Mennonite Weekly Review

Whenever people publicly affirm their dedication to nonviolence, inevitable questions follow: What would you do if your family were attacked? Would you defend an innocent person being harmed by someone else? Depending on how they are asked, these questions can be a kind of taunt. But they also are an opportunity to teach and share deeply held convictions.

In truth, none of us knows what we would do if faced with grave danger or serious threats. We can only hope we would respond as Christ would — with mercy, not vengeance. But falling short of this, is there grace to atone for our failure to love those who would harm us?

Jim Loney would say there is, because he has been its recipient. As one of four Christian Peacemaker Teams activists kidnapped in Iraq on Nov. 26, Loney had his devotion to nonviolence tested as few ever will. It was an agonizing discernment that spanned 118 days filled with uncertainty, fear and, in Loney’s case, the urge to resist his guards and escape, even if it meant he had to compromise his beliefs and seek God’s forgiveness afterward.

“I don’t know what the right or wrong answer is,” Loney said in an April 25 interview (“Hostage Struggled With Desire to Escape,” May 8). “But I felt increasingly that we weren’t going to get out alive unless we took matters into our own hands.”

It would be all too easy for someone who has never experienced such an ordeal to question the depth of Loney’s commitment to nonviolence. Even Loney seemed to question how far he would allow himself to go in trying to escape.

“I was prepared to use some force to get us out, and my limit was avoiding any permanent physical harm,” Loney said. He also explored these broader moral corollaries: “Can even a small amount of force be justified? When does the use of physical force become violence?”

In the end, Loney admitted his dilemma came down to whether he truly could love his captors. “I didn’t like what it was doing to me,” Loney said of this struggle. “I would look at [the kidnappers] and be thinking, ‘This is how I could incapacitate them,’ and then I would think of Jesus’ call to love your enemy, and it just seemed really incongruous. These thoughts interfered with my ability to love them, something which was already hard enough to do.”

This incongruity reflects one of the gospel’s deepest mysteries — how imperfect humans can ever hope to achieve perfect love. The answer is that we can’t. We rely on the grace and unending mercy of God to teach us the fullness of compassion.

Those who view nonviolence — or, for that matter, peacemaking — as naive posturing will not understand this grace or the struggle Loney and his colleagues faced in captivity. To some, only the impossibly holy could hold out against violence with patience and not respond in kind.

But Loney and the other CPTers kidnapped in Iraq had no special holiness. They had only their faith to strengthen them in the darkest moments. If Loney was tempted to respond to his captors with hate — after all, they killed his friend and fellow hostage Tom Fox — he ultimately prevailed over this anger because Christ also faced such temptations.

As it says in Heb. 4:15-16: “But we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are — yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” Mercy and grace were given in abundance to Jim Loney and his friends. May it be as well with all the people of Iraq.