On this Good Friday, as we commemorate Jesus’ cross amidst imperial resurgence and war, I offer this excerpt from Who Will Roll Away the Stone: Discipleship Queries for First World Christians (Orbis, 1994), pp 251f, 267.
Mark’s invitation to “take up the cross” (Mk 8:34) is the central characteristic of discontinuity with the Domination system.
“Whosever would”–this is one of Jesus’ few universal prerequisites for discipleship.
We must deny the self that is protected by the gun and its myths, and experiement with satyagraha. Some Christians in the locus imperii understand this in terms of a “vow” of nonviolence resistance as a way of life.
Resistance is how the community of discontinuity remains “sober” and how it “intervenes” in the dysfunctional and addictive system.
It is how we “defend” the political body against pathology and “offend” the pathological body politic.
These represent the two basic trajectories of nonviolence: the struggle to remain “disarmed” on one hand, and “militatn” on the other. Both are equally necessary for a “peace church.”
…We First World Christians need far more character and courage if we are to practice the somatic politics to which Jesus calls us, and for which history waits.
Ched Myers 