Today we get a wonderful contradiction. A kind of twofer that pushes against all our expectations and preferences. How we respond to matters of war and violence and matters of active peacemaking.

George

First, we celebrate George, a Christian solider in the early part of the 4th century. He lived at a time when very few Christians had anything to do with the military at all.

And while we don’t know a great deal about his actual experience, we can certainly expect that a Christian in the military during the middle of one of the worst persecutions in history probably was difficult. We can only speculate. And yet, George personifies the internal struggle that continues: How to follow Christ’s command to make peace and serve a nation’s instrument of war.

This paradox gets stranger as George’s fame grows in the tradition. His service gets intertwined with heroism, to mythic proportions, as his duel with a dragon becomes the iconic vision of humanity’s battle with evil.

But the truth of these visions is always more complicated, of course.

In Justifying Violence

I’m reminded of what fantasy and science fiction writers have often said of their genres: that they can speak to modern and eternal human conditions far more directly than the local news because we can filter them through the battles with dragons or in interstellar exploration.

But it also seems the reverse is also true. That we can launder our tradition’s opposition to violence through a vision of the spectacular. That our fights are not with other people, but with evil itself.

That this is so clearly evident in the Crusades, the most obvious low point in all of Christian history, should make its danger obvious. Less obvious is all of the fallout from that low point; including the adoption of the crusader cross (and George himself) for the imperialistic age of England.

May we again be reminded of the Christian call to peace, not supremacy and reconciliation, not the false peace from power. A gospel truth that paints these parts of our history, not as “the best we could do” but steps away from the path of peace.

A current meme proclaims that “not all heroes wear capes.” With the way George has been used in the church, we might say instead, “not all heroes wear that cross.” In fact, looking at history, very few heroes wore capes or armor, brandished swords or guns. Christian witness proves that very few heroes have taken to violence at all.

War and Peace

The other saint we have the fortune to honor today is Toyohiko Kagawa. Not a soldier, but a pacifist. And it is in Kagawa’s witness that we see the question of Christian participation in violence in a much starker, and much more relevant relief.

Those of us who eschew violence are often burdened by trick questions. Often phrased to make us seem immoral or cowardly. They usually come in the form of the ticking time bomb scenario: If somebody had a gun to your head, would you… or If it were a choice between your killing the bad guy or his killing your family…

These scenarios, much like the common aphorism that we’re all capable of cruel violence, are not so much true as they are framed to justify violence and vilify true peace. Primarily because they put violence in the hero’s clothing and passivity in the goat’s. In this way, we are not actually arguing about violence at all. The true argument is action vs. inaction. Violence becomes the essential and exclusive stand-in for action and peace is relegated to inactive passivity: that we watch as all we love is utterly destroyed due to our rigidity or our cowardice.

So we put a cape on the thing Jesus teaches us not to do and call everything he teaches “cowardly” and “impossible”.

It’s a pretty strange look for Christians.

Toyohiko Kagawa

Kagawa gives us a much truer response to the questions of violence and peace and how Jesus describes our part in the world. Precisely because he reveals how shallow that depiction of active/inactive truly is. Kagawa’s pacifism is not the absence of activity, but the presence of great activity. His vocation to humble service, dedication to community organizing, and facing the violent response for his labor organizing is the picture of a life of constant dedication, sacrifice, and service.

When juxtaposed with the depth of Kagawa’s activity in making peace (which some may condemn as being political—in other words, active—not passive); the participation in systems of oppression, the ongoing support for laws which denigrated the people, and the willingness to turn a blind eye to the violence used against the weak—these are signs of cowardice and passivity in the midst of evil!

Kagawa, even more directly than George, points us back to his vision of the kin-dom, saying that this is about the new thing that God is doing in the world:

“The spirit of Christ must be the soul of all real social reconstruction.”

Making Peace Now

At a time in which this vision of kin-dom-making is centered from our homes rather than our churches, we are wise to see how our participation can be active or passive, outside of our cultural boxes of war and peace.

Tomorrow we will remember genocides—the ultimate picture of violence and kin-dom-breaking evil. And we will do so knowing that the dimensions of facing this evil are not merely violent retaliation of passive acceptance; or that our witness to these true acts of evil are eternally in the past and for a different time.

For we have a vision of making peace, of offering confession, of seeking reconciliation beyond the confines of a nation’s politics, or the particularities of its use of violence. We have saints who show us out of the trap of perpetual violence and toward Christ’s way of love. And we have Jesus, whose way of love gives us a better path to follow.