As Jesus is being led to his death, he shouts a warning to the crowd: “If this is what [the Romans] do when the wood is green, what will they do when the wood is dry?” (Luke 23:31)
Dry wood is kindling: a firebrand. It is a word we use to describe a violent revolutionary. Luke was writing his gospel just a few years after the Romans put down a Jewish revolution. According to Josephus, when the Romans exacted their revenge, they crucified so many people that they actually ran out of wood. They cut down every tree for miles around Jerusalem.
This is one of the most poignant moments in the gospels, for me, because it sounds like Jesus, having failed to make the case for moral pacifism, makes a plea to the crowd for strategic nonviolence: “Use my death as an example; If you can’t choose nonviolence because you love your enemy, choose it because you love yourselves.”
I don’t think there’s much doubt that Jesus was a moral pacifist, and the early Christians certainly interpreted him that way. After all, we’ve got the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus asks his followers to “pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:43-48). We’ve got Paul’s letter to the Romans, when he tells his readers to “repay evil with good” (Romans 12:17-21). We’ve got the parable of the Good Samaritan, when Jesus makes the listeners’ most hated enemy into an example of God-like compassion and says, “go and do likewise” (Luke 10:25-37). Early Christian communities forbade their members to take up weapons.
Moral pacifism is not naive. It is grounded in our collective liberation and the power of nonviolence. Nelson Mandela, who certainly witnessed his share of violence and coercive power, said that his form of nonviolent resistance was about helping to liberate not only the oppressed, but also the oppressor (Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 1994.) It is difficult to use violence even against your enemies if you believe, like the Jewish sages, that whoever kills a person destroys a world. Extinguishing a sentient life diminishes us all.
But Jesus’s warning about dry wood is a much more practical reason for nonviolence. A cross was not just a convenient execution method: it was a billboard. It advertised Rome’s monopoly on violence. Jesus was saying, “I came preaching forgiveness and nonviolence, and this is what they do to me; what do you think they will do to those of you calling for violence?”
Dr. Desmonda Lawrence explains one of the reasons for strategic nonviolence this way:
“Maintaining nonviolent discipline is necessary against a state that has a well-developed arsenal. The state has a monopoly on violence: a group of citizens taking up arms against a regime is usually vastly outgunned. But, importantly, armed struggle legitimizes the state’s use of force against the citizens.”
Our American fascist regime has decided to blame recent violence on “radical leftists,” in spite of well-documented research that most of these (white, male) shooters are right wing. They claim that anyone who tells the truth about the brutality of masked ICE agents is at fault for recent shootings. Anyone who stands up for freedom of speech for protesters, or due process for immigrant food truck vendors and grandmothers gets labeled a “radical leftist.” (Meanwhile the Department of Homeland Security regularly posts white supremacist kitsch on social media. They are desperate to find an excuse to unleash the power of their expensive weapons.)
Please understand: strategic nonviolence does not guarantee safety against the brutality of authoritarians. This is what Jesus was yelling out to the crowds: “See what they do when the wood is green?”
The most important argument for strategic nonviolence is that it is simply more effective than armed resistance. Dr. Erica Chenowith studied the difference between violent and nonviolent protests and their effect on authoritarian regimes:
“Countries where resistance campaigns were nonviolent were 10 times as likely to transition to democracy compared to countries where resistance turned violent—regardless of whether the campaign succeeded or failed in the short term. Even when nonviolent campaigns were not immediately successful, Chenoweth and Stephan found, they still tended to empower moderates or reformers within the ruling elites who would gradually initiate changes.”
While I do believe, in a spiritual sense, that any violence I do to you I also do to myself and to Christ, I recognize this is not an insight that is easy to convey to those who already see me as an enemy. North American Christianity has denied the nonviolence of Christ for centuries, and instead embraced and further developed the religious violence of medieval and settler-colonial Europe. Strategic nonviolence is not about winning the hearts and minds of white supremacists and authoritarians. They have already been baptized into violence, washed in the blood of their enemies.
But even strategic nonviolence requires a spiritual commitment. The choice to refrain from violence, to override the fight-or-flight response of my amygdala, is one that I have to choose to strengthen daily if I want to be able to “maintain nonviolent discipline,” as Dr. Lawrence says. Without prayer and meditation, without practicing restraint when I am angry, I cannot restrain my own violence.
And if I cannot restrain my own violence, how can I expect to change the violence of the world? And if I cannot restrain my own violence, how can I expect someone with much less self-knowledge, insight, or self-control to do so?
When I read Jesus’s words in Luke, I can hear the desperation in his voice: “Look, people. Look and do not turn your eyes away. This is what they do even when we are nonviolent. If you won’t choose the path of nonviolence for spiritual reasons, choose it for your survival.”
Dave Barnhart 