While we Christians have long argued that our religion is primarily about peace, in practice we have frequently fallen short. The recent surge to power of White Christian Nationalism in the USA is a prime example of people professing to be Christians but rejecting Christ’s calls to peace. As a former parishioner of mine once said to me back during my parish ministry days, “Pastor, I don’t go for that turn-the-other-cheek stuff.”

Priest, activist, and Nobel Peace Prize-nominee Father John Dear, in The Gospel of Peace: A Commentary on Matthew, Mark, and Luke from the Perspective of Nonviolence, challenges us Christians to embrace the message of nonviolence that he sees in the Synoptics. Dear draws from Gandhi and King, both of whom regarded Jesus as quintessentially nonviolent. King taught that Jesus was a “practical realist” (xviii) who did not offer some idealistic portrait of a better life but a strategy for engaging in acts of nonviolence against social injustice. Dear sees in the Synoptics “the God of peace” as not a wrathful, violent deity but as one insisting on nonviolence. Dear defines “nonviolence” as not merely the absence of physical violence but as an understanding rooted in the belief that all life is sacred and that we are all children of the God of peace. Therefore, it would be wrong to kill or harm another human being. Indeed, nonviolence is based on the belief that, not just humanity, but all of creation is one. This holistic understanding of nonviolence, which we see in King and Gandhi, requires nonviolence to the self, all people, all creatures, and the planet, as well as being part of movements against nonviolence around the world. True nonviolence, the kind that King, Gandhi, and Jesus teach, must involve all these components.

Dear then makes his way through each of the Synoptics, highlighting in passage after passage how Jesus promoted this holistic understanding of nonviolence. Overall, Dear makes a strong case for this understanding of the Synoptics. Then again, that Jesus was a champion of nonviolence is not a new argument, but perhaps it is a message we need to hear anew.

At the same time, it seems that Dear sees nonviolence in Jesus where it is questionable that Jesus is actually behaving nonviolently. For instance, Dear argues that Jesus’s cleansing of the Temple is nonviolent because he doesn’t hurt or kill anyone, as if turning over tables and driving people and animals out does not constitute a violent act. Of course, overall, Jesus was indeed nonviolent, but to see the cleansing of the Temple as a nonviolent act seems a stretch. Certainly, if one of us went into a house of worship and started knocking things over and driving people out, we would be accused of violence.

That said, Dear offers inspiration and guidance in his commentary that, I hope, people actually pay attention to and put into practice, going for that turn-the-other-cheek stuff.