Jesus was a practitioner of non-violence. So why do so many turn the words of the Prince of Peace into a call to arms? As an advocate for gun violence prevention efforts, I receive many emails, Facebook comments, and Tweets from those who make comments along the line of these:

God does give us the right to defend ourselves and our family and our communities. And Jesus did tell his diciples to sell some possessions and buy swords. Sell your cloak & buy a sword. Look it up in the Bible. Guns have surpassed swords & cloaks ain't worth what they used to be worth, so modern updates are needed - for women too since they get to vote. Domestic violence? Stay armed & everyone stays polite.😎

Does God actually want an armed civilization? To start with, I’m in agreement with the National Council of Churches in Christ USA:

It is difficult to imagine that the One whose own Passion models the redemptive power of non-violence would look favorably on the violence of contemporary U.S. society. Present-day violence is made far worse than it otherwise would be by the prevalence of weapons on our streets.

The passage that is brought up so often in which Jesus asks his disciples to buy swords – Luke 22:36 – is one nearly always taken out of context. Here is the text:

He said to them, ‘But now, the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one.

So, is Jesus pro-sword? The sword Jesus spoke of was most likely a tool, not a weapon. Even so, when only two were obtained, not enough to defend the disciples, Jesus declares two are enough.

Daniel Howell, a professor of biology and anatomy coordinator in the department of biology at Liberty University, thinks Jesus would want you to have a gun. He wrote in 2015:

It is sometimes claimed that Jesus never told his followers to arm themselves, but that is patently untrue. In Luke 22:36, Jesus told his disciples to buy themselves swords even if they had to sell their cloaks to afford them. Of course, the sword was the “arms” of their day, as the gun is for us today. The disciples possessed two swords and Peter used one of them to injure a man when Jesus was being arrested.

The logic of Professor Howell is a bit difficult to follow. He might teach at a Christian university – Jerry Falwell’s Christian university – but his exegesis of the text is very poor (worth remembering he teaches biology and not theology, I suppose). Guns are not the same as swords, try using a sword from the time of Jesus in a mass shooting, and to try and apply Jesus’ teaching here is nothing more than proof-texting.

In the story of Jesus’ betrayal at Gethsemane, one of the disciples does turn a weapon on those who come to arrest Jesus. Here is text in Luke that follows the oft-recited 22:36 verse:

47 While he was still speaking, suddenly a crowd came, and the one called Judas, one of the twelve, was leading them. He approached Jesus to kiss him; 48but Jesus said to him, ‘Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?’ 49When those who were around him saw what was coming, they asked, ‘Lord, should we strike with the sword?’ 50Then one of them struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his right ear. 51But Jesus said, ‘No more of this!’ And he touched his ear and healed him.

Again, as is his custom, Jesus rebukes those that employ violence. Jesus believed that violence was cyclical and that in using violence against oppression we become the oppressor. Above, one of the comments made to me via Facebook argues that God would support a right to self-defense. I’ll not take issue with that. If my family were in danger, I would defend them. I also recognize that having a gun in a house dramatically increases the possibility someone in the home will become a victim of gun violence, through suicide, accident, or in a firefight.

God would forgive us, I am sure if we sought to protect our family from danger. Nonetheless, when Jesus was threatened with death and violence, he molded for us what God wanted: non-violence.

Walter Wink wrote:

There are good reasons for reluctance to champion nonviolence. The term itself is negative. It sounds like a not-doing, the putting of all one’s energy into avoiding something bad rather than throwing one’s total being into doing something good.

Passivity is not what Jesus taught. What he taught was counter-cultural, even today, and radical: what Wink calls a “third way of militant nonviolence.” The Civil Rights Movement in the United States, embodied by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (who once owned guns but later said “I was much more afraid in Montgomery when I had a gun in my house. When I decided that I couldn’t keep a gun, I came face-to-face with the question of death and I dealt with it. From that point on, I no longer needed a gun nor have I been afraid.”), practiced such non-violence, and there was nothing passive about that movement.

As a minister in the United Church of Christ, I try and emulate the life of Jesus (often poorly, I’ll admit). Jesus does not want us to put trust in guns; Jesus wants us to put faith in God. The well-armed society in the United States has led to what Jesus warned about: cycles of violence that seem never-ending. We must use the tools of our democracy to push legislation that values human life. I am convinced that the NRA, and other groups like them, value the profit of gun sales over the lives of school children, worshippers, or those just seeing a movie or shopping at the mall. There are many steps we can take, including banning assault weapons, to create a more peaceable society.