Unwanted truth makes for unwanted people. The Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels proclaiming His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies is an unwanted person in His own time and today. Indeed, the Nonviolent Jesus is an unwanted God, an unwanted Messiah and an unwanted Savior. Since such is the case, those who proclaim the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love can expect to be as unwanted as their unwanted Master.
The Jesus who is Divine is wanted. The Jesus who forgives sins is wanted. The Jesus who works miracles is wanted. The Jesus who heals is wanted. The Jesus who saves is wanted. The Jesus who can be drafted for our football team or into our army is wanted. But, the Jesus of the Gospels, who is Nonviolent and who teaches by word and deed a Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies for His disciples to follow, is not wanted by the Constantinian Churches of Christianity. He is always and forever persona non grata and positively disinvited to all Constantinian events from the Eucharist to Ecumenical Councils.
He is unwanted at any Constantinian Church functions because He always brings with Him an unwanted truth, which the Constantinian Churches work like the devil to keep as far out of the explicit consciousness of their membership as they are able. The unwanted truth that cannot speak its name in these Churches, or is only permitted to speak its name in a broom closet in the basement of theses Churches, is that they are living, propagating and witnessing to a lie about the Way of Jesus, when they teach that participation by a Christian in war, capital punishment or/and abortion is in conformity with the teachings of Jesus and the will of the Father that is to be done by the Christian “on earth as it is in heaven.” That unwanted truth, regardless of who brings it to a Constantinian Church, whether it be a bishop or a bum, automatically makes the bearer of it as unwanted as the message itself.
Constantinian Church bishops have no interest in participating in public dialogue about the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies, and how they and their Churches relate to it and why they relate to it as they do. They know that any public forum dialogue that tries to defend the theological “truth equivalent” of 2+2=5 can only undermine the untruth they live by and prosper by, e.g., Jesus saying, “Follow me,” with a machine gun in hand, Jesus saying, “Follow me,” on the way to burning someone to death at the stake or in the electric chair or with a flame thrower, Jesus saying, “Follow me,” executing an abortion, as valid images of the truth of Jesus and His Way. The strategy of the episcopal elites of the Constantinian Churches is not to refute the Gospels’ truth that Jesus is Nonviolent and teaches a Way of Nonviolent Love as much as it is to discard it from the life of the Church by calculatingly ignoring it, or demeaning it by faint praise, in every forum and venue over which they exercise control. The hierarchical strategy is not to out-argue non-Constantinian, Nonviolent Christianity, but to set it aside quietly by planned inattention without public dispute or fanfare, and thereby marginalize it for the good of those who benefit from the marginalization of this truth of Jesus and about Jesus. It is the way power people operate when it is in their interest, as President Obama did with single-payer universal health care coverage. Even though over fifty percent of U.S. citizens wanted that form of health care coverage, he just said, “It is off the table for consideration and discussion.” Case closed. And so also is the case with the Nonviolent Jesus and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies in the Constantinian Churches: it is rendered by the powers-that-be in these Churches nearly unknowable and therefore nearly un-discussable via the policies, structures and personnel they choose for all phases and levels of religious education from pre-school to pulpit.
The terrible cost, yesterday and today, of not putting into the ordinary education and communication channels of these Church any serious effort to evangelize Christians about the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies is the entrenchment in the minds of billions of Christians of intractable and operationally murderous untruth about good and evil and the Father’s will as taught by Jesus. The toll in human anguish and agony, from the Constantinian Churches teaching and nurturing generation after generation in the theological equivalent of 2+2=5, is there for anyone to see, regardless of his or her status in the Church—unless they refuse to see it, because in seeing they would realize that the untruth of Jesus-justified violence and enmity that they consider so vital to their existence and survival is a snare rooted in the wickedness of the fiend, that has imprisoned and disempowered them and their Churches to the detriment of all humanity.
Dorothy Day wrote to Catherine de Hueck Doherty on August 9, 1936:
“I just go straight ahead, doing the best I can with the human material God sends us. Just look at the disciples He chose for Himself, and how little they understood Him, how they wanted a temporal kingdom and thought all was lost until the Descent of the Holy Spirit enlightened them. Why should we expect to be anything else but unprofitable servants? We simply have to leave things in God’s hands. Get hold of “Abandonment to Divine Providence” by Jean-Pierre de Caussade [John Beevers’ translation] and comfort yourself with that. It’s done more to help me these past years than any other spiritual writer.”
Excerpt from a homily by ECM preached at the close of The Forty Day Fast for the Truth of Gospel Nonviolence, St. Elias Byzantine Ukrainian Catholic Church, Brampton, Ontario, Canada, August 9, 1985:
“Why continue this Fast year after year when so little seems to be happening, when Christians the world round are slaughtering each other as they have been for the last 1700 years? The only answer is that 1+1=2. The Truth is the Truth is the Truth. Jesus Christ taught a teaching of Nonviolent Love.”
How long, O Lord, how long?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_O860l8u3U&feature=youtu.be
-ECM
