The Scandal Of Defenselessness

Jesus said to them, "Tonight every one of you will lose his faith because of me" ( Matthew 26:31).

Our minds can hardly take in the pathos of those words. They come as a sort of horizontal foreshadowing of that dire cry from the cross. The Son of Man had come to save the lost, to lift up the fallen. Here, though, is not a lifting up, but (in more literal translation) a falling away because of him. "Anyone who is an obstacle [stumbling-block] to bring down one of these little ones who have faith, would be better thrown into the sea with a great millstone around his neck" (Mark 9:42). But here Jesus himself is causing others to fall from faith. He is the stone of stumbling (skandalon), and he feels the weight of the ponderous millstone.

Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor said to Jesus, "Thou art proud of Thine elect, but Thou hast only the elect, while we give rest to all." Jesus had rejected a political strategy for mobilizing and lifting up the many. With gaze still upon the many, he had turned to the few. But now he has no longer even the few. The few, on whom the future of his mission depends, are about to fall away—because of him.

Peter does not fall away because of the number of swords readied against his. He and the others collapse into grave sin because of Jesus himself, Jesus in his defenselessness. Peter is ready to go down fighting. But he is utterly unready to go down not fighting. What breaks Peter and the others is not the overpowering concentration of armed might sent against them in the garden and not the danger of death. Rather, it is the way Jesus meets that armed mob, reprimands Peter for the attempted defense, does not raise a hand except to heal, and goes as a lamb to the slaughter. The disciples fall away precisely because of the character of Jesus as they see it climactically revealed at the time of the arrest.

The Son obeys the Father, but because of his obedience his disciples disobey. He sees that in going to the cross he exposes his followers to grave physical danger and extreme moral peril. They will either go into the jaws of death with him or desert him. He knows they will desert him. The prospect of himself being skandalon is for him skandalon.

The Son of Man cannot be defenseless alone. His going to the cross cannot be a delimited, self-contained act. In his defenselessness they are direly exposed; with his wounding they are vulnerable—they who do not know, do not yet understand, that by his wounds they are healed, that by his not fending off the worst from himself, he fends off the worst from them.

Jesus knew what was in human beings (John 2:25), but he moved into the turbulent middle of the human situation, he put himself in human hands, he gave himself over into the power of his enemies. His coming was God's ultimate exposure, defenselessness, vulnerability. Reconciliation between God and his adversaries could come, not through his annihilating them, not by his overpowering and coercing them, not by his keeping them at a safe distance or his maintaining a shield to hold off their mad attacks. Reconciliation could be brought about only as he has drawn near to the enemy, met them, spoken with them, showed them himself. It could come only through defenselessness, vulnerability, the cross. God did not defend himself. The Father did not defend the Son. Jesus drew near his enemies; he met them. He was wounded, smitten, pierced, done away with by human beings. When we had done our worst, God came back with his best.

But death on the cross was not the end of the wounding. The resurrection did not terminate the vulnerability of Jesus. The Risen One had still visible wounds. He put the question, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" (Acts 9:4). Paul saw the sufferings of Christians as extension of and supplement to the sufferings of Christ.

In the Old Testament, God was drawn into the sufferings of his people. In the New Testament, Christ's people are drawn into his sufferings. The vulnerability of Jesus Christ does not stop just with him. The healing, deliverance, power of his triumph go out into others; and so do his weakness, his defenselessness, his suffering. "While we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh" (2 Corinthians 4:11).

Jesus was skandalon not only to his disciples during those several days; he has remained skandalon for the many in each generation. "Christ crucified" was "a stumbling-block to Jews and folly to Gentiles" (1 Corinthians 1:23). The Jesus of Gethsemane and Golgotha is the stone of stumbling (Romans 9:33). Jesus must also have discerned the long-term scandalousness of his going to the cross and been torn by it. From this perspective, Jesus as skandalon, we can now deal further with that most difficult question of attack and defense. Neo-Cain says, "I am my brother's keeper and therefore must kill." When thus laid bare, the attitude of military custodianship isn't very attractive. But what is the alternative? Are we to leave others undefended? Can God expect of us an obedience which would leave others exposed to whatever evils our adversaries might choose to inflict? We know (perhaps) that we ourselves should be ready to suffer; but are we to keep our hands clean even if this means the suffering and the ruin of others?

What we usually forget is that Jesus in the desert and in the garden faced these very questions. Their persuasiveness was pressed upon him by Satan himself. Directly from the Evil One he learned the subtleties of the lesser-of-two-evils argument: You have to resort to some regrettable actions to prevent what would be far worse; don't fall into the pride of an obedience which brings the ruin of others. Jesus in Gethsemane met the marshaled pathos and power of all these considerations. The Son obeyed the Father. In weakness he faced the might of the enemy and went down. He became skandalon. That child was "set for the fall and rising of many" (Luke 2:34). The Son scandalously obeyed the Father, and through his rising many rose.

To refuse certain modes of defending loved ones, thus leaving them seemingly more open to attack by adversaries, is a scandalous stance. So is the rejection of lethal modes of combating a perverted and perverting system like Nazism, the wider victory of which might bring spiritual ruin to additional tens of millions. But the great difficulty and scandalousness of the Christian pacifist position is closely derivative from the scandal of God's weakness in Jesus Christ, the weakness through which alone the meeting with and reconciliation of the adversaries could come. The grim skandalon of Jesus on the cross was soon illuminated—for those with eyes to see—by the light of the Father's raising up the obedient Son. This same light illuminates the scandalous defenselessness accepted by the community of disciples when they understand that they are to meet enemies as God in Christ has met them.

Jesus did not resort to violence, but he did, in other than the usual sense, defend those who were his. In the last hours Jesus defended those dearest to him by praying for them. "Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you [plural], that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not" (Luke 22:31-32). That prayer was not a feeble second-best, marginal to the central need in the situation. Jesus' prayers for Peter and the others (rather than 12 legions of angels to hurl back the enemy mob) were what the disciples most of all needed. Jesus' praying followed those who deserted him.

Jesus defended those he loved by cleaving to the Father rather than resorting to a wrong line of action which could have kept him and them from the cross. His obedience was skandalon pressing his dear ones toward ruin. But his disobedience would have been the abyss of ultimate ruin for all. Discernment of this can help free us from supposing that through readiness to kill we can neatly hold back ruin from loved ones. In the attack situation the turn from Jesus Christ to kill the attacker with one's private pistol or through the national army can be more deeply damaging to the ones defended than the harm the attacker might otherwise have inflicted. We can surmise that the alignment of churches with lethal defense in this century or in earlier ones has issued in more perdition for those defended than might have come in from beyond the borders without that alignment.

Temptation to Violence
Jesus acted decisively to defend any under attack, but not by crushing the attackers. There is in the Gospels an incident somewhat comparable to the situation asked about in the ever-repeated question, "What would you do if somebody attacked your wife, mother, sister...?" Jesus was on the scene as the life of a defenseless woman was about to be taken (John 8:2-11). Stones were in those tensed hands ready to be hurled at the terrified adulteress. Jesus did not stand by and do nothing. But neither did he call down fire from heaven or rally his disciples to grab up whatever defensive stones they could find lying around. He halted their drive to crush the life out of her. He met their lethal force with a far different kind of power. There was no crushing of the attackers. True, his was limited triumph that day: His initiative did not draw those men into fellowship; it did hold them back from total negation of fellowship. Jesus stood between the woman and the attackers. In effect he took the brunt of their attack upon himself. The bitter madness which extinguished his life was in part the very madness which he had held back from that woman.

Similarly, Jesus in Gethsemane defended the disciples by drawing the attack to himself: "If you seek me, let these men go" (John 18:8). He defended them by absorbing the evil sweeping toward them all.

When defense is needed, Christians can expect to be guided along the lines Jesus took in his defending. In Jesus we are shown what it is to be the kind of person God wants. "He who says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked" (1 John 2:6). Would God ever expect from us a mode of defense which we do not at all see in Jesus?

The hypothetical attack questions often focus on the prospect of the rape of a man's wife, mother, sister. But there could have come a rape attempt on the mother or a sister of Jesus with him nearby. Jesus would have met that enemy in love, or by his own standards he would have sinned. If there are situations that bring with them the necessity of resort to a lesser evil inflicted on the attacker (and that is the thrust of virtually all those hypothetical questions), Jesus was without sin only because of his good fortune in not having had to face that type of situation; and he was therefore not tempted in every respect as we are (cf. Hebrews 4:15).

The skandalon for the church through most of its history has not been the defenselessness of Jesus (which has been regarded as necessary for the salvation drama) but rather the corollary defenselessness of his people. The prevailing protests within the church against acceptance of that defenselessness have come as a sort of transposed echo of Peter's outburst: "God forbid, Lord! This mustn't happen to us." Peter with his plea was for Jesus skandalon (Matthew 16:23), lure toward the turn from God. In wrongheadedness, too, he was the representative first-start for the church; and that plea in its transposition remains, not for Jesus, but for his body on earth, the closest lure to the turn from God.

If we try to defend others with violence, we replay Peter's reliance on the sword—which was really the turning point in his abandonment of Jesus. If Peter had stayed with Jesus, the threatened one, without resort to violence, his stand would have been archetypal for that course of action in relation to any who are threatened. Christ stands weaponless with them. His disciples are to do the same.

Jesus Christ is head of the community, and Christians are bound together in a corporate vulnerability derivative from his. Only when there is discernment of this can there be right thinking about defense of those attacked. Others may join together in military "defense." Christians are to stand together in shared vulnerability. In that common stand there are elements of defense. In Gethsemane the disciples pulled out of this corporate vulnerability; they broke with the body rather than be broken themselves. And that has been a big part of Christendom/post-Christendom history down to the present.

For the eleven, Jesus was temporary skandalon. For Judas he was skandalon into eternal ruin. There is for Christians the awesome possibility that their very obedience may enter crucially into the terrible drama of the final ruin of other persons. Jesus gives sternest warning against sin that undermines the faith of another. Christian obedience, like that of Jesus, will not cause the collapse of another person's faith; it can only be a blow to inadequacy of faith or, as with Judas and the Pharisees, bring to the surface the dominant underlying rejection of the Son. Yet the ominousness of what might result partly from our faithfulness, specifically in not using lethal violence to fend off evil, should impel us to prayerfully entrust (as part of our obedience) such processes into God's hands.

In the imagery of Ephesians 6, attack by invisible powers, not the flesh-and-blood adversaries, constitutes the central danger for us and those around us. The same understanding was expressed in Jesus' words to Simon Peter, "Satan hath desired to have you." Resort to the "lesser evil" of violent resistance cannot really counter that danger but rather augments it.

There is in all of us an inclination to see the use of tangible weapons to fend off physical attack as more real, substantial, and practical than the spiritual warfare described in Ephesians 6. But the most decisive battle in history was the one between Jesus and the powers of darkness; his was the supreme defending of us all. If in biblical perspective we truly see that and the relative indecisiveness of all military battles, we have basis for discerning what for us and those dearest to us is the critically needed defense: "They have triumphed over him [Satan] by the blood of the Lamb and by the witness of their martyrdom, because even in the face of death they would not cling to life" (Revelation 12:11). As Christians trust in the triumphal defense Jesus has carried through, and themselves give confirmation to it, even to the point of letting their life blood be added to his, the centrally imperiling attack is countered and overcome.

Dale Aukerman was a correspondent for Sojourners when this article appeared.