Jesus, passive resistance & mutual aid

Why doesn't the West see Jesus's politics? Maybe it's our philosophy

Too often the price exacted by society for security and respectability is that the Christian movement in its formal expression must be on the side of the strong against the weak.

— Howard Thurman¹

A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. . . . Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.

—Song of Solomon²

Ten days before Mohandas Gandhi’s first imprisonment, a Baptist minister walked into his Johannesburg law office.³ “How far are you prepared to make a martyr of yourself for the good of the cause?” the stranger asked Gandhi.

“It is a matter with me of complete surrender . . . I am willing to die at any time, or to do anything for the cause,” Gandhi replied.⁴

Imprisonment turned out to be tough. Because he wasn’t white, Gandhi was housed in Fort Prison’s “native block,” which was overcrowded, narrow, and dark, according to Gandhi’s biographer Ramachandra Guha.⁵ Gandhi’s prison conditions stemmed from the rulers’ desire to keep South Africa’s Transvaal Colony white. The Transvaal, though in British control after the 1902 Boer War, had no concerns in 1908 about how their treatment of Gandhi and the other Asian passive resisters would affect Britain’s relations with India. Actually, they hoped for the worst.⁶

Rev. Doke contrasts Gandhi with silent Christians

Reverend Joseph J. Doke had his reasons for seeking out Gandhi. First, the Hindu activist was known for quoting Jesus. Second, Doke’s own Baptists, offering passive resistance to England’s discriminatory Education Act, had suffered while Anglican Christians had done nothing.⁷

Twelve days after first meeting Gandhi, Doke told his white congregation that he marveled how

. . . a little handful of Indians and Chinese should have so imbibed the teaching of Christ in regard to the inherent nobility of man that they should become teachers of a mercenary age, while Christians stand by and smile or are silent as they suffer.⁸

Doke concluded that Gandhi, though not a Christian, was a disciple of Jesus.

Jesus teaches passive resistance to his oppressed villagers

According to Guha, Gandhi would later tell Doke that “the New Testament, and the Sermon on the Mount in particular, had awakened him ‘to the rightness and value of Passive Resistance.’”

What does the Sermon on the Mount teach about passive resistance? In an article asserting that “Gandhi and [Martin Luther] King laid legitimate claims to the political implications of the Gospels and to the significance of Jesus’ nonviolence,” theologian Mark G. Brett outlines some of Jesus’s teachings on nonviolence.⁹ He explains, for instance, Jesus’s mandate to turn the second cheek, offer the second garment, and walk the second mile—all of which to the Western ear sound somehow both etherial and defeatist.

Instead, all three of the Sermon’s “seconds” are practical and promising. The blow, Jesus says, is to the right cheek, which implies “striking with the back of the right hand, widely considered an insult in the Graeco-Roman world,” Brett notes.¹⁰ Turning the other cheek, then, would be understood “as a provocative gesture and an implicit challenge to be treated with dignity—to be struck as an equal.” The nakedness resulting from the loss of both tunic and cloak “would shame the oppressor and observer.” Finally, walking the second mile would double Rome’s compulsory public service, “thereby shaming the oppressor through a symbolic heightening of their power and implicitly challenging them to break their own law.”¹¹ These methods sound like some of political scientist Gene Sharp’s 198 methods of nonviolent action, including “protest disrobings,” “destruction of own property,” and “disguised disobedience.”¹²

The Sermon on the Mount sums up passive resistance this way: “do not resist an evil person,” which Brett prefers to translate as “do not retaliate.”¹³ Gandhi was familiar with this passage and with Leo Tolstoy’s adaptation of it: “non-resistance to evil.”¹⁴ Gandhi and Tolstoy exchanged letters about Gandhi’s application of Tolstoy’s ideas regarding nonviolence.¹⁵

Jesus teaches mutual aid to his dispossessed villagers

Jesus propounded and lived out his strategies of nonviolence in the context of his people’s political and economic struggle. He lived, Brett says, in “an age of revolt” as well as

. . . an age of deep social divisions between the ruling classes—both Roman and Jewish—and the majority peasant population who produced the agrarian resources upon which ancient Middle Eastern societies were based.¹⁶

Jesus’s nonviolent strategies would be largely incomprehensible without their foregrounding against these struggles.

Perhaps these political and economic struggles overlap most entirely in the pain of Roman Palestine’s pervasive debt. Debt threatened the cohesion of villages whose households were, according to theologian Richard A. Horsley, “linked by kinship” and which “struggled to obtain a subsistence living from often unforgiving conditions.”¹⁷ Tribute and tithes required by “local and imperial rulers living in cities”¹⁸ could exact, Brett says, up to “forty percent of crops and herds each year.”¹⁹ Rulers could get around the Sabbatical year’s mandatory debt forgiveness²⁰ by “a legal mechanism called the prosbul whereby a person could swear before a court that a debt would indeed be repaid, regardless of the Sabbatical year.”²¹

Jesus contested this practice and its underlying structure of debt. He contested the source of debt by contesting “the imperial claim to sovereignty,” Brett says, and by reminding his fellow villagers that God’s reign in heaven was to come to earth to challenge the “Roman religion and its ideological legitimation of the emperor as Lord of the earth.”²² He contested debt also by making debt “an opportunity for forgiveness.”²³ He contested, too, the economic and political repression that would land villagers in court.

The Lord’s prayer in its political and economic context

Jesus summed up these challenges in a prayer that Gandhi read in the Sermon on the Mount:

Our Father, who are in the heavens, let your name be held holy; let your Kingdom come; let your will come to pass, as in heaven so also upon earth; give to us today enough bread for the day ahead; and excuse us our debts, just as we have excused our debtors; and do not bring us to trial, but rescue us from the wicked man.²⁴

The prayer’s parts make a whole, Horsley says. The prayer’s “plea for the kingdom of God” leads to the kingdom’s concrete manifestations: “sufficient food and the cancellation of debts.” The prayer’s plea for debt forgiveness in God’s Sabbatical kingdom (the “favorable year of the Lord” that Jesus elsewhere proclaims)²⁵ is linked to the villagers’ commitment to cancel debts that they contracted with one another:

They were collectively taking action to deal with their debt, thus strengthening their communities, through mutual aid, against the political- economic pressures that had brought them into hunger and debt. Whatever the communities were doing, however, was evoking repressive action by the rulers. So they also petitioned God to deliver them from “the testing/trial” of being dragged into court.²⁶

The Lord’s Prayer coalesces in collective action in the context of a poor community, one that found power in Israel’s conjunction of religious, political, and economic life.

But the prayer ends up where Jesus ended up—in court.

Gandhi and his people imprisoned for violating a racist law

Gandhi was dragged into court for violating the Transvaal’s new “Asiatic Ordinance,” which required Asian immigrants to the South African colony to produce new registration papers on demand or face imprisonment. The ordinance’s goal was to keep Indians and other Asians coming into the Transvaal from displacing Europeans “employed in trade and commerce,” Guha says.²⁷ The law’s architect, Assistant Colonial Secretary of the Transvaal Lionel Curtis, wished to, in his words, “keep the Transvaal a white man’s country.”²⁸ For religious, political, and economic reasons, Gandhi lead his compatriots in refusing to comply with the ordinance.²⁹ He advised his people, in resisting the act, to risk prison.³⁰

Not long after Gandhi’s imprisonment in defiance of the act, Doke wrote a biography of Gandhi in which, Guha says, Doke interpreted Gandhi’s “mission in a Christian idiom”:

In Doke’s eyes, the simplicity of Gandhi’s life and the truthfulness of his conduct, his readiness to court death in pursuit of justice, made him come closer to “the Jew of Nazareth” than most practising Christians.³¹

The Christians with whom Doke was familiar had extracted their religion from its natural admixture with economics and politics. Consequently, they could not become “teachers of a mercenary age” with the imprisoned Chinese and Indians.

Jesus: materialism makes us heedless of justice

What explains the complacence that Doke noted, this reticence on the part of Western Christians to seek justice? What built this wall—to repurpose Roger Williams’s phrase—this “wall of separation between the garden of the Church and the wilderness of the world”?³²

The answer may lie in the Sermon on the Mount, the part that follows the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus warns his listeners not to store up treasure on earth but in heaven, not to serve money but God, and not to to worry about provisions but to trust God.³³ He concludes his sermon’s section with an explicit contrast between seeking justice and seeking food and clothing:

Set your mind on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well.³⁴

In this longer section of his address, Jesus suggests that materialism makes us heedless of justice. The garden of materialism leaves the outside world a wilderness of injustice.

New Testament materialism: the Gentiles’ preoccupation and the Epicurean philosophy

Materialism isn’t the same thing as covetousness, though the two are obviously related. Materialism appears in the Bible’s pages not as a sin, strictly speaking, but as a philosophy. Jesus describes it as the Gentiles’ preoccupation.³⁵ Paul argues with Gentile philosophers who espouse materialism—the Epicureans at Athens. Even back in Paul’s day, the Epicureans believed what philosopher Catherine Wilson says that Epicureans have always believed: “materialism [is] the only valid frame of reference . . . for the solution of the deepest problems of ethics and politics.”³⁶

N. T. Wright and Catherine Wilson: we are all Epicureans now

The Epicureans’ materialism was an extension of their cosmology. Some of them believed in gods and some of them didn’t, but even those who believed in gods understood them as “remote, corporeal, and unconcerned with human welfare, and in their perfection they were deemed to feel neither anger with men, nor affection for them,” Wilson says.³⁷ Paul counters this Epicurean cosmology in Luke’s account of his Areopagus trial by claiming that God “is not far from each one of us.”³⁸

Wilson as well as former Anglican Bishop N. T. Wright believe that Epicureanism’s modern comeback has shaped Western civilization. Wilson describes how seventeenth-century philosopher Pierre Gassendi reconciled Christianity with Epicureanism—successfully, from a popular perspective—in part by downplaying the philosophy’s “anti-providentialism,”³⁹ so conceding, as it were, Paul’s claim in Athens about God’s immanence. Of course, it’s not just Western Christians who labor under Epicureanism; Wilson points out that “. . . we are all, in a sense, Epicureans now.”⁴⁰ For his part, Wright says that we live “within a world where Epicureanism has triumphed, where it is assumed that God and the world are utterly detached from one another,”⁴¹ despite Gassendi’s earlier doctrinal compromise.

If our God is walled off from public life, we are, too

If our God is walled off from the world, we remain walled off, too. Wright describes the tendency of Epicureanism’s adherents to emulate their gods by shunning public life. In Paul’s day, the luxury of this emulation limited the number of the philosophy’s adherents, Wright says:

It was fitting that the school Epicurus founded in Athens met in, and was known by, a garden. Epicureanism has always appealed to those who, like its own distant divinities, can afford the recommended lifestyle of withdrawal from the public world.⁴²

Wilson calls the Epicureans’ walled garden “a suburban grove.”⁴³

Wilson’s reference to suburbs is apt. Wright points out that the materialism of modern times now makes the Epicurean retreat from public life seem possible not just for the wealthy, as in Paul’s day, but also for “a whole society.” All Westerners can now strive to imitate the Epicurean gods’ non-involvement, “rising above the common heard to be ‘the enlightened ones,’ the ‘developed’ or ‘advanced’ countries, operating on different principles and, tellingly, living by different standards.” One version of non-involvement is the American Dream, pictured as a lawn and a two-car garage in the private retreat from public life we call the suburbs.

But our “Epicurean paradise,” Wright says, “comes at a cost. The cost is borne by others, some of whom are washing up on our shores as we ponder the problems at a safe distance.”⁴⁴

Materialism isn’t really about the material

Materialism, then, isn’t principally about the material. Materialism is about the blindness and the wall of protection that the material forms in the service of a blind and private god. The great historian of suburbs, Kenneth T. Jackson, describes these aspects of materialism in twentieth-century American suburbs:

I refer to a tendency for social life to become “privatized,” and to a reduced feeling of concern and responsibility among families for their neighbors and among suburbanites in general for residents of the inner city. . . . [“Suburban”] once implied a relationship with the city, [but] the term today is more likely to represent a distinction from the city.

As a result, Jackson says, “. . . alienation and anomie are more characteristic of urban life than a sense of participation and belonging.”⁴⁵ The city falls before the walls of the suburbs’ gated communities.

Jesus and Gandhi connect poverty and public service

At Doke’s memorial service, Gandhi spoke of Doke’s efforts to convert him to Christianity. Gandhi told the assembled mourners how he had responded to Doke: the “fullness of Christianity could only be found in its interpretation of the light and by the aid of Hinduism.”⁴⁶ Maybe that light, for Gandhi, involved Hinduism’s relative lack of materialism. There’s a connection, after all, implicit in what Guha describes as Gandhi’s embrace of “poverty and public service.”⁴⁷

In Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, his parallel to Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus also connects poverty and public service: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”⁴⁸ But when we retreat from public life and watch from our distant, private spaces the incarceration and other sufferings of the poor, we become the ones enclosed.

Above: photo taken last month along Milwaukee’s Riverwalk.

The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

1. Thurman, Howard. Jesus and the Disinherited. Boston: Beacon Press, 2022, 11-12.

2. Song of Solomon 4:12, 16 KJV.

3. Guha, Gandhi Before India, 262.

4. Guha, 263.

5. Guha, 265.

6. Guha, 265-66.

7. Guha, 263.

8. Guha, 269.

9. Brett, Decolonizing God, 132-52.

10. Brett, 141-42. See also Wright, Jesus and the Victory, 291.

11. Brett, 142. Theologian Stanley E. Porter has a similar take on two of Jesus’s “seconds”: “Instead of cowering submission or violent retaliation, Jesus urges a non-violent response to the superior’s slap, offering the other check to deflect the intended intimidation and demeaning (5:39). In 5:41 Jesus requires compliance to angaria, a custom whereby Rome requisitioned labor, transport (animals, ships), and lodging from subject people. But followers were to subvert imperial authority by carrying the soldier’s pack twice the distance, putting the soldier off-balance, in danger of being disciplined for overly harsh conduct.” Porter, “Matthew and Empire,” 114.

12. Sharp, The Methods of Nonviolent Action, 140-42, 306-8. The 198 methods are summarized on the website of the Albert Einstein Institution, which Sharp founded. “198 Methods.”

13. Matthew 5:39 NNAS; Brett, 141. N. T. Wright understands the word translated as “resist” and “retaliate” as “almost a technical term for revolutionary resistance of a specifically military variety,” the opposite of nonviolence. Wright, 290-91.

14. Guha, 209.

15. Guha, 337-41.

16. Brett, 133.

17. Horsley, You Shall Not Bow, 46.

18. Horsley, 53.

19. Brett, 133. In discussing Roman Palestine’s political and economic situation, Brett cites various books written or edited by Richard Horsely concerning the same topic. Brett, 133, 137, 141-43.

20. Deuteronomy 15:1-5.

21. Brett, 133.

22. Brett, 137.

23. Brett, 133-34.

24. Matthew 6:9-13, translated in Hart, New Testament, 11.

25. Luke 4:16-19 NNAS. In the context of this proclamation, Jesus is reading from Isaiah 61.

26. Horsley, 41. Italics in the original. Jesus’s proclamation of the “acceptable year of the Lord” — the Jubilee year and the messianic arrival the year points to — occurred in a Nazarene synagogue. Luke 4:16-21. See gen. Brett, 134.

27. Guha, 204.

28. Guha, 204-5.

29. Guha, 205-65.

30. Guha, 207-8.

31. Guha, 339.

32. Quoted in Carter, Culture of Disbelief, 116.

33. Matthew 6:19-30.

34. Matthew 6:33 REB.

35. Matthew 6:32.

36. Wilson, Epicureanism, (p. v).

37. Wilson, 6.

38. Acts 17:27 NNAS.

39. Wilson, 3.

40. Wilson, 3.

41. Wright, History and Eschatology, 32.

42. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness (Pts. 1 & 2), 212.

43. Wilson, 10.

44. Wright, History and Eschatology, 28.

45. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 272.

46. Guha, 462.

47. Guha, 625-26n81.

48. Luke 6:20 NNAS.