Why We Do Not Take Up the Sword
When violence feels inevitable, refusal becomes a spiritual practice: Refusal, Fire, and the Long Work of Love.
Before we enter this study, we need to let go of our preconceived notions so we can listen to the words of Matthew and glean the word of God from them without forcing them to mean what we want or need them to mean.
The Sword in the Garden
Matthew 26:51-52 (cf Luke 22:49–51)
51. Behold, one of those who were with Jesus stretched out his hand, and drew his sword, and struck the servant of the high priest, and struck off his ear.
52. Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place, for all those who take the sword will die by the sword.
The soldiers have come to arrest Jesus, and Peter has drawn a sword to protect him. He believes the Living Word of God needs protection, and that it is his duty to save the word. Jesus responds with the truth. He tells Peter to put away the sword.
Violence lives because it creates an endless cycle where the injured party injures another. The only way to stop the cycle is to put the sword away, interrupting the cycle of violence. Those who embrace violence die by violence. This is not the way of Jesus.
In the version of this story in Luke, when the soldiers come, the disciples ask if they should take up arms, and one of them does, striking a servant of the high priest. Jesus puts a stop to it and heals the servant’s ear.
Violence and the Cycle of Desire
Romans 12:17-21
17. Repay no one evil for evil. Respect what is honorable in the sight of all men.
18. If it is possible, as much as it is up to you, be at peace with all men.
19. Don’t seek revenge yourselves, beloved, but give place to God’s wrath. For it is written, “Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay, says the Lord.”
20. Therefore “If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in doing so, you will heap coals of fire on his head.”
21. Don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Paul tells us to think about what the community sees as noble, and not to repay evil for evil so we can live in peace with everyone. He reminds us that while others might harm us, we never avenge ourselves because vengeance is not ours to mete out.
On the contrary, we do the work of the kin-dom, feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, even if they are our enemies, because this burns away the enmity, because we overcome evil with good.
James 4:1-3
1. Where do wars and fightings among you come from? Don’t they come from your pleasures that war in your members?
2. You lust, and don’t have. You murder and covet, and can’t obtain. You fight and make war. You don’t have, because you don’t ask.
3. You ask, and don’t receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.
The writer of James asks us where our conflicts and disputes come from. They are from the craving that was within us. We want what we do not have, and we murder. We desire something we can’t get and argue and fight about it. We don’t have these things because we do not ask for them. When we ask, we still don’t get them because we didn’t ask with right intention. We ask for what we want for our pleasure, not for our need.
What the Sword Really Is
The sword is the symbol for violence. It is taken up in self-defense, in vengeance, and in desire. This sword is the aggression that puts our needs before the needs of others.
Desire or craving is a disruption in the flow of life that functions like an eddy current, drawing elements from the flow to possess it in itself.
When Jesus heals the enemy, he recognizes that he is a servant and compelled to be there at his arrest, reveals his forgiveness by touching him, and liberates him by restoring him and making him whole again.
Refusal is a key aspect of the Via Negativa. It is the power to say no and resist our desires and ache for vengeance to interrupt the cycle of violence so healing and restoration are possible.
The World This Story Names
This is a story about a world where far too many give into their desire and craving and grasp onto the sword, bringing violence, conflict, and coercion with them, and about a faithfulness that refuses to pick up that sword and heal our enemies, even when we know the cost to ourselves will be great.
The great river of life flows through everything, and we cannot allow ourselves to become eddies that trap what must flow on.
In refusing to pick up the sword, we are saying no to vengeance and coercion as well as our control over the outcome in order to break the cycle of violence and bring healing and restoration to the world.
Letting Go Without Looking Away
We have to let go of our grasping desire that tells us we deserve something and others don’t, refusing to give into the cravings for the things we believe we are worthy to have.
No one deserves anything, and none are worthy. These are the language of conflict and the tools of grasping hands.
That does not mean that we sit idle and passively wait or watch what is going on in the world. We don’t. We observe, making space to take in the facts and the lessons we need to learn and unlearn.
There is no room for vengeance and violence. They disrupt and shatter the peace of life.
We must lament the lamentable and unlearn the ways that trap us in this seemingly endless cycle of violence.
What Remains Holy When We Refuse the Sword
We are struggling for life, and life more abundantly. We don’t create a good or better life in the ashes of war, but in the light of a new day. Life is precious, but more than that it is filled with cooperation and competition. Competition is only conflict if we allow it to be.
In life, we find awe in its diversity and tenacity. We live gratitude when we build this new world together. Our reverence for life guides us in all our steps, reminding us when harm comes to any of us, we are all diminished for it.
Coercion is a poison to cooperation, so we do not drink it. Grasping takes the fun out of competition and robs us of joy. When we refuse the sword and hold onto life, we are not refusing to take action. We are denying vengeance and desire’s hold on us so we can tend the garden of life so it may grow ever more fruitful.
This dream is the delight of our heart and the hope that drives us forward.
Creativity Without Violence
Refusing vengeance and coercion, and embracing the delight in and hope for a shared life, empowers the compassion we bring into the Via Creativa. The path forward is not dictated for us, and we now know that we always have a choice; it is up to us to make those choices wisely.
We look for ways we can turn the perceived strengths of our adversaries against them or to show them for the empty vanity they are.
Proclaiming a thing does not make it so. We act, rooted in our beliefs and convictions, and do not obey their petty whims. This is the heart of nonviolent resistance.
When the empire tells you to only buy salt from them, you march to the sea and make your own salt. When they tell you to move so they can harm others, you stand firm.
Through our creativity and imagination, we seek ways to unmask the illusion of their power and authority and preserve what we love. We always save what we love instead of fighting what we hate. Hate is a tool of the adversary to breed division and conflict. It is the sword we refuse to pick up.
Transforming Ourselves and Our World
If we are going to ever live in a world free from the sword, we have to transform ourselves and the systems we live within into something new.
This has to start with our language. This is no above and below; there is only the here and now. This is learning to live with, not above, beside, or opposed to each other. We have no leaders, only guides and facilitators. We must learn to walk and not follow.
This is the antithesis of the rugged individualism and all-consuming collectivism we fight about. It is realizing that we are harmed when others are harmed, so we reduce the chances of that happening through mutual aid, care, and support. We work together on big problems and in smaller groups or alone on the rest. We rebuild our systems to reflect the natural order where cooperation and competition both exist, but prevent cooperation from becoming controlling and competition from being coercive and divisive.
It is about teaching our cultures and civilizations the lessons we were all supposed to learn in kindergarten: how to share, how to get along, and how not to hit each other.
Candor as a Communal Practice
Taking up the sword and engaging in conflict is a refusal to embrace life and live together.
The first step on the path to healing is candor, which is all about being open and honest. Too often, when we are not lying about our intentions, we are guarded and only say what we think people are willing to hear. Candor teaches us not only to speak our truth honestly and completely, but to be open to the dialogue that will follow.
We do not grasp tightly to the truth we speak. We offer it lightly and allow it to take its place in the discussion. Candor does not accept anything less from others in the dialogue and unmasks and invites participation through gentle questions and direct speech.
We guard against candor picking up the sword of violence and coercion, but recognize that truth itself is a double-edged sword that often cuts both sides. The goal of candor is not to dominate, but to find space where the truth can live and thrive.
Where Resistance Becomes Coercion
Sometimes it’s easy to tell when we’ve crossed the line between resistance, coercion, and violence. When we lay hands on other people or strike them, violence is easy to see. When we strike terror and fear into others, coercion is easy to see. But there are many who feel that talking about hell, hellfire, and the vengeance of God is not an act of coercion, when it is.
In the epistle of John, John tells us two things: that God is love and whoever does not know love does not know God, and that true love casts out fear. Whether it is recognized in the moment or not, all acts of coercion and violence are acts of fear. Fear that we do not have something, fear we will not get something, or fear that our way is not going to prevail.
When we learn to act in a way that is born and centered in love, a love that casts out fear, fear is still in the room. We have not given way to certainty or a belief in our own righteousness that we alone are doing the right thing. We don’t let ourselves succumb to the great lie of violence that says, “I had no other choice.” Anything we do when we have no other choice is a reaction, not an action.
When we take this step back and root ourselves in the basic compassion that we have for the world and then act forward from there, casting our fear to the side so that we can speak and act in a way that brings that compassion truly and fully forward without violence, without threats, without coercing other people, then and only then can we see that we are acting out of love and not fear.
Fortunately for us, we have many examples. We can see the courage of Gandhi’s resistance movement. We have the witness of the Freedom Riders and those who sat at the Woolworth counters. We have the march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the March on Washington. We can see truth and love in full action, refusing to take up the sword and winning the day.
No, winning the day is not always winning the battle or the war, but every win moves us ever closer to that victory where we can all live in that freedom, compassion, and justice that we are seeking.
Anger, Fire, and the Choice We Make
In this life, anger is often born through the mistreatment that happens to us or from witnessing it happening to others. That anger burns within us. It is a fire, and like all fires, we have a choice in what we do with it.
Some choose to quench it, to put it out, so that they don’t see or feel the injustice and just live in compliance. Others give in to their fear and pain and strike out in violence and coercive action, taking up the sword and doing further harm, continuing the cycle that they’re trapped in. While both of these are understandable as a reaction in this time of anger, our choice, if we are to live in love and cast out fear, is to take that fire and place it either into the hearth or into the forge.
That anger is the evidence of the outrage that we feel at either the sight or the experience of injustice. The anger itself is not wrong. Error creeps in in how we use it. If we add that fire to the hearth, then it lights the room and helps us see more clearly the world that we live in. It does not become the lens through which we see, but it highlights aspects of our lives that we may not have seen before. If we take it to the forge, we are not taking it there to make a sword. Instead, we are using it to heat the fires that will turn the sword into a plowshare, so that we can care for and cultivate this world, bringing it new life and new growth without destroying it.
This is not an easy path to walk, but it is one that clarifies. Are we carrying with us a sword to strike a blow, or a plow that can split the ground open to cultivate new life and seeds? A sword strikes out at others. A plow prepares the way for new life to grow.
A Word to the Weary
I know how hard it can be to walk through this dry land and hold on to our hope that we will one day arrive at the promised land, green and overflowing with milk and honey.
It’s easy to feel like we’re failing, and the exhaustion sets in as so many terrors are wrought to us and around us. It’s easy to be afraid. None of that is a flaw. It’s merely a sign that we’re human. So long as we’re doing whatever is within our power to make the world a better place, we have not failed.
If we don’t stop and take care of ourselves and make sure that we are in the best mental, spiritual, emotional, and physical state that we can be in, of course we will be exhausted. We have to rotate in and out of the struggle, or we’ll burn ourselves up and burn out.
It’s not wrong to be afraid. But it’s important for us to remember that the fear that anyone or anything instills in us is only a projection of the fear that it feels in itself. People and systems make us afraid in the same way that they are, so we feel powerless before them.
The truth is, they are always powerless before us. What they believe is power is shallow, empty, and brittle. So long as we push on and push forward after we rest and recuperate and take care of ourselves, we have not failed. And as long as we are able to live in our love and compassion and cast aside the fear in order to take action, we have not succumbed to it.