We still have a few members left in our church who were very young and living in the Ukraine when the Communist Revolution took place in Russia. They may not have memories of the time of the revolution itself but they certainly have memories of some of the recurring violence that accompanied that massive shift in ideology in Russia. Perhaps for the reason that the word "revolution" inspires images of sudden and dramatic political change, we frequently think of violence when we think of revolution.
In our times, the word has been co-opted by advertisers who want us to think that some new product has new features that are remarkable. Then, the product is said to revolutionize things. This trivializes the word, which really means a sudden, radical, or fundamental change. The word certainly applies to the kind of political, ideological change exemplified in the Communist Revolution. But it’s also an appropriate word to attach to the message Jesus brought to the world. We might be loathe to attach it to what Jesus did because of its connotations of violence but when we think of the word as indicating a fundamental change in thought, we might be able to agree that it applies to what Jesus did and said.
Consider the Scripture reading we read today. It jumps right into revolutionary thought when Jesus begins his address to his disciples with, "Blessed are you who are poor." Maybe that doesn’t sound like revolutionary thought to you but consider the four statements Jesus makes about who is blessed. In this case, the word "blessed" is closely related to the word "happy." It relates to being joyfully whole. So Jesus says that the people who are truly, joyfully whole are those who are poor, hungry, weeping and hated and insulted. What do you think? Do those sound like conditions that would cause you to feel joyfully whole? We’re not inclined to think so, are we? None of us are seeking to be poor, to be hungry, to be sorrowful, or to be hated and insulted. None of those conditions appear to us to be blessed.
Jesus continues from those statements of blessing to four contrasting statements in which he declares woe to people. Jesus says that people who are rich, who are well fed, who laugh and who are well liked by people are woeful. That doesn’t sound right to us. Those are all conditions we think are good things. We all want enough money and enough food. We all want to be happy and laugh and we surely want to be liked by others. Jesus says that the people who are all those things are woeful. They’re in a place of overwhelming sorrow and disaster if we take into account the English dictionary’s description of woe.
This all signaled revolutionary thinking. This was a radical change in thought for the disciples of Jesus. They had grown up conditioned to think the way that the Jews generally understood the Old Testament. If they would be faithful to God, then God would make their lives happy and prosperous. They surely expected that they would be rewarded eventually for their choice to leave other things behind and to follow Jesus. God would bless them for that decision and make them prosper. This teaching about who was blessed had to sound completely off base to them. I think that, if we’re honest, it sounds off base to us as well. We, too, are inclined to think that God should make things turn out right for us and make us happily prosperous when we follow Jesus.
But Jesus turns that thinking around in a completely different direction. He is revolutionary when he says that those who will be blessed are the poor, the hungry, the weeping and the hated. What does he mean? Donald Kraybill, in his classic book, The Upside-Down Kingdom, gives us some good understanding of what Jesus means to say. Jesus intends to warn his followers that following him may require them to become literally poor. They will be truly, joyfully happy when they are following him with commitment. Commitment to following Jesus means detaching oneself from the power of possessions and wealth. The state of blessing may come with poverty, persecution and hardship attached. Kraybill also thinks that Jesus has in mind the same idea that he communicated to the rich young man in another encounter. That is that people who have it all in a material sense are more caught in commitment to their wealth and to a maintenance of their positive life situation and will have a harder time giving their full commitment to God’s kingdom. As a result, the poor and persecuted who follow Jesus are blessed.
We have considered these words of blessing and woe within the context of Jesus giving his followers a revolutionary direction. Listening to those words about blessing and woe provides the foundation that causes us to understand that Jesus was proposing revolutionary thought, thought that signified a fundamental change. He continued that in the following verses. The concluding contrast in the statements of blessing and woe was that of people being either hated or well-liked by others. Jesus had said that those who are blessed are those who are hated by others.
That launched him into a description of how to treat enemies. We have already thought about Jesus teaching revolutionary thought. When he talks about how his followers should treat enemies, he continues to be revolutionary. The revolutionary sense of his words is signaled even better in the comparable words of Jesus in Matthew 5 when he frames the discussion of how to treat enemies with the "you have heard it said . . . but I say to you" literary construction. This is a shift in thinking. This is a significant change. It is revolutionary. So what does Jesus say about treating enemies in Luke 6?
In the first paragraph, he speaks essentially of how his hearers should respond when someone does something malicious to them. What do we hear Jesus say to us? If someone hates us, we should respond by doing good to them. We recognize that doing something good is more likely to improve the other’s hateful attitude than doing something bad but it still goes against our natures which incite us to respond to hatred with hatred. If someone swears at us in anger, we should wish them well instead of responding in kind. If someone treats us badly, we should choose to pray for that person. Prayer for another often helps us to see that person in a different light and softens our negative response. If someone wants to physically harm us, we should not retaliate in kind. If someone wants to take from us what belongs to us, Jesus says we should give it to that person. That statement strikes me as the most difficult. It seems to encourage the facilitation of stealing, something that is wrong in itself. While Jesus wouldn’t have encouraged theft, his words tell us that we should be free with giving our property away, a reminder that would also tell us not to protect our property from people we think of as enemies with such ferocity that we would harm others. The first paragraph describing Jesus’ teaching about treating enemies ends with the saying that we have called the "Golden Rule." It deserves a second look from us just because it’s so familiar and we may not think very hard about what it means for us. Jesus says his followers should do to others what they would want to have done to them. We’re inclined to respond to other people in the way that they treat us. We feel an obligation to do good to people who have done good to us but not so much if they have treated us poorly. Our treatment of others is often a reaction based on their treatment of us. Jesus’ words, in effect, tell us to take the offensive. Don’t decide how you will treat others based on how they have treated you. Decide to treat others based on how you would like to have them treat you. Take the initiative in good treatment.
In the second paragraph describing Jesus’ teaching about the proper treatment of enemies, Jesus focuses on the natural human tendency to do good things to people who do good to us so this is an expansion of the "Golden Rule" that ended the first paragraph. All over society, people commit to this kind of ethic. If our neighbours are people who do favours for us, we feel obligated to reciprocate favours. If we do something good for neighbours, we feel more justified in asking favours from them. To a degree, our church community is built on this philosophy. We will all act lovingly toward each other and expect loving treatment in return. This is not a bad or wrong philosophy. Jesus just says that it’s not enough. Our decisions to treat other people well should not be based on their prior good treatment of us or on an expectation to receive good treatment in return.
Again, we recognize the revolutionary nature of this teaching. Jesus has taken the way normal, sane people think and has said that their way of thinking is not the way that his followers are to think. He has proposed a radically different way of thinking and acting. We recognize that this revolution in thinking leads to peaceful ways of treating people and of relating to others. This is a revolution of peace. There is no violence in this revolution. This peaceful revolution is the way of the kingdom of God. God has delivered to his followers a teaching for how they should relate to those who would harm them and it is revolutionary.
We recognize that in many times and places, responses of kindness, peace and love in the face of violent treatment serve to defuse situations and bring peace to them. We also recognize that in some cases, peaceful responses do not turn the situations into good situations. But we commit to peaceful response just the same. Those who commit to such responses could be called peaceful revolutionaries. Do you think of people you know or situations you recall when you think of peaceful revolutionaries?
Here’s one story from Congo.
In late 1996, a guerrilla movement led by Laurent Kabila moved from southeastern Congo towards the capital, Kinshasa, in an attempt to overthrow the corrupt and dictatorial regime of President Mobuto Sese Seko. Along the way, the guerrillas engaged Mobutu’s army in battle and skirmishes; the army fell apart and took out its fury on local villages with killing, rape and pillage.
Kikwit, a community 500 kilometres east of Kinshasa prepared for the onslaught. The Mennonite Brethren churches [there] gathered to pray and brainstorm how they could respond to the impeding violence. They developed a plan, pitched it to the mayor, who accepted it, and they went to work to try to keep their community safe.
When the troops arrived a month later, volunteers met them before they could cross the bridge into Kikwit. They greeted the soldiers with welcome songs, and gave them food, shoes, clothes and medicines collected from city residents. Business people provided vehicles to transport the goods over the bridge and to take the troops out of the area. Additionally, teams of trained and unarmed youth (20 teams of 100 each) patrolled five main streets, intervening nonviolently when someone needed protection. Only one life was lost. (from MCC Peace Sunday resource packet for 2009 at www.mcc.org)
I watched a video this week that presented another story of peace revolutionaries. It was not a story of Christian activity but it was the story of how the nation of Denmark refused
to cooperate with the invading German army in World War II. Their persistence in non-cooperation with the demands and expectations of the Germans eventually frustrated the German intent to harness the labour resources of the country for their own purposes and damaged the German war machine. In their non-cooperation, Danes were also significant in saving a large number of Jews from death at the hands of the Nazi effort. These stories represent times where peaceful revolutionaries had important effect on the history of humanity.
We can’t all be part of big stories, but we can all be part of small stories. The peaceful revolution that Jesus inaugurated continues every time we as his followers choose to relate to people of all sorts, enemies included, with non-violence in word and action and with love instead. Each of us can be participants in this peaceful revolution. We can each be peaceful revolutionaries.
All this thought about the peaceful revolution and the multiple uses of the word, "revolution," drew me to think of another text. While not a biblical text, this text refers directly to revolution and then talks about the revolution of peace and love we have been considering. It is a text written by Jerry Davison, poking fun at some of the naïve expressions of peace and love in our world and bringing Christian understandings to them. It was recorded as the song, "Love is the Reason we Live." The song begins with a line reminiscent of The Beatles, "You say you want a revolution." It goes on to challenge us to be people of love and peace. I expect you will not know of the band that recorded the song except for the fact that you may have heard me mention their name when I’ve performed several of their songs. The band was Jacob’s Trouble.
I want to make a few comments about the way that the lyrics of the song challenge us in our thinking about the peaceful revolution and provide some application to our lives. In the verse we heard, Jacob’s Trouble sang, "Everybody’s talking ‘bout peace now, harmony and brotherhood. It’s just big talk until we understand it all began with a cross of wood." True peace is rooted in what Jesus did on earth. True peace takes hold in the hearts of humans when they respond to Jesus’ non-violent response in giving himself up to death and give themselves to God for God’s purposes. That’s where we need to begin in this peaceful revolution.
In the first verse of the song, the band sang, "You know we’ve got to love one another. You’ve heard it from the day you were born. But talk is getting cheaper and cheaper, till love is just another useless word." In this peaceful revolution, we have to do more than talk about it. We have to decide to act. We have to decide to be people who will not hate.
In the second verse of the song, the band sang, "You’re singing, ‘All you need is love’ now and to think it is all you need to do. You call it dreaming, I call it wishful thinking and it takes more than that to make a dream come true." Again, the challenge is to make this talk of peaceful revolution something more than a dream and a vision. Dreaming about peace doesn’t bring it to be. That verse concludes with the line, "But the world will only change one heart at a time." We need to move past dreaming to allowing the power of God to change your heart. As we choose to live out of love and peace in relationship with other humans, we begin to bring change to the world.
I wonder if we’re convinced to join Jesus’ revolution. Does it make enough sense to us to commit ourselves to being peaceful in our relationships with other people? Does it make enough sense to us to declare in our country that we believe in peaceful resolution to disagreements on the international level? Does it make enough sense to us to say to Jesus in response, "Yes, we will join you in loving enemies, in doing good to those who hate us, in blessing those who curse us and in praying for those who mistreat us?" Will we join this revolution of peace?