At last we come to the matter at hand, and answer the question: was Jesus a pacifist? The previous posts in this series have provided strong prima facie evidence from Jesus’ background context and the earliest foreground interpretation of his legacy, that he was not a pacifist.  Now a positive explication of Jesus’ teaching and example are needed.

The strongest and most common arguments for pacifism from Jesus’ teaching come from a few places in the Gospels. Primarily, these seem to be: the temptation narrative, the Sermon the Mount (and parallel texts), his teaching about taking up the cross, his teaching about Caesar, his teaching about Gentile rulers, and his teaching about taking the sword. Another argument comes from Jesus’ acceptance of his own crucifixion.

Refusing Satan’s Temptation

In Matthew’s account, the final temptation given to Jesus is world domination (Matt 4):

8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. 9 And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” 10Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, “ ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’ ” 11 Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.

The pacifistic argument from this account usually follows the logic that this temptation represents the “zealot option” for Jesus’ ministry, and that in rejecting it, Jesus rejects violence in toto. However, there are several reasons to reject this interpretation. Firstly, it wrongly conflates a zealot ideology, which is really the Holy War option, with a just war approach. Just war thinking follows certain criteria, including: (a) that a legitimate authority must wage war, (b) that the prospects of success in war must be probable for waging it to be licit, and (c) that acts of war should discriminate between the guilty and the innocent. Holy war thinking need not follow any of these criteria, and often has not in history.

Secondly, it overlooks the background to these temptations. In the wilderness temptation, Jesus recapitulates Israel’s wilderness wandering, but succeeds where Israel failed. This point is highlighted in the mode of Jesus’ reply: he quotes the word of God as sufficient reason for his obedience to God. He obeys God’s commands where Israel failed. In the desert, Israel caved into the temptation to worship idols. So in the present temptation, the command Jesus cites in reply to Satan is not “You shall not kill”, but “You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.”

A good positive explanation of this text is provided by the demonology of the NT. Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 10:20 that:  “what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons.” Further, the apostle confirms this assessment of Satan in a sense, when he states that the devil is (2 Cor 4:4) “the god of this world”, and the apostle John echoes this concept in his first epistle (1 John 5:19): “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.” For the NT, to live in any way other than obedience to God is, de facto, to be subject to and in fellowship with demons. Fellowship with evil can give pleasures for a time, including the pleasures of power. This is the temptation Jesus faced, and it is in fact the ultimate temptation: the temptation to replace God with the creature in our moral universe.  Jesus’ rejection goes much deeper than a refusal of a certain kind of political tactic; his reply goes to the heart of the problem with the human condition. And this leads to the second background to the text, which is the failure of humanity at its origin, the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden. And what was the temptation they faced? Not the temptation to use violence, but the temptation to distrust God, and to strive for their desires in disobedience to his commands. It is this fundamental problem that Jesus’ refusal to worship Satan addresses, and not an ethically downstream matter like zealot violence.

The Sermon on the Mount

In the preface to his book, The Sermon on the Mount: Inspiring the Moral Imagination, Dr. Dale C. Allison writes about two common errors in exegesis of this sermon:

Some people would say that the Sermon on the Mount is the quintessence of Christianity. I am not among them. The erroneous conviction comes from the unfortunate habit of viewing the Sermon in isolation. Readers, especially modern readers, have again and again interpreted Matthew 5-7 as though the chapters were complete unto themselves, as though they constituted a book rather than a portion of a book. Symptomatic is the occasional reprinting of the Sermon in anthologies of literature. But the three chapters that constitute the Sermon on the Mount, chapters surrounded on either side by twenty-five additional chapters, neither summarize the rest of Matthew nor sum up adequately the faith of Jesus, much less the religion of our evangelist. How could anything that fails to refer explicitly to the crucifixion and resurrection be the quintessence of Matthew’s Christian faith? Here context is everything. Any credible interpretation of Matthew 5-7 must constantly keep an eye on Matthew 1-4 and Matthew 9-28. For the part (the Sermon) loses its meaning apart from the whole (Matthew’s Gospel). The Sermon on the Mount is in the middle of a story, and it is the first goal of this little commentary to interpret the discourse accordingly.

There is a second way in which this commentary seeks to place the Sermon in context. All too often in the past–the strategy goes all the way back to Tertullian and Augustine–the Sermon has been read against Judaism. That is, the superiority of Jesus and the church over against Judaism has been promoted by arguing that this word of Jesus or that expression of Matthew brings us, within the world of first-century Judaism, something startlingly new, or even impossible. Most such claims, however, do not stand up under scrutiny. What we rather have in the Sermon is the product of a messianic Judaism; and, as we know from the writings of Friedlander (1911), Abrahams (1917, 1924), and Montefiore (1927, 1930), most of the sentiments found in the Sermon already appear, at least here or there, in old Jewish sources. It is primarily the relationship of those sentiments to one another and, above all, their relationship to the person of Jesus and his story that gives them their unique meaning for Christians. So responsible exegesis will seek to highlight the continuity between the Sermon and Jewish teaching, whether within the Hebrew Bible or without, and moreover the immense debt of the former to the latter. The time of polemic against Judaism is over. So too is the time when Christians could pretend, in the words of Adolf Harnack, to find in the Sermon on the Mount teaching “freed from all external and particularistic features.” ¹

The following commentary on Jesus’ teaching will attempt to do what Dr. Allison suggests should be done, i.e. interpret the sermon in these two contexts. In many cases, I will simply be following Dr. Allison’s lead in doing so.

Dr. Allison also highlights another important aspect of this sermon that some interpreters throughout the centuries have missed:

One must reckon seriously with the fact that the Sermon on the Mount is partly a poetic text. By this is meant that it is, unlike codes of law, dramatic and pictorial. The reader sees a man offering a sacrifice in Jerusalem (5:23), someone in prison (5:25-26), a body without eye and hand (5:29-30), someone being slapped (5:39), the sun rising (5:45), the rain falling (5:45), someone praying in a closet (6:6), lilies in a field (6:28), a log in an eye (7:4), wolves in sheeps’ clothing (7:15). These images and comments upon the sermon hardly add up to anything can be called legislation. The Sermon does not offer a set of rules–the ruling on divorce is the exception ²–but rather seeks to instill a moral vision. …

The Sermon’s primary purpose is to instill principles and qualities through a vivid inspiration of the moral imagination. What one comes away with is not a grossly incomplete set of statutes but an unjaded impression of a challenging moral ideal. ³

Below, we will highlight the texts used most often to support pacifism in order to show how they do not, as well as various other aspects of the Sermon which confirm Allison’s general analysis.

As a final prefatory note, Dr. Allison views the sermon as chiastically structured:

A Introduction (5:1-2)

   B Blessings (5:3-12)

      C Law and Prophets (5:17-20)

         D Jesus and Torah (two triads) (5:21-48)

            E Almsgiving, Prayer, Fasting (6:1-4)

         D’ Social issues (two triads) (6:19-7:11)

      C’ Law and Prophets (7:12)

   B’ Warnings (7:13-27)

A’ Conclusion (7:28-8:1) ⁴

Beatitudes

Dr. Allison notes the extensive Isaianic background to the Sermon and its explication elsewhere in the Gospel. This begins with the Beatitudes, which echo the Prophet in various ways:

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” borrows from Isa. 61:2. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God” is inspired by Isa. 61:1. And “Rejoice and be glad” recalls Isa 61:10 (“I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, and my whole being exult in my God”). ⁵

As Dr. Allison notes, this dependence on Isaiah has significance for interpretation of the Sermon:

It means above all that the authority who speaks the Sermon belongs to a history. Jesus is not an isolated novum on humanity’s religious landscape. He is rather the goal of a story, the history told in the Jewish Bible. To say that Jesus is the anointed one prophesied by Isaiah 61 is to say that he has been sent by the same God who spoke to Abraham, Moses, David, and the prophets; it is to imply that there is continuity between the new and the old and that ultimately the one who speaks here through his anointed prophet is the one whose words and deeds constitute the religious story of Israel.

That this is indeed the case is confirmed by 5:17-20. ⁶ Sometimes religions begin when a charismatic figure overthrows the traditions of the past. Buddha, for instance, appeared and rejected the Hinduism of his time and place. But Jesus does not reject his religious tradition; he is rather a reformer of it. He comes not to abolish the law and the prophets, whose imperatives remain in force. The God who spoke then speaks again now, in the Sermon. And he does not contradict himself. ⁷

The most directly relevant beatitude to the issue of pacifism is obviously 5:9: blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the sons of God.  This beatitude says nothing that is not expressed or implied in several OT texts, including: Psalm 34:14; 37:35-38; 120:1-7; Prov 12:20. These texts are part of a nonpacifist corpus and era of redemptive history, and so cannot be interpreted  in a pacifistic manner. However, they can be interpreted in other ways. Firstly, the virtue of seeking for peace is eminently useful and good in personal relations. Secondly, even in the matter of statecraft, the just war tradition has always emphasized war should be the last resort taken. So there is both personal and political expression to the virtue of peacemaking.

Salt and Light

The words about salt and light give the first of the actual commands of the Sermon, but they do not explain how people are to carry them out. Dr. Allison explains that “the sayings” about salt and light “together constitute a transitional passage that functions as a general heading for 5:17-7:12, where those issues are addressed. Matt 5:13-16 moves readers from the life of the blessed future (depicted in 5:3-12) to the demands of the present, and so the theme switches from gift to task.” ⁸

Jesus, The Law, and the Prophets

At this point we must recur to Dr. Allison’s structural analysis above, which points out the bracketing of the sermon with references to continuity of Jesus’ teaching with the Law and the Prophets (5:17-20 and 7:12). This primes us to read the Sermon in continuity with the OT, and given what the OT background says about the premises of pacifism, this is not good news for the pacifistic position.

The various components of 5:17-20 deserve particular attention. Dr. R.T. France explains the meaning of the words “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets”:

“Do not suppose …” might be no more than a teaching device to draw attention to Jesus’ positive statement by first setting out its opposite (cf. 10:34), but it is not unlikely that there were in fact some who did suppose that Jesus was against the law and the prophets. His disagreements with the scribes over the correct way to observe the law (notably with regard to the sabbath, see 12:1–14) would easily have given them the impression that he sat light to the authority of the law itself; the same charge persisted with regard to his followers (Acts 6:11, 13–14; 21:28). By the time Matthew was writing, the “freedom from the law” message of some of Christianity’s leading teachers would have strengthened this impression. Jesus, it seemed, had set himself up against the written word of God. The issue is not simply an accusation of failing to keep the law in practice, but of aiming to “abolish” scriptural authority. The verb katalyō is used of dismantling and destroying a building or institution (24:2; 26:61; 27:40); with reference to an authoritative text it means to declare that it is no longer valid, to repeal or annul. The issue is thus not Jesus’ personal practice as such, but his attitude to the authority of the law and the prophets. ⁹

Jesus, then, directly denies he has come to annul the authority of scripture. Any interpretation of his teachings in the Sermon which implies he has done so, pits Jesus against himself, and should be a last resort for any charitable interpreter.

On the meaning of “but to fulfill” in v. 17, Dr. Allison once again provides the most likely interpretation, that of fulfill as “eschatologically fulfills the prophecies of the OT”:

Matthew usually uses the verb in question (“fulfill”) with reference to prophetic fulfillment (1:22; 4:14; 12:17; etc.) and because our sentence refers not just ot the Law but also to the Prophets. So Jesus’ new teaching brings to realization that which the Torah prophesied. And that realization does not set the Law and Prophets aside. Fulfillment rather confirms the Torah’s truth. ¹⁰

Yet, this interpretation lacks completeness without an explanation of its relevance to the ethical teaching that follows in the Sermon. Dr. Greg Welty provides the best solution to this problem:

Why do I say this? Well, it is precisely because the entirety of OT revelation, that seamless fabric of the law and the prophets, consistently prophesy a coming Saviour from sin, that we would expect the Saviour pictured by that revelation to confirm those Mosaic laws which the Pharisees subjected to distortion. For the same Christ whose life is the ground of our imputed righteousness, is the Christ whose life is the pattern for our practical righteousness, our Christian sanctification. Since throughout the NT, one and the same life of Christ is both the grounds of our righteousness (his obedience to God’s moral law) and the pattern for our righteousness (his example to us), we would never expect Christ to drive a wedge between the moral law to which he submitted (OT moral law), and the practical righteousness he commended to his followers (via his own life and ethical teaching). The eschatological pleroo of v. 17, by which Jesus declares that he really is that Saviour from sin promised on every page of the OT, only reinforces this point. ¹¹

Dr. Welty notes that the connecting word of v. 19 (oun, “therefore”) entails that the responsibility to obey OT law follows from Jesus’ coming to fulfill the law (a point which 17-18 elaborates upon). Verse 20’s linking word, “for” (gar): “reminds us that the kingdom righteousness exemplified in Jesus’ teaching, is not merely distinctive to the inhabitants of the kingdom of heaven; it is a condition of entry into the kingdom of heaven (‘you will by no means enter’)!” ¹²

The Isaianic background to the Sermon noted above provides further support for Welty’s argument. For Isaiah depicts a future for the Law, with two aspects. Firstly:

2:1 It shall come to pass in the latter days
that the mountain of the house of the Lord
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be lifted up above the hills;
and all the nations shall flow to it,
3 and many peoples shall come, and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go the law,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
4 He shall judge between the nations,
and shall decide disputes for many peoples;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore.

The Law shall go forth and discipline the rule the nations. Yet at the same time, in the future, God will not treat some individuals exactly the same as he did in the Mosaic system:

56:3 Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say,
“The Lord will surely separate me from his people”;
and let not the eunuch say,
“Behold, I am a dry tree.”
4 For thus says the Lord:
“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose the things that please me
and hold fast my covenant,
5 I will give in my house and within my walls
a monument and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that shall not be cut off.

Such a practice would directly contradict Deut. 23:1-8. How can the continuity and discontinuity of the Law in Isaiah’s vision of the future be understood?

The tension can be resolved if we recognize that Isaiah stresses the continuity of the law on a matter where it is in continuity with the created order (i.e., natural law), that is, where the law teaches people to good to one another and live at peace. On the other hand, he stresses discontinuity on ceremonial and cultic matters, where God instilled divisions between people in order to symbolize and signify various realities to the Israelites. In the future, Isaiah suggests, these symbolic laws will no longer be in effect. Rather, the reality to which they point as an entire system of symbols, the restoration of human nature and the reconciliation of the human race, will come into being, and thus these symbolic laws will no longer be necessary.

As we will see below, this interpretation of Isaiah perfectly explains the logic of the connection between Matt 5:17’s “fulfill” and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount.  Firstly, however, we must note that immediate context of this word, vs. 18-19, and elaborate on the meaning of “fulfill”:

18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. 19 Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

The connecting gar at the beginning of v. 18 provides a further reason for verse 17’s statement. Jesus’ teaching here echoes rabbinic Jewish statements which affirm the absolute unchangeable authority of the scriptures, as Dr. Craig Keener has noted:

He announces in v. 18 that the law will stand until the time when heaven and earth pass away–in other words, until the end of the world (cf. 24:35). Most Jewish readers understood this as a figure of speech meaning that the law would stand “forever,” a suggestion of the eternality of the covenant. Jesus certainly understands the law to be eternal; its sanctions are executed at the day of judgment (5:19-20).

Indeed, as v. 18 continues, not one yod (the smallest Hebrew letter) or marking was to pass from the law. … [E]ven the least noticed parts of God’s Word are eternally true and valid. Later Jewish teachers often spoke in similar ways about the importance of even the most trivial elements: they spoke of how God would rather uproot a thousand king Solomons than a single yod from the Bible; or they told how a yod removed from Sarai’s name in Genesis cried out to God from generation to generation, until he finally stuck it back into the Bible, in Joshua’s name. Although there is no way to know how early these Jewish stories are, they at least illustrate the point that Jesus’ readers would have no doubt understood: he was upholding the veracity of even the smallest details of God’s Word. ¹³

On verse 19, Dr. Keener writes:

When Jesus condemns breaking even the smallest of commandments, he is espousing an idea that most of his hearers would have readily understood. By the third century many rabbis had even decided which commandment was the lighteste and which was the heaviest… .

The rabbis thereby affirmed that one who performed a single precept was regarded as if he had kept the whole law, and one suspected of violating one precept could easily be suspected of violating any other. Indeed, a Jew could not become a Pharisee, and a Gentile could not convert to Judaism if he were unwilling to keep even a single, little-known law. As one scholar points out, “Deliberate rejection of any commandment was, in the later rabbinic formulation, tantamount to rejecting the God who gave it.

The point is not that no one ever breaks a commandment; the rabbis admitted that virtually everyone breaks some commandments sometimes. The point is that no one has the right to say, “I like these commandments over here, but those little commandments over there are not worth my attention.” To deny that one was responsible to do whatever God commanded, no matter how trivial it may seem, was to deny his lordship and to intentionally rebel against his whole law. According to the rabbis, such a person merited damnation. ¹⁴

Verse 19 continues the logical flow of Jesus’ teaching, drawing a consequence from the inviolable authority of the divine word. That is, verse 18 and 19 work like this: because the scriptures are the word of God, they cannot be contradicted by the course of history. And because of that same characteristic, i.e. the divine authority of the scriptures, no one can rightly alter the law in their exposition of its demands.

Of course, a problem arises for many at this point. For a cursory glance at the rest of the NT shows many cases where OT laws are clearly no longer binding for Christians. As we noted in the previous post, these cases are: Sabbath, food, priesthood and temple, circumcision, and sacrificial laws. The common feature of these laws provides the solution, however. All of these laws are ceremonial and symbolic, and are not mere expressions of natural law, like the teaching of the rest of the Sermon. And this is precisely in accord with the eschatological vision of the OT, seen even in Isaiah as we explained above. For in the eschaton envisioned in the law and the prophets, natural law (the created order) would be obeyed, but the ceremonial divisions and restrictions on humanity, intended to symbolize the problem with creation (sin and its effects) and the solution that problem (judgment and restoration), would not longer be in effect, the reality to which they pointed having already come. This is the logic that explains Jesus’ consistency with the rest of the NT. Jesus’ elaboration on this point throughout the rest of the Sermon provides commands and directions in full continuity with the OT; in none of the cases does he uphold as still in effect the ceremonial laws elsewhere abrogated. ¹⁵ Rather, he upholds the law as binding precisely in the places where it expresses the norms of the created order, natural law.

The last verse of this introductory passage is v. 20, and here again Dr. Welty provides the best exegesis: “v. 20 gives a single, unifying theme to vv. 21-48: it is the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees which is being exposed as fraudulent and in need of correction, not the OT.” Indeed, this theme extends beyond verse 48 and into chapters 6-7. In the rest of the sermon, Jesus constantly contrasts the true righteousness the kingdom demands with the hypocrisy and unrighteousness of the Pharisees. Contrary to some interpreters, who have attempted to ground a view of the Sermon as surpassing the demands of the Law by arguing the Pharisees were examples of perfect obedience to the Law, Jesus is quite clear of his view of Pharisaical righteousness:

23: 23 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. …

27 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. 28 So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

Jesus’ demand in 5:20, then, is not about “surpassing the demands of the Law,” but about truly obeying it, in contrast to the Pharisees who merely pretend to, while being truly lawless.

The consequence of this analysis must be, at minimum, to incline interpreters to seek for continuity between the OT and the Sermon in the 5:21-48.

Retaliation and Love Your Enemies

The most important aspect of the Sermon for the subject of pacifism is 5:38-48

38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39 But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40 And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. 41 And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. 42 Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

We have already argued in the previous entries of this series that not taking vengeance, and instead doing good to one’s enemies, was commanded in the OT and the rest of the NT, and that in OT specifically, it is quite clear such commands were consistent with participation in state violence. However, some positive interpretation of this text is needed.  And while it may seem banal, we should take care to note that in none of the examples Jesus gives of obeying the command, does he describe a magistrate. All of the examples are drawn from the normal life of an average, politically powerless, Israelite. This should incline us to affirm the old Augustinian interpretation of these texts, that they are talking about interpersonal conflict in the private realm, not the public role of the magistrate.

Further, the implication of Jesus’ examples in the first antithesis is that he has in mind a particular interpretation of the lex talionis, not the law per se, as his opponent. It is the application of the law to private life, in a way that justifies taking private vengeance, precisely the course of action the OT prohibits. In the second antithesis, regarding love of enemy, scholars have long noted that no such command as “hate your enemy” ever appears in the OT, and this is true. As we argued, the OT commands love of enemy. This is not true, however, for all Jewish tradition, where one can find explicit commands not to do good to evil people. It is certainly these Jewish traditions, and not the OT scriptures, which Jesus is correcting here, by reiterating OT ethics.