The Gandhian Roots of the Sermon on the Mount - Full Interview

During this episode of Nonviolence Radio, Michael and Stephanie welcome Reverend John Dear: activist, author, Nobel Peace Prize nominee and passionate advocate for nonviolence for over 45 years. This rich conversation covers a lot of ground, with a focus on one of the most significant roots of active nonviolence: The Sermon on the Mount. Noting the way this profound text influenced both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., this interview dives below the surface of its inspiring words and reveals it to be profoundly practical, a “how to be a human being manual.”

Jesus, for the first time in history, I think you could argue, presents Gandhian-Kingian methodology of nonviolent resistance, saying, “You stand your ground, but you don't use the means of your opponent, but you deal with your opponent head on with love and truth and say, ‘I'm a human being. Why are you hurting me?’ Even to the point that you accept violence without retaliating until you wear them down, and you reconcile, and he repents.”

Thus we see how Jesus – and through him later leaders in nonviolence – empowers all of us who “are merciful and pure in heart and peacemakers and persecuted for justice” to “get up and get moving” With its base in universal love, nonviolence can be harnessed into effective action in the world.

Transcript

Stephanie: Greetings everybody, and welcome to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I'm your host, Stephanie Van Hook, and I'm here with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. And we're from the Metta Center for Nonviolence here in Petaluma, California.

We have a wonderful interview to share with you today. It's with Reverend John Dear. You can find his work at JohnDear.org. If you don't know of him, he is quite a phenomenon. John Dear is an internationally recognized voice and leader for peace and nonviolence. That's an understatement. He's a priest, an activist, author, and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee.

He served for many years as the director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. After 9/11, he was a Red Cross coordinator of chaplains at the Family Assistance Center in New York, and has counseled thousands of relatives and rescue workers. He's traveled to war zones all over the world and has been arrested some 85 times for peace. He's led Nobel Prize winners to Iraq, given thousands of lectures on peace across the US, and served as a pastor of several churches in New Mexico.

He even arranged on many occasions for Mother Teresa to speak to various governors to stop an impending execution. And he helped draft Pope Francis's January 1, 2017 World Day of Peace message on nonviolence.

He is a co-founder of Campaign Nonviolence and the Nonviolent Cities. His 40 books include, The Beatitudes of Peace, They Will Inherit the Earth, The Nonviolent Life, Radical Prayers, Walking the Way, A Persistent Peace, Transfiguration.

It goes on. His most recent book is Gospel of Peace: A Commentary on Matthew, Mark, and Luke from the Perspective of Nonviolence. And our interview with him was about the Sermon on the Mount. So, let's tune in to John Dear.

Michael: Gandhi said, “The only people who don't realize that Jesus was nonviolent are the Christians.” Comment, please?

Fr. John Dear: I've sort of, in a strange way, ended up giving my whole life to that quote. Gandhi said, “Jesus was the greatest person of nonviolence in history.” And when I read that as a 21-year-old kid, it kind of changed my life. I always joke, “Jesus thinks he's Gandhi. Jesus thinks he's Martin Luther King. Who does he think he is?”

So, he's totally nonviolent. And we have spent, you know, at least 17-1800 years totally talking about everything but that, and denying all his nonviolence. And Gandhi comes along, in the words of Martin Luther King, and totally reclaims the nonviolence of Jesus and follows it. He's the greatest Christian who ever lived, hands down. And he's not a baptized Christian because he didn't want to be involved in imperial Christianity, which I understand.

And then Martin Luther King took it to another level, explaining that every Christian has to follow the teachings of Jesus, which are all about nonviolence. And so, Gandhi saying these spectacular things, that nonviolence is the only way forward.

And for me, as I've worked on this every day for 45 years, I kid you not, talking about it, that means a couple of basics. We're not allowed to kill, Christians. You're not allowed to kill anybody. And we don't kill people who kill people to show that killing is wrong. The days of killing there are over.

And only from within the boundaries of nonviolence. Refusing to take up the gun, the sword, or build bombs or drop nuclear weapons or cultivate violence in any form, then can we practice the universal love and universal compassion and universal peace that Jesus taught.

So, that's why I wrote a whole new book on this my life's work, The Gospel of Peace. Which is reading Matthew, Mark and Luke, the Synoptic Gospels. I call it, from a Gandhian-Kingian hermeneutic. Which is a highfalutin word to say “from their perspective.” As if Doctor King and Gandhi are sitting over your shoulder, and we go through every sentence and show how Jesus is more nonviolent than them. Ain’t that great? It's never been done before.

So, I'm happy to be here to talk with you about that, and the core of Jesus's teachings of nonviolence and the Sermon on the Mount.

Stephanie: And you told me, Gandhi read the Sermon on the Mount every day.

Fr. John: What do you think of that, Stephanie?

Stephanie: That sounds just like Gandhi, to be honest.

Fr. John: Yeah, exactly. Again with the showing off.

So, I was asked by Orbis Books 25 years ago to do an anthology of Gandhi's writings. And so, I read the 100 volumes, The Collected Works of Gandhi. And then I read about 50 other volume – biographies. And Daniel Berrigan said I had overdosed on Gandhi and needed a 12-step group.

You know, he's talking about the gospel and Jesus and nonviolence, I mean, his entire life. And I read that. And then after the book came out, I went to India with Arun Gandhi for a month, and we went to all the places where Gandhi lived. And Arun and his cousin Rajmahon, my friends, were raised by Gandhi. So, they knew him really well. 

And we're there in Ahmedabad. And this is the place that Gandhi prayed. And Arun is telling me, what I kind of got from the letters that from 4 to 5 in the morning, they sat outside in silence. They did a Christian hymn, a Hindu hymn, a Muslim hymn, read a little bit of Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2, but also a little bit of Matthew 5. And then they were silent, and then they sang again. And then they did that in the evening. And this went on for 45 years. And when he was shot, and walking to the stage there at Birla House, they would have been hearing from the Sermon on the Mount.

Anyway, it's such a challenge to – on bad days, I think is Gandhi the only human being who took Jesus that seriously, who read the core fundamental teachings of Jesus every day? And Christians don't do that. 

And I've been going around the country and the world for 25 years saying, “Look what Gandhi did. We better get our act together and start taking this guy seriously.” But see what Gandhi did, nobody else did. Gandhi did not approach the Sermon on the Mount, which is Matthew 5, 6, and 7, like Sacred Scripture. Like nice pious writings. Or even interesting poetry, because all holy scriptures are beautiful.

He said, “No, this is a handbook. It's a ‘how to be a human being’ manual. It's the textbook.” And he said, “Therefore, it's a textbook on how to practice nonviolence.” He's discovering this in South Africa, and he goes, “I want to be a person of nonviolence, ahimsa. This guy figured it out more than anybody, ever. So, I have to read the manual.” It was almost like directions. You know, how to set up your television.

Well, I don't read directions, and nobody reads directions. And certainly not going to read directions about the spiritual life or God. Gandhi said, “No, these are directions in how to live and therefore how to be nonviolent and how to love.”

And he was not Gandhi. He was a mess, like all the rest of us. What he did that no one else does is he just said, “I'm going to do what the guy says. By the way, it doesn't make sense, and I may not agree with it, and I definitely don't understand it. Doesn't matter. He's smarter than me. I'm going to do what he did because he embodied nonviolence. I don't.” And he became Gandhi in the process. That's what Jim Douglass says, which is a very powerful teaching. And that was what the nonviolent Jesus wanted. Isn't that great?

Stephanie: That’s beautiful. And it's quite thought-provoking as well. Where did Jesus learn his nonviolence?

Fr. John: In the Gospel of Luke, it's clearly framed that Jesus learned all nonviolence from a woman, his mother. Luke 1, the story of the Annunciation. Mary's there, the angel comes. That's the first movement of nonviolence, contemplative nonviolence. And once you encounter God and you go, “Hey, I don't know, but I'll do whatever God wants, because that's who I am.” That leads to the second movement of nonviolence, the Visitation, as active nonviolence. She goes out to serve her elderly cousin who's in need. Love your neighbor, which is a dangerous thing to do.

And once you love your neighbor and serve, that leads to the third movement of gospel nonviolence, prophetic nonviolence, the Magnificat. God is going to throw down the rulers of the world, and lift up the poor and oppressed, and remember the promise of mercy, for all ages. The promise of nonviolence. Isn’t that fantastic?

And then the next thing is, Jesus is born, and he lives that stuff out. You can see it. So, Luke frames it that way. That's good enough for me to go on.

Michael: Thank you. Gosh, that's inspiring, John. That's nothing short of inspiring. I was reminded that there was a missionary, Stanley Jones. And he said, there's only one real Christian in the world today, and he's a Hindu.

Fr. John: Yeah. Doctor King said that, too. Imagine Martin Luther King as a Baptist minister in the South.

Michael: Yeah.

Fr. John: Saying that at a Baptist convention. I mean, they wanted to kill him. First of all, Gandhi's going to hell, they thought, because he's not been baptized, with no understanding of – well, the spectacular teaching of the Sermon on the Mount is that God is nonviolent. That's the whole point. And so, we're nonviolent.

But I could talk about the Sermon on the Mount and the nonviolence of Jesus all day. And I know you wanted me to, so I wanted to go over four key teachings that people may or may not have heard. But if you want to ask me anything before, about that, Stephanie.

Stephanie: Well, it really – it's interesting because without the perspective of nonviolence, without understanding nonviolence, I imagine that the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes would be hard to interpret, really.

Fr. John: Exactly. And it's the same with the Bhagavad Gita, which is a story of the training of, what Arjuna? The warrior – and Gandhi says, “No, that's about inner violence.”

Well, Jesus is explicitly about nonviolence and love. And so, what did we do? Well, we just ignored it. But it's right there in black and white for every human being to read. And, well, we killed the poor guy too, so. 

Gandhi and King, and I would include Dorothy Day, offer a new, fresh perspective on how to see life, how to see what's going on inside us, our own violence, how to look at our families, how to look at the newspaper, the world, our lives, our work, churches, mosques, synagogues, the world. And it's all from the perspective of nonviolence. Everything now seen through the lens of nonviolence. Well, including the scriptures.

Gandhi reads Bhagavad Gita from a perspective of nonviolence. I think if you read the Jewish scriptures from the perspective of nonviolence, as my friends in the Jewish Peace Fellowship have told me, it's radical nonviolence. And same with Islam. And what I'm proposing, even Christianity [laughs] – God, I have – it’s stupid that I have to say “the Sermon on the Mount is about nonviolence.” Oh, boy. 

And that's what I said in the Vatican. And that's what I've been trying to teach. But somebody's got to do it, since we're back to square one.

Michael: John, are you familiar with a book by Geoffrey Nuttall called, Christian Pacifism in History?

Fr. John: Possibly.

Michael: The reason I mention it is that he identifies five rediscoveries through history of gospel nonviolence. Though he doesn’t always use the word, of course. And, you know, they sputter into life, they tried to change the system, and they get overwhelmed.

So, it just seems like throughout history there's this struggle, repetitive struggle, to discover that truth that you are talking about. And because the truth is so hard to live out, people then make up rationalizations and go somewhere else.

But against that background, and I've been thinking about that book more and more, because where are we now? Is this a sixth rediscovery?

Fr. John: I do know that book and I never referred to it. Because if you may have noticed, I never – and, you know, I was the director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, I got us to stop using the word pacifism because in the mainstream culture it just means passivity. But nonviolence is such a clumsy word, but nobody uses that. And it says, “No violence.” 

But something's going on, Michael. Of course, you could make a case, it's one of the worst moments in history. We're closer to nuclear destruction, now in the throes of catastrophic climate change, something we couldn't imagine 20 years ago, really. We're living in it now. Well, okay, we're moving closer to the brink. 

But somebody said we're actually – more is happening about nonviolence than ever before in history. Now, I don't know about that. We had Gandhi, who did spectacular work, and he appeared in the same time as Hitler, which has always amazed me. And then Martin Luther King was Gandhi's hope that there would be an African-American leader who would really take it to the mainstream to the West. Well, no one could do more than Martin King.

I mean, Elvis could reappear, and Doctor King did more than Elvis. I mean, I don't – I’m trying to make you laugh. That was Dan Berrigan's joke. You know, even if Elvis appeared, no one would believe in nonviolence. Martin did everything, and the churches did not much.

But it's all organizing. And Ken Butigan, and Marie Dennis and other friends, we sort of turned after the war in the 2000s on Iraq, and started organizing against the Vatican, almost for a laugh with Pope Benedict. “Hey, let's do some teachings on nonviolence.” And then he stepped down. And then Pope Francis appeared, and he's like, “Yeah, come on over.”

And next thing you know, he issues a statement, There is no just war theory. Well, no one has ever said that before. In fact, not only does it not apply, no one knows what it actually is. And he said, “Nonviolence is the norm for Christians.”

And we worked on that statement for him. It's really exciting. So, we're trying to get him to write an encyclical, which is the official document, and that would then go into Canon Law and the Catechism globally.

So, the Pope has made historic strides, outlawing any little hint that you could build a nuclear weapon, that deterrence is okay. That's gone. He's made historic strides. There's no justification, not a word for executions. And other stuff, okay, of course.

And now there is no such thing as a just war. But we want him to say Jesus was totally nonviolent, and Christians have to become nonviolent again, which means they can't be involved in war. We’re people of universal love, universal compassion, universal peace. I don't think it's going to happen. But we've done – more has happened than ever before.

Forgive me for being negative. I'm not that much of an optimist. But it's been amazing. And, you know, there's a lot of people promoting and teaching nonviolence, certainly more than since the 60s. So that's hopeful.

If people aren't familiar with the Sermon on the Mount, but are interested in nonviolence, I thought of four little points, which are the key points that people might like. So, the four different gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke, the first three are written around the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70. 

Matthew's gospel is particularly written for the Jewish community that's converting to Christianity. So, it's very focused on Judaism in every aspect. It's lovely. So, the emphasis is what? We found the Messiah. The problem is, he's not quite the guy we hoped for. There's not going to be any war. He thinks he's Gandhi. He's totally into nonviolence.

So, Matthew frames the nonviolent Jesus as the new Moses going up the little mountain and sitting down and offering us the new commandments of nonviolence. Isn’t that great? And that's the whole design. So, the Sermon on the Mount is actually, the people, the community that wrote the Gospel of Matthew are bringing together all the best most basic teachings of Jesus, and they're putting them into what I call one basic campaign platform speech. This is it. 

But nowhere does it say, by the way, this is called the Sermon on the Mount. That's just what we call it. And it's not a sermon. It's like if Martin Luther King were appearing, you know, in Wyoming, and 5000 people showed up, and you had a whole day, and he was going to talk. Well, this is what it would be like. And in fact, if anything, he ends up doing a classic Kingian nonviolence training. Isn’t that fantastic?

But it's weird. It's nothing like you or I would say. And he began to teach them. And so, we get the equivalent of Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path. But they're the Beatitudes. That's how it starts. And I'll just say them briefly. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice. And blessed are the merciful. Blessed are the clean of heart. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those persecuted for the sake of justice.

And then, finally, there's sort of an addendum, and blessed are you when they really go after you and insult you and call you every name in the book, rejoice and be glad, now you're like the prophets of old. Your reward will be great. That's how it begins.

And everybody goes, “Isn't that nice?” Jesus didn't speak Hebrew or Greek. The Gospels are written in Koine Greek. He spoke Aramaic, and his Aramaic is gone. But this French scholar spent his life trying to translate the Beatitudes and what we call the “Our Father,” back into the Aramaic.

And instead of “Blessed are,” “Aren't you nice?” like patting the dog on the head. If Jesus is like Gandhi or Doctor King, that's not what's going on here. Think. He's in the most remote, horrible place. It's a desert by a little lake. It's not pretty 2000 years ago. It's not like it is today.

It's on the outskirts of a brutal empire where the Romans are coming through and raping the women, burning down the houses, killing the kids, stealing the stuff, and making every man immediately is now a Roman soldier, and we march on to the next town for the next victory for Caesar, called the gospel. So, these are really scared, oppressed people. Think South Africa under apartheid, Mississippi in the United States, or El Salvador, or Rwanda, or Syria, or Gaza. We can go on.

And this guy, the French scholar, says the word is not “blessed are.” In the Aramaic, it has all these connotations. So, the first sentence would be, “Arise. Get up. Start walking, and walk forth all you poor in spirit, mournful, meek, and you who are hungry and thirst for justice. Doesn’t that sound like King? The empowerment.

So, the guy said it’d be two phrases. Arise and walk forth. Get up and get moving, you who are merciful and pure in heart and peacemakers and persecuted for justice. Get going. He's empowering them to build a movement.

Well, I never knew that until about 20 years ago. It's incredible. And you go, “Now, this sounds like a guy they'd have to kill. And it sounds like Gandhi and Doctor King. It's just classic nonviolence.”

So, the two beatitudes I just wanted to mention, because I think they might help people, that I've done the most work on – and I've written 5 or 6 books on Jesus and nonviolence, including a whole book just on the Beatitudes called, The Beatitudes of Peace, if people want to pursue this – would be the third one, first.

Blessed are the meek, they will inherit the earth. And you go, “Isn't that nice?” Not at all. You know, I wrote a book on Thomas Merton, as pretty much all Catholic writers have to do at some point, 25 years ago, because I'm trying to learn nonviolence. Thomas Merton, Peacemaker.

And Merton wrote this incredible post-doctoral statement explaining the Christian roots of nonviolence for Hildegard Goss-Mayr and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which he dedicated to Joan Baez in 1965, called Blessed Are the Meek.

Merton says that phrase, “blessed are the meek,” which is throughout the Psalms, does not mean what we think it means. Passivity. Aren't you nice. He said it means Martin Luther King. Thomas Merton said that in 1965. He said it's the active, public, provocative, total nonviolence of Martin Luther King, and we would include Gandhi. And that Jesus is saying that 2000 years ago.

Well, that gets me excited, and I'm going, “Why didn't I know this?” And then you go, “Why does Jesus say, okay, people who were like Gandhi and Doctor King, total nonviolence, they will inherit the earth?” Let's say – my translation, they are one with creation. What the heck does that mean? And why is no one in my whole life ever told me that?

And then I remembered we got rid of the Sermon on the Mount in the third century, created the just war. Constantine converted, made Christianity legal, and said, “You can all be soldiers now. You don't have to follow the nonviolence of Jesus,” in effect.

So, blessed are people of active nonviolence. Well, we're not doing that. And so, we're not one with the earth. And so, catastrophic climate change. To me, it was right there. “Inherit the Earth” is a phrase in the Psalms. “Meekness” is a phrase in the Psalms. Jesus puts them together. Well, nobody had ever said these things before in all of written history. Isn't that interesting, y'all?

And Gandhi's reading that sentence every single day. Nonviolence means oneness with creation. So, I wrote a whole book on that sentence called, They Will Inherit the Earth. If you care about the Earth, according to Jesus, you have to practice total active Gandhian-Kingian nonviolence. Well, that's a very mysterious and beautiful and hopeful teaching, and it's a way forward for all of us.

The second line, and then I'll stop about this for now, is, I guess the seventh beatitude, “Blessed are the peacemakers, they will be called the sons and daughters of God.” All the Beatitudes lead up to that teaching in my mind. So that's the statement. We're called to be peacemakers.

He doesn't say, “Blessed are you if you really like peace.” As someone said to me 30 years ago, “I'm a big fan of peace. But sometimes you just got to kill somebody.” That was in a packed church. I never forgot that. Everybody went, “Well, she's got a point.” Well, anyway, no. 

And so, what does that mean? Well, you can't be a warmaker. You can't be part of war. And this is so stupid. It's kindergarten level, and people have wanted to kill me. And I've been kicked out of places all over the country to say, “Well, I think it goes like this, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ Which means he's not saying blessed are the war-makers and following the prophetic language of Jeremiah that the Gospels are reflecting on. He would be saying something like, ‘Cursed are the war-makers, and therefore we have to be against all war, all weapons, all nuclear weapons. Every intention to kill.’”

And you go, as I did when I was a young kid, “Okay, great, I love it. I'm all for peacemaking. Why?” And this, again, is the weird mystery of Jesus that I've talked about all around the world. He said, “You go into the culture of permanent warfare because your fundamental identity as a human being is you are the beloved daughter, the beloved son of the living God of peace.” 

Wow! That to me is just game changing. He says God is a peacemaker. No, the whole point is God's got to throw those people in hell. God blesses our troops, not their troops. No, God didn't bless any troops. God doesn't bless any wars. God is on the side of the peacemakers because they're actually like his firstborn sons and daughters.

So, this is so important because I think – I don't know if we've ever talked about this, Michael, and I’ll try to sum up this thing. It's the bottom line for me. And I've said this in all my 40 books. And I get this in Gandhi because he would have gotten this. Gandhi says, “The heart of nonviolence is you see every human being is a sister and brother.” Okay, great. How did he get that teaching? 

I think the culture of violence and empire and war, from Rome to Britain to the United States, is always telling us who we are, and we go right along with it. “You're an American. You're a Republican. You're a Democrat. You live in California, or whatever. Or you're rich. Actually, you're a nobody. But you could be somebody if you do.”

And then there was that commercial in the 70s. “You want to be all you can be? Join the Marines and kill to defend the United States.” In other words, the culture of war is saying the highest identity there is, is to kill to protect your empire. Rome said that. The United States says that.

Our guy comes along and says, “No, this is who you are. You are beloved sons and daughters of a living God of universal peace, who only makes peace, doesn’t know how to make war. But he gives us the option because he's nonviolent.”

And I've been inviting people to claim their fundamental identity as the beloved sons and daughters of the God of peace. And so, then you walk into the culture, and you just speak out against war and nuclear weapons and killing everywhere – in your families, in the neighborhood, in your city and the state, in the country, in the world. That's what we do. We can't help ourselves. We’re sons and daughters of God. This is our job. Isn’t that great?

I'll let you tell me what you think about that, and then I'll go on to my other two points. I want to know what you think.

Stephanie: Well, I think it's funny that I have this conception of this kind of beautiful, you know, field of daisies and Jesus and, you know, holding us in the palm of his hand. And you're really like an anthropologist here, an anthropologist of these prayers and pulling it out of the stone, you know, of where these teachings have been hidden from the culture.

Fr. John: They are spectacular teachings, and they're incredibly radical and life-changing and world-changing, and we've totally ignored them. It's incredible, but I find it very exciting. But I get this from Gandhi and Doctor King. Isn't it exciting that they did such great work? 

So, after he does the Beatitudes – this is the terminology of the scholars – he offers six antitheses, okay? Remember, he's supposed to be like the new Moses. Here are the new commandments. You're my chosen people. But now every human being is chosen, and it's all nonviolence all the time. This is amazing. And we're going on a movement, and we're going to bring down the Roman Empire. So, they kill him. And he comes back, and he's still at it, by the way.

So, I could go on and on about the first one. But the way they wrote in those days was that the center of the text was the climax. Not the way we write, which is all builds up to a dramatic climax, and there's a short denouement.

So, the climax is this the fifth and sixth teaching, which is sort of at, a third of the way through the Sermon on the Mount. And the antithesis go like this, “You have heard it said, but I say to you,” okay? And that's the new teaching.

And the fifth one, this just gets me so excited. You have heard it said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Well, that's the whole Mosaic Law, which was progress. That's the Torah, I think. You know, “Okay, if they come and chop out your eye, you can chop out their eye.” At least we're not killing each other. 

But Gandhi then comes along and says, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth makes the whole world blind and toothless.” But it's then Jesus. “But I say to you,” and this is the best translation from the original Greek. And this is what I've been trying to tell the world, because Walter Wink is the one who – he's the one who really unpacked this more than anybody in history, in the 70s and 80s. He said, “The translation is,” and I always invite people to memorize it with me because maybe the most important thing Jesus said and no one even knows it. “But I say to you, offer no violent resistance to one who does evil.”

I'm going to repeat that, offer no violent resistance to one who does evil. There it is. And that's the sentence Gandhi read every morning and every evening. I kid you not. And he said, “Well, if that's the methodology of Jesus,” then, by the way, if you're going to do an eye for an eye, you really don't need God. If you got money, you got weapons, you don't really need God. 

But if you're going to be no more violence, you need God to get you through the day. You know, then the Psalms start to make sense. My rock, my security, because I don't have any weapons and I don't have any money.

This is the basis of everything Gandhi did in South Africa then. He was taking ahimsa to another level and going, “Wow, Jesus means this to be applied not just on the personal level, but on the nation level.” And then he goes to India, and it's on the global level. Indian people should not respond to British imperialism and oppression and violence with further oppression and violence and killing. No, we have to organize nonviolently.

So, then Walter Wink says Jesus does a classic Kingian nonviolence training. Remember, these are oppressed people in the outback. And he goes, “Let me give you five examples, okay? Someone comes along and strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other cheek.” You all heard that. 

Well, what I do in my workshops is I stand two people up in the room. I usually say, “No.” I'll bring up a priest who's hosting me, and I'll say, “Okay, now I'm going to demonstrate, I'm going to hit the priest.” Everybody laughs. And I go to hit them, and so I'm going to – I'm demonstrating. And I say, “What's wrong with this picture? It's not possible to strike someone on the right cheek. 

Think about it. If you're right-handed, nobody's left-handed because that was for unclean stuff. So, you go to strike someone on the cheek, you hit them on the left cheek. This is not what this is about because it specifically says it.

So, this is like Martin Luther King, you know, in Birmingham now or in Montgomery. Now we're getting somewhere. He's saying the Roman soldier is coming in, you're kneeling down before him, and he's striking you with the back of the hand. It's all top down, humiliation, oppression. You turn the other cheek and say, “Sorry, man, but I'm a human being. You have to treat me like an equal.” And it's scary and risky, but there's no violence. But you're not passive. You're not running away.

So, the world always says in the face of violence, you do nothing, run away, be passive, or you fight back with the means to the opponent. And Jesus, for the first time in history, I think you could argue, presents Gandhian-Kingian methodology of nonviolent resistance, saying, “You stand your ground, but you don't use the means of your opponent, but you deal with your opponent head on with love and truth and say, ‘I'm a human being. Why are you hurting me?’ Even to the point that you accept violence without retaliating until you wear them down, and you reconcile, and he repents,” and so forth.

What gets me about this teaching is the history of it. So, it was totally ignored, basically. You know, when Christianity became an imperial religion, some fled to the desert of Africa. We call them the desert fathers and mothers, and they saved nonviolence.

And then as the centuries went on, some formed monasteries, like in Ireland. But they ended up having their own soldiers, so that didn't work, but they were trying. And then, you know, we had the just war theory. In the Middle Ages, you have the Crusades, and the Cardinals are leading the killing of the thousands of Muslims. It’s so evil.  And then slavery and so forth.

It's Saint Francis and Saint Claire bring it along, and then you get the Quakers. Their translation is wrong, “I say, offer passive resistance.” And that's what got us in so much trouble. But it was enough for them to organize the abolitionist movement, which led to the suffragist movement.

So, in the US, did you know that William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, when they launched the abolitionist movement in the 1820s, they cited this verse, “We are people – we are pacifists, and therefore we can't support slavery. And therefore, we are now calling for the abolition of slavery.” They based everything on the Sermon on the Mount.

And as the years go on, their best friend, John Brown, says, “Enough with the pacifism.” And by 1859, on the brink of the Civil war, they all renounced the gospel and said, “You're right. We got to just go and kill the white slave owners,” all except for one guy. William Lloyd Garrison's lieutenant, Adin Ballou says, “No, I'm going to stay with nonviolence.” And he lived into the 1880s, had a pile of kids, formed the ashram. He writes a manifesto on nonviolence. He dies, his son publishes it and mails it to the 100 most famous people on the planet – Queen Victoria, the Pope, Rutherford B. Hayes, nobody who cares, except for the most famous guy on the planet, Leo Tolstoy.

And he gets it in the mail, reads that and basically says, “I will spend the rest of my life on this one sentence, ‘Offer no violent resistance to one who does evil.’” And so, he writes The Kingdom of God Is Within You. And the first sentence, “I got in the mail a pamphlet from Adin Ballou's son,” the legendary. It would be like Andrew Young. It'd be like Doctor King renouncing nonviolence to support the Vietnam War and everybody but Andrew Young saying, “No, why are we get…”

And Tolstoy wanted to convert the Russian Orthodox Church to this and to stop making imperial religion, and totally failed. But gets this letter from this guy in South Africa. “Dear Mr. Tolstoy, I read your thing. I, too, will give my life for this sentence. Mohandas K. Gandhi.” I find that lineage of nonviolence really amazing.

And that's what I've tried to do, like you all, to keep that verse alive. And I tried really hard to say this in the Vatican. Like, this is the sentence that you need to be telling the world. This is why we need an encyclical.

And if we got an encyclical, forget the United States, it would go the whole planet. 1.5 billion people would start reading about nonviolence. Francis could do this, and I don't know if it's going to happen, beyond Gandhi and Doctor King, in some ways, because of media.

Anyway, that's the fundamental teaching. And that leads to the six antitheses. And this is the climax. And then he says, “You have heard it said, love your countrymen and hate your enemies. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons and daughters of God in heaven.”

No one has ever said those words before in history. And in the Greek, the way it's been translated and talked about down through the centuries has been, “Well, you know, the person across the street is crazy. He's your enemy, but you're going to love him anyway. Okay?” No, that's not what this is about.

Countrymen – because women didn't count as human beings. So, it's nation-state language. This is very important. And hate your enemies. “But I say to you, agape your enemies. Unconditional, nonviolent, active, aggressive love to the people targeted by your nation state for death.”

So, that means for us as Americans, if you're a Christian during the last century, you have to love the Germans and try to stop our country from killing them. And you have to side with the Jews who are being killed, and stop the Germans. And you have to side with the Japanese, especially the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then Korea. You have to side with the Vietnam War and stop our country from killing them. And then go down the list – Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Palestine, now Sudan, all the places of the world and now with nuclear weapons and so forth.

It goes beyond the abolition of war. He could have said, “We're going to abolish war.” Well, that would have been helpful, Jesus. But it's taken me a lifetime to realize this is so beyond that. It's so political. It's the end of the nation state system. It's a call for universal love. And the minute you do that, the people are going to persecute you because you're not supposed to side with the Palestinians or the Iraqis or Afghanistan.

And Jesus says, “Well then you pray for them while you're actively speaking out.” And, okay, I'm reading this as a 21-year-old kid, and I'm going, “Great, fine, I'll sign up. I'll do it. Just tell me why.” And I can't find anyone to help me. No one's talking. 

And then I find – who talks about the Sermon on the Mount? I go and read, for the first time in 1982, the sermons of Martin Luther King. And the book is still out. It's called Strength to Love. And he has one of the greatest sermons, maybe the greatest in history, called Love Your Enemies. And he explains the whole darn thing. 

Martin says, if he were preaching it, “Jesus does not say love your enemies because it's the moral thing to do, even though it is. Jesus does not say love your enemies because it's the philosophic good to be done,” right? Even though it is. That's choosing goodness. “Jesus does not say love your enemies,” and this is where he gets to me, “because it's the only practical political solution left for the planet,” even though it is.

If we all did that, we'd have to stop killing each other. Then we'd have all this money, and we could feed everybody, and we could fund nonviolent conflict resolution. Why? Martin Luther King said, “It's right there. Love your enemies. And didn't we just agree to this?” “Didn't I explain this to you half hour ago?” poor Jesus would be saying. “Then you're really sons and daughters of the God who lets the sun rise on the good and the bad, and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.”

I remember finally getting that when I was 21 through Doctor King's teaching, and went, “It's just – this is fantastic.” Because number one, it's the most political statement in the entire Bible, and we've done everything we can to pretend he never said it.

It's the measure of Christianity. It's the bottom line. It's beyond nonviolence. Love your enemies. But there in the same sentence, the most political sentence in the Bible, is the clearest description of the mystery of God that Jesus ever said. Because he actually didn't talk that much about God. He's doing stuff to show us what it means to be godly.

But he says, actually, “God is a God of universal love toward every human being.” And he uses nature images – the sun and the rain. It’s so beautiful. And that's why then we say God is a peacemaker. And so, you are sons and daughters. And therefore, the scandal of the Sermon on the Mount in this climactic sentence, which is total disarmament of the planet, is that we do this because God is nonviolent. And so, I ask people, “Well, who's the God you worship? Is your God violent or nonviolent?” 

“And if God is nonviolent, that's not a – I don't want that God,” well, that's what the culture of war tells us. And we don't even know that. And Gandhi – I’ll end with this thought. It was so helpful reading Gandhi. Somewhere he had a mysterious teaching, but that's what you get if you read this sentence every day.

He said. “So, what we have to do is help people re-imagine the nonviolence of God because we’re all lost. We’re all blind.” And then Gandhi said, “Once people can go, ‘Wow, you mean God might be totally nonviolent,’ then we might begin to worship a God of peace, a God of universal love, a God of active, creative, nonviolence that has nothing to do with violence. And then once you begin to worship that God and not the false gods of war, you become people of active nonviolence and universal love.” I think this is the real bottom line, fundamental spiritual truth that Gandhi and Doctor King were trying to teach us. And that's the that's the hope for me.

If Jesus is violent, I don't want anything to do with him. If Gandhi and King are right that he's the greatest teacher and person of nonviolence in history, and that's what this guy says, this is working for me. Now we're getting somewhere. This is actually really exciting stuff. And I go around the country and tell this in churches, and they run me out of town, or now they just bar me from speaking. But it's very exciting. So, thanks. And I'm sorry I'm so long-winded, but I can't – it's years of training.

Stephanie: Thank you. Before he gets to the love your enemies, he addresses the issue of anger. And as King and Gandhi also address anger. And you can't get involved in nonviolence without coming across your own anger, the anger of others, and how to use it and how to harness it. So, tell us about anger and how that builds up.

Fr. John: I'm so excited that you – but that's you, Stephanie. You and Michael are wisdom teachers of nonviolence, that you're not afraid to talk about that. You know, that's the first antithesis. And I said I was going to talk about the fifth and the six.

I once flew to Oaxaca, Mexico, to give a three-day retreat on the Sermon on the Mount to church workers. And they're on the front lines. And I got 15 verses in, to the verse on anger. And they all blew up at me, started yelling and screaming and stormed out. And that was the end of the retreat. I didn't even get to love your enemies or nonviolence. It's incredible.

And yet, as you know, and you don't mind me name-dropping, I was very close with Dan and Phil Berrigan, and Thich Nhat Hanh, and Archbishop Tutu, and Mother Teresa. They all transcended that, and they were changing the world.

And that's why, Gandhi, when he says, “What if I took Jesus seriously about the avoid anger and think that Jesus knew better than the rest of us? Maybe the teaching is Jesus is trying to form lifelong total satyagrahis. People of total nonviolence.” And one of the teachings is, and I've written a lot about this, if you go through the Sermon on the Mount it says, “Avoid these negative emotions. They're not going to sustain you for the long haul. Anger, fear, worry, anxiety, despair. None of those work. But that's exactly what the empire wants you to think. Be angry, be afraid. Great. And then you'll be busy. You won't resist.”

And Jesus actually says, “Cultivate these two other emotions, grief and joy. I said it in the Beatitudes.” All those great peacemakers taught me that that – I saw them. Tutu fell in my arms once, sobbing over the state of the world. And he said, “I've cried every day of my life, and I've laughed every day of my life.” He told me I had to work for nonviolence and justice and peace until the day I die.

And I said, “Oh man, how am I going to do that? How do you do that, Desmond?” And he goes, “I cry, and I laugh.” And I thought, “Oh, yeah, that's because he lives the Beatitudes. I'm just a dopey kid.”

Okay, so the teaching in the first antithesis is you have heard it said, thou shalt not kill. That's the first sentence after the Beatitudes. And you go, “Okay, I'm with you.” And Jesus says, “But I say to you, don't even get angry.” And all around the country, when I read that, people go, “What? I'm so mad that he said that. What are you talking about? Anger is a good thing.” And then they storm out on me. I'm going, “Oh yeah, is that working for you? Is that really helping us get end war and get rid of nuclear weapons?”

In the long run, see, the angry anti-Vietnam student movement doesn't sustain you for a long haul. Because it's a long haul we're involved in. But so, okay, you know, you can unpack that, as you all have done in nonviolence, and he's trying to get the roots of our violence. And the psychologist would say anger is because we're wounded. There's a wound in us. And Jesus might say, as Henry Nouwen says, “Don't be a wounded wounder. Be a wounded healer.” You know, and even the Greek might say, “I say to you, don't nurse your anger.” Okay, that's nice too.

But in other words, avoid anger. Don't cultivate it, because that will lead to you to being full of violence and rage and resentment, which always leads to saying negative things and then hurting people. And then the next thing you know, you're off to war, and you don't even understand why. You're brainwashed.

But it's the next sentence that's so crazy, okay? You've heard it said thou shalt not kill. Okay, I agree with that. Friends, don't kill anybody. You're never allowed to kill. But I say to you, don't even get angry with anybody. And he's going to offer a complete alternative where people have universal love. Which means we are always grieving because there's so much harm being done, and there’s always rejoicing, the wonder of creation, and children, and life.

And then the next sentence is, “Therefore, when you go to the altar to bring your gift to God,” and I want to go, “Wait a second. Hold it, Jesus. We're talking about killing here, and you're talking about anger. Why are you now talking about worship and God?”

And he says, “When you go to the altar to worship God and you remember someone is angry at you. Because you've hurt someone, they're nursing resentment to you. Whatever you do, don't go to God.” It's shocking. In other words, don't pray. Don't worship, and don't bring your gift to God.

This is the first teaching about prayer in the Sermon on the Mount is don't pray, don't go near God if there's one person on the planet who you have hurt, who is still wounded by you. And Merton would emphasize is the commandment in the Greek is [Greek] go and be reconciled. Well, this is classic 12-steps work. Go and apologize and say you were wrong. I should never have hurt you and make amends to all the people you have harmed in your life. 

Once you've done that, and you reconciled with the people you have hurt, starting with the people closest to you in your life, then you go back to the altar and bring your gift to God. You do go and worship God. But God wants people who are practicing their nonviolence. Ain’t that spectacular? 

So, he turns it around, and you know, you're angry at someone else, but wait, what about all the people you've hurt? They're angry at you. And you can just expand it and say, “Okay, we're Americans. We got people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine – I can go on – who are angry and hurt by us.”

So, you expand it as Gandhi did to the global perspective, and you see how spectacular the teaching is. Isn’t that exciting stuff? So, then it leads up to offer no violent resistance to one who does evil. And then the climax. Love your enemies, practice universal love in total nonviolence from now on.

You've reconciled with everybody. You're going to be like Gandhi and Doctor King. You're going to go beyond them, and you'll love everybody. I just love this.

Stephanie: One more word in here that I want to talk about. It might be one of the most political words of these teachings. And the word is satisfied.

Fr. John: Oh, isn't it wonderful? Look at you.

Stephanie: Blessed are – back to the Beatitudes. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.

Fr. John: I love that you're citing that. That's great. Okay, I've pondered that word my whole life. And I love that word. 

Now, according to the Hebrew, from what I've studied, the better translation with all due love and respect, is not righteousness. It's actually social justice, if you go back deep into the meaning of that word.

So, hunger and thirst for social justice for the whole planet, that means the poor. Well, hunger, thirst? It's your passion. It's your whole life. I want justice. We're here to abolish poverty, end hunger, get clean water to every human being. Free, decent housing toward every human being. Plumbing and free universal healthcare to every human being on the planet. Total, good, decent, pro-human employment toward every human being on the planet.

I'm not talking about Americans. I mean Africa, India, Asia, Latin America, the whole world. And education for every human being on the planet. Since we're getting rid of nuclear weapons, you can't be spending trillions on killing people. There's infinite money to do all this, the UN says, in two weeks. 

Once you've done all that, by the way, Gandhi says, you fund nonviolent conflict resolution so that every human being on the planet is taught it from kindergarten to grad-school. Every class, every place on the planet, every religious community, every university, every hospital. Everything is training camps of nonviolence.

But he has that strange phrase. You hunger and thirst for justice, but they will be satisfied. And the way I have studied this and translated is that, of course, you want the satisfaction of justice. We want victories of justice. We want to end segregation. We want to end world hunger. We want to end the death penalty. We want to end all the wars, the genocide in Gaza, the war in Ukraine. We want to abolish nuclear weapons and get rid of fossil fuels.

That may not happen in our lifetime. So, it's a long-haul movement. That's what I was taught by Daniel Berrigan. And you go into the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu way of you leave the outcome in the results in the hands of God. But you just keep forward, detached from the outcome.

Okay, we hunger and thirst for justice whether we have a victory or not, whether we're satisfied or not, we're going to hunger and thirst for justice until the day we die. That's what Tutu said to me. Ah, but as a kid, when I was at Duke, I was enraptured with Victor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning. And that had a huge impact on my life.

And he said the key for the survivors of the Holocaust was they had found some profound meaning in their lives. And I thought that's what Jesus was getting at. And I have still not come up with a better way to explain it for myself.

You will have a fundamental deep meaning to your life. And then I read Gandhi and Doctor King and Dorothy Day, and I see them saying that. And I talk to my great heroes, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Tutu, and I see them saying that this is the most meaningful thing you can do with your lives is to hunger and thirst for justice for the poor. To really be in the nonviolent struggle for justice. And, I'm thinking of Cesar Chavez, who I talked with about this. And he said this to me, too. 

In the Viktor Frankl sense, you have meaning. And nobody has meaning in their lives in this country and in this world. You know, and that's and that's exactly what the culture wants, is watch TV, be confused, be angry, be depressed. There is no meaning. Don't have anything to do with the church or religion. Don't bother with the Christian scriptures or any scriptures. Well, that works. Well, you can't make a difference. Don't work for justice.

No, those who work for justice, the thousands that I have met, and if they go deep into nonviolence, you end up like Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh, and Dorothy Day. A real possessing a certain dignity, a certain deep peace and contentment, even an inner joy. And this fundamental meaning that no one can take.

You can be like Doctor King on the balcony of the Lorraine motel. Go ahead, you can kill me. You can harass me, persecute my family, jail me. But I'm still hungering and thirsting for justice. And I'm still calling for an end to the Vietnam War. And this is the truth. And this is the way of God. And this is what it means to be a human being. And it works for me.

That's my thought. Stephanie, what do you think about that?

Stephanie: Well, it ties into the next part that said blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, but you said social justice.

Fr. John: Yeah. The Kingdom of God is yours.

Stephanie: Because that's also a misconception that people have when they get involved in active nonviolent, you know, direct action is that, “Well, we did it. And they resisted us. They didn't – it didn't work the way we thought it would. They didn't just do what we wanted.” So, that's an important part of this nonviolence training from the Sermon on the Mount.

Fr. John: That's brilliant. And so, he's saying, “Yeah, you're going to be persecuted, but you're already in the presence of God. You're there. The kingdom of God is yours. And if they really go after you, really rejoice and be glad.” And if you read in the fine print in Luke's version, the Sermon on the Plain, it's called, he says, “Leap for joy.”

That's why I always say we should all be dancing because we're in so much trouble working for justice and peace. Dorothy Day, then, with these beatitudes, said, “The measure of your discipleship to Jesus is how much trouble you're in from the government because you're working for peace and justice.” 

You remind me, though, Stephanie, is what nobody reads the follow-up, Matthew 8,9, 10 and 11. So, the crowds leave, he moves on, he's healing people. And he takes the small community around him. I think they're like 50 people, okay. Men and women, his gang, his community, the Jesus movement. And he takes him aside and goes, “None of this is going to work. They're going to kill me, and they're going to kill some of you, and they're going to put you in prison, and there'll be father against son, and daughter against mother,” and they're all freaking out.

He’s forming them, like Gandhi and Doctor King did. And you know, it's the pushback. King goes into Birmingham to provoke a response and to take on nonviolent – through nonviolent love, the suffering and going to jail because it can be socially transformative. That's what Jesus was trying to teach them. Of course, they were clueless about it. And we are to. Isn't that amazing? So, the training continues.

Stephanie: Any last words for our time together today?

Fr. John: Well, I just encourage people not only to study nonviolence and do their contemplative practice and work on their – I always say, nonviolence to yourself, nonviolence toward all others, every human being, all the creatures and creation. But you also, third, have to have one foot in the global grassroots movement of nonviolence.

But for those who are Christian, I invite you to join me in studying the nonviolence of Jesus. And I invite everybody to stop reading all of the rest of the New Testament, including Saint Paul, and just read the Gospels. Or I dare you to read the Sermon on the Mount every day for 45 years and become like Gandhi and Dorothy Day and Doctor King, like Jesus, a person of active, creative nonviolence and universal love.

And by the way, I find it very exciting. If you do this, things will happen. You can get involved, and it really will help. We need more teachers of Christian nonviolence. I could go on and on about the problems of the church and all organized religion. Anybody can. And that would be a lot of fun. And we could all be really angry and mad. And wouldn't that be great?

The problem is, this guy is still spectacular with his act of daring, revolutionary nonviolence. Forget the problems of the institutional organized church is another one. Let's get on with what the guy says. And he calls for radical nonviolence at every level. And it's spectacular. Gandhi and King did not have time to teach this.

We haven't even begun a theology and a spirituality of nonviolence. What does it mean that God is nonviolent? How does this impact the church? Or you could, as you said, Stephanie, like an anthropology of nonviolence. To be human is to be nonviolent, so forth and so on.

So, there's so much new ground we're breaking here. And I encourage people not to be afraid of the Sermon on the Mount. And it's hard. It's not like anything you've ever heard before, but that's the point. You sit with it. And like Rilke said, “Don't try to answer it or figure it out. Live with it. Live with the questions. And live your way into it until you begin to live it. And it begins to make sense.” Thanks for having me.

Stephanie: We want to thank our guest today, Reverend John Dear. Find out more about his work at JohnDear.org. Also, check out the Beatitudes Center for the Nonviolent Jesus, BeatitudesCenter.org. He has a new book out, Gospel of Peace: A Commentary on Matthew, Mark, and Luke from the Perspective of Nonviolence.

We want to thank our mother station, KWMR, KPCA, to the Pacific Network who helps to syndicate this show. Thank you so much. Matt and Robin Watrous, your transcription work and editorial work is amazing. Sophia, Annie, thank you very much for all you're doing to support and share the show. Bryan, also over at Waging Nonviolence, we appreciate the syndication.

And to all of you are faithful listeners, it's so great to hear from you. Find the rest of this show at NonviolenceRadio.org, and you can learn more about the Metta Center for Nonviolence, and nonviolence at Metta Center.org.

Okay. Take care of one another. Until the next time.