It is equally clear, however, that Jesus rejected the widely accepted notion that God's violence, employed directly or through human agents, was the necessary instrument for securing God's justice. In order to embrace Jesus' life as a revelation of God, it is necessary to see the good news he announced and embodied as a bridge connecting his understanding of the domination system with his experience of God.

What Jesus expected God to do in the midst of injustice and what he understood to be a faithful response to the spiral of violence that characterized the imperial situation clashed sharply with common expectations of God's redeeming violence.

Some people expected a Davidic messiah to save them. Jesus told a parable about a messiah coming and nothing changing (Matt 18:23-35). Some embraced violent revolution as solutions or at least appropriate response to injustice. Jesus told a parable depicting the destruction that inevitably followed rebellion, however tempting and justified violence might seem (Mark 12:1-12). Many clung to promises that sufficient holiness would activate God's action to crush enemies and assure Israel's glorious triumph. Jesus rejected standard explanations that Roman oppression was a punishment for sin and challenged the sin-based system's preoccupation with holiness both as a characteristic and as a requirement of God.

Some created isolated, insular communities because they believed they could not be God's people within an unjust society. The Essenes, for example, lived holy lives set apart from the domination system and prepared for God's holy violence to end it. Jesus sought transformation and experienced the possibility and reality of abundant life within society, not apart from it. Some expected the end of the domination system as hated enemies were defeated. Jesus exposed and challenged the domination system, called forth alternatives, taught love of enemies in an effort to break the spiral of violence, and linked salvation to healing and wholeness.

Some, including Daniel, John the Baptist and the author of the book of Revelation, embraced apocalyptic promises of God's avenging violence to impose justice within or at the end of history. Jesus embraced but eventually rejected apocalyptic expectations of God and history, advocating instead the imitation of a nonviolent God. Some expected a glorious "kingdom" that would come with power through God's dramatic, redemptive violence. All the wealth of the nations would flow to Israel like a never-ending stream. Jesus spoke of tiny mustard seeds, subversive weeds, leaven in bread, Spirit within and surrounding us, daily food and abundant life. Many understood God t be God because of superior violence. Jesus embraced the invitational, nonviolent power of a compassionate God.

Jesus' parables and other teachings and actions undermined messianic and apocalyptic expectations of God's redeeming or punishing violence. He illuminated and challenged each spoke in the spiral of violence, and he associated salvation with healing and restoration to community rather than defeat of enemies. His understanding of God's noncoercive, nonviolent power is reflected in the Lukan passage in which everyone is invited to dinner. There is no threat of violent sanction but rather a lost opportunity because we miss the Spirit's open invitation to abundant life. This vision of a nonviolent God is reinforced in the prodigal story in which a father's compassion violates a brother's sense of justice. According to the logic of the oldest son, his irresponsible brother had forfeited his right to his father's love. The behavior of the father, however, illustrates that God's compassion is ultimately deeper than God's commitment to justice, if by justice we mean that people get what they deserve or that in a well-ordered universe disobedience leads to sanction and obedience to blessing.

Jesus links compassion and justice together in opposition to the dominant tradition that saw God's violence or divinely sanctioned human violence as essential to God's justice. God's violence cannot be the instrument by which justice is established for the simple reason that God, according to Jesus, is nonviolent. God's power is invitation rather than coercive. Justice is the fruit of compassion. It is the vocation and logical outcome of those who embrace the infinitely loving Spirit's call to abundant life.

Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer
Jesus Against Christianity
Trinity Press International, 2001