Father Richard Rohr reflects on the spiritual and moral futility of violence, drawing on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and his radical call to love:
Part of the genius of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), inspired by the teachings of Jesus and Gandhi, was that he was able to show thoughtful people that violence was not only immoral but actually impractical and, finally, futile. In the long run, it doesn’t achieve its stated purposes, because it only deepens bitterness on both sides and leaves them in an endless and impossible cycle of violence that cannot be stopped by itself. Instead, some neutralizing force must be inserted from outside to stop the cycle and point us in a new direction.
King insisted that true nonviolent practice is founded on a spiritual seeing and has little to do with mere education or what I would call the “calculative mind.” He thought it self-evident that the attitudes of nonviolence were finally impossible without an infusion of agape love from God and our reliance upon that infusion. He defined agape love as willingness to serve without the desire for reciprocation, willingness to suffer without the desire for retaliation, and willingness to reconcile without the desire for domination. This is clearly a Divine love that the small self cannot achieve by itself. We must live in and through Another to be truly nonviolent. [1]
Palestinian Christian theologian Munther Isaac challenges us to confront the deep disconnect between the nonviolent teaching of Jesus and the ways Christianity has often aligned with systems of power and violence, even today:
Christianity and violence should not go hand in hand, at least theoretically. The teachings of Jesus are very clear. The teachings of Paul and the apostles are very clear. There is no place for violence for the followers of Jesus. Yet an honest assessment of even the last 150 years will clearly reveal that many who claimed to be Christians committed some of the worst atrocities in our world: the Belgians in Congo, the Germans in Namibia, the French in Algeria, the Bosnian Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Guatemalan genocide against the Laya indigenous people, and of course the Holocaust against the Jewish people in Europe.
The Bible and theology have played a significant role in this war of genocide in Gaza.… To be clear, I fully believe that when Scripture is used to justify genocide or promote ideologies of supremacy, this use has nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus nor the essence of the Christian faith. Yet, shamefully, the church has aligned itself with empire throughout the centuries. It has chosen the path of power and influence. One would expect Christians to have learned the lesson. We have not.
Can We Love All?
Congressman John Lewis (1940–2020) describes his Christian faith as the foundation of his commitment to nonviolence:
I believe in the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. I accepted it not simply as a technique or as a tactic, but as a way of life, a way of living. We have to arrive at the point, as believers in the Christian faith, that in every human being there is a spark of divinity. Every human personality is something sacred, something special. We don’t have a right, as another person or as a nation, to destroy that spark of divinity, that spark of humanity, that is made and created in the image of God.
I saw Sheriff Clark in Selma, or Bull Connor in Birmingham, or George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, as victims of the system. We were not out to destroy these men. We were out to destroy a vicious and evil system. [1]
Theologian Walter Wink (1935–2012) recalls a tense moment in Selma in which a reminder to love their enemies shocked the conscience of the crowd and forged a nonviolent path forward:
King so imbued this understanding of nonviolence into his followers that it became the ethos of the entire civil rights movement. One evening … the large crowd of black and white activists standing outside the Ebenezer Baptist Church was electrified by the sudden arrival of a black funeral home operator from Montgomery. He reported that a group of black students demonstrating near the capitol just that afternoon had been surrounded by police on horseback, all escape barred, and cynically commanded to disperse or take the consequences. Then the mounted police waded into the students and beat them at will. Police prevented ambulances from reaching the injured for two hours….
The crowd outside the church seethed with rage. Cries went up, “Let’s march!” Behind us, across the street, stood, rank on rank, the Alabama State Troopers and the local police forces of Sheriff Jim Clark. The situation was explosive. A young black minister stepped to the microphone and said, “It’s time we sang a song.” He opened with the line, “Do you love Martin King?” to which those who knew the song responded, “Certainly, Lord!”… Right through the chain of command of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference he went, the crowd each time echoing, warming to the song, “Certainly, certainly, certainly Lord!” Without warning he sang out, “Do you love Jim Clark?”—the Sheriff?! “Cer … certainly, Lord” came the stunned, halting reply. “Do you love Jim Clark?” “Certainly, Lord”—it was stronger this time. “Do you love Jim Clark?” Now the point had sunk in, as surely as Amos’ in chapters 1 and 2: “Certainly, certainly, certainly Lord!”
Rev. James Bevel then took the mike. We are not just fighting for our rights, he said, but for the good of the whole society. “It’s not enough to defeat Jim Clark—do you hear me Jim?—we want you converted. We cannot win by hating our oppressors. We have to love them into changing.”
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TODAY IS THE FIFTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
We’re still in the “season within a Season” the four Sundays in September now celebrated by many churches as the “Season of Creation.”
On this Sunday, we read one of Jesus’ strangest and most misunderstood parables — about a corrupt manager who gets praised for stealing from his own boss.
Luke 16:1-13
Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’
“Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’‘
“So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.
“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”
The passage today is appropriate for both this season of creation and the threatening political season of global authoritarianism in which we live. It is a parable — a story that isn’t factual but is true — told to make a point or two. There is a point about shrewdness: People of faith are often kind of clueless but shouldn’t be. There’s a point about money: “You can’t serve God and wealth.”
And there is also a point about justice: You can do the right thing even while having less than honorable intentions toward others. In this parable, the manager tries to save his own neck but winds up acting justly toward the poor. Sure, he keeps his job. But those who receive the greatest benefit from his actions are the debtors. Ultimately, those struggling to repay the manager’s master have their debts reduced some 20 to 50 percent!
The rich man, the householder, is out a lot of cash. Yet he still praised the corrupt manager who stole from him.
All sorts of things may be happening behind the scenes. It may be that the manager had cooked the books all along. Maybe he’d padded the debts by 20 to 50 percent and skimmed that extra off the top for his own benefit. In order to rescue his job, he abruptly ended his scheme to profit off the master’s account. Perhaps he added to the debts to make more money for the master — who might be impressed by the profitability of the estate and reward him for his good work.
Corruption wears many masks.
But people started to talk — and the manager got called out. So, whatever smarts he’d employed toward cheating in the first place, he now redirected to impress and befriend those in debt. Because those were the folks about to become his new neighbors.
If you emphasize the debtors in the parable (instead of the householder or the manager), the story shifts. At first, the manager sees the debtors as a kind of personal piggybank — cheating them, whether directly or indirectly, enriches him. He sees them as a way up the financial or social ladder, people to be used on his way up.
When it becomes clear that he might spend the rest of his life among those whom he’d defrauded, he didn’t panic. Instead, he saw the situation differently. He will be in their debt. He’ll be beholden to them for friendship and food. He will live among them, not over them.
Well, he might have panicked a little. Would they cast him out? Would they turn their backs on him? Would they cheat him as he had cheated them?
He may have thought they were objects to be used for his benefit. But they were people, human beings as vulnerable as he was.
What will make them like me? Accept me? Welcome me to their tables?
The manager had a change of mind. He converted, at least in a vaguely selfish way, to side with those whom he’d previously seen as less than human. He decided to buy their affection. And he slashed their debts.
The manager’s boss finds this shrewd. It certainly was a creative redeployment of resources.
In the process of saving himself, the manager made the debtors’ world a little more just. He’s an accidental sort of social justice warrior. And guess what? They probably did like him much better than before. Who wants to hang out with a crooked debt collector?
At this point, the debtors disappear from the story and we are left with questions about them.
My sense is, given Jewish law and customs about hospitality at the time, the debtors would not have rejected the fired manager. If he came to them in distress, and if they took the teachings of their own faith seriously, they would have accepted him and cared for him. The debtors might have been generous people glad to have the manager finally take a seat at their tables. Even without the debt reduction.
But he saw the world through his own eyes — seeing people as pawns in his own game. He discovered he needed others, even as “pawns” to save himself, and did a strangely good deed for them.
The householder steps back in at the end. He praised the manager because the manager did something right even with these less-than-pure motives. The manager oddly became an agent of God’s justice for the poor. And then, the householder added one more thing — bring your heart in line with your mental shrewdness.
We might paraphrase the householder’s final speech: You did the right thing for the wrong reasons. How much greater would it be if you understood that you still had used my wealth to get ahead, to placate your own fears and greed, and that money was still your ultimate master. Don’t do the right thing accidentally. Change your heart, too. Because, ultimately, you can only follow one path — you must embrace the love of God and neighbor or continue to serve and save yourself through mammon.
Shrewd, yes. But loving? My cunning manager, you’ve got some work to do.
And what of that manager? As the story closes, his boss is pleased with him and expects him to do better in the future and his neighbors are grateful to him for making their lives easier. The manager now has the opportunity to go from being a crooked middleman in a corrupt arrangement to being well-regarded by the entire community. From having no friends to being surrounded by friends.
*****
I find great comfort in these truths within Jesus’s story. (Always remember: a parable is fiction, not something that actually happened.) I certainly have done good things for the wrong reasons — often those reasons were greedy and self-serving. And I’ve seen other people as little more than rungs on a ladder of my own getting ahead, only to learn later that, ultimately, all we humans are in the same boat.
The shrewd manager reminds me that I’m not alone. And the householder’s generous response to his manager’s actions — to praise him and keep him on — makes me feel safer, accepted, and forgiven. For all my flaws, I don’t feel condemned. Instead the householder’s response makes me want to do better. I want my actions and my heart to match, to grow in tandem toward the love of God and neighbor.
And, as we do better, everybody else does better. Because it isn’t about ascending to the top of some power pyramid by abusing and cheating others. We really live, even though we don’t always see it, in an interconnected community of mutual benefit.
This twist on the parable is greatly needed today. We are literally drowning in a sea of the most massive political corruption in the history of the United States. It is outrageous and brutal, and it is destroying the fabric of community at every level.
So many of us stand at the ready — indeed are eager — to condemn both the actions and intentions of the corrupt. To gossip and accuse and charge others with fraud and abuse. All those whom we deem less than human, those whom we think it is fine to abuse on our way to getting some result in our own interest. Corruption in the middle of a system invites more corruption throughout.
Perhaps we all need to take a breath — and try to see if and where good is really being done, ham-handedly perhaps, by those with impure hearts (and please do tell me if you find many actors with pure hearts) and mixed motives. Where the most unexpected of characters winds up being a hero in the story. I bet there’s more of those sorts of folks than we imagine — shrewd managers who accidentally learned that they don’t have to buy their friends. And that they don’t have to cheat to get ahead.
In the midst of it all, imitate the householder.
Praise the good; resist condemnation; invite even the awkwardly contrite to do the right things for the right reasons. Extend mercy. Seek the unity of mind and heart, of action and compassion. Rightly direct your love and urge others to do the same. Welcome all who come to the table.
And make sure that we, each one ourself, continues on that neighborly way — where we find we have far more friends than we knew all along.
