peace prophets
Illustration by Leonardo Santamaria
MOST CHRISTIANS TODAY do not understand the life and teachings of Jesus as a broad vision of daring nonviolence. But scripture gives convincing evidence for this: The gospel of Luke presents Jesus as the God of peace who comes among us in total poverty into our impoverished world of war and empire, who brings with him God’s reign of peace and nonviolence, and who invites us to follow him on the path of love, compassion, and justice. With his birth, we hear the angels announce the coming of peace on earth.
Jesus, the greatest peacemaker in history, marked the path of peace toward Jerusalem, where he confronted imperial injustice and called us to learn the things that make for peace; he endured rejection, betrayal, torture, and execution in the holy spirit of nonviolence, and rose to offer his gift of peace and send us out all over again on his path of peace.
How did Jesus learn all this? Luke’s gospel offers an amazing answer. The writer presents Mary, Jesus’s holy Jewish mother, as his teacher of nonviolence.
Luke tells the story of Mary’s journey as three movements of creative nonviolence: the first, the Annunciation as a story of contemplative nonviolence, which leads to the second, the Visitation as the story of active nonviolence, which leads to the third, the Magnificat as the vision of prophetic nonviolence.
Movement 1: Contemplative nonviolence
THE ANNUNCIATION IS a scene of contemplative prayer in which Mary communes with the God of peace; in that silence and stillness, she encounters, and is ready for, God. Jesus learned this from his mother. We will see this in Jesus’s first public appearance when he sits by the Jordan River after his baptism and, in that contemplative peace, hears the God of peace call him “My beloved,” which sets him on his journey.
The first lesson of Lucan nonviolence is to sit in silence and solitude, in contemplative prayer, to open ourselves to God, to listen for God, and to be available if the God of peace chooses to speak. As Mary would have known, the first step in a peaceful life is to spend time in peace with the God of peace, to let God speak to us, to be ready if God sends us forth as peacemakers into the world of war.
"I had no idea Martin Luther King was a radical!" These shocked words were spoken to me this weekend after an activist training I'd been running in Sydney. I had the privilege to be part of the Make Poverty History "action lab" -- a "teach-in" for 15 young anti-poverty activists chosen from each state of Australia.