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Fr. Richar Rohr explains that so-called “redemptive violence” usually only perpetuates the cycles of violence Jesus came to stop.

Jesus has no part in any “myth of redemptive violence,” as some have called it, even though redemptive violence is the primary storyline of history, and even much of the Bible (conquering the Promised Land, the wars of the kings of Israel, and the acts of Saul, David, Herod, and the like). Jesus’s story, instead, becomes a pattern of redemptive forgiveness.

Jesus’s life and teaching are starkly opposed to that perennial, universal mistake that is probably happening every three minutes in most human minds and hearts: the instinct to destroy what we perceive as the source of the problem. In that sense, he really is the “Savior of the World” (John 4:42), because that violence is the world’s primary agenda, which he unmasks and then resolves with a quite different agenda. If we do not learn this, it is hard to believe there is much future for the world.

To oppose violence, Jesus has to diminish the very thing that people tend to absolutize, because our absolutes are normally what we use to justify our violence. This is especially true when it comes to group identity. Jesus speaks critically against his own group whenever they try to use his message for oppositional thinking or group arrogance, or to justify violence. How different Christian history would have been had we listened to him!

This is Jesus’s simple message: Holiness is no longer to be found through separation or exclusion, but through the radical inclusion and forgiveness of the supposedly contaminating element. Any exclusionary system only lays the solid foundation for violence in thought, word, and deed. So, he has to lead us on a new path of forgiveness, inclusion, and sacrifice of our self-identity.

What Leviticus 16-27 describes as the “law of holiness”—separation from sinful people, the rejection of certain actions and things—is turned around in Jesus so that the very acts of separation, superiority, and rejection are in fact sins!

I believe Jesus is teaching us that if we put our energy into choosing the good—instead of the negative and largely illusionary energy of rejecting the bad—we will overcome evil in a much better way and will not become evil ourselves. This is exactly what he does on the cross, and I believe it is the heart of his message. At our center in New Mexico, we have taken it as one of our central axioms that “the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.”

More than anything else, this is how Jesus reformed the laws of religion and undercut the basis for all violent, exclusionary, and punitive behavior. He became the forgiving victim so we would stop creating victims ourselves. He became the falsely accused one so we would be careful whom we accuse.

(quoted from Fr. Richard Rohr, the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico)