A Gentle Answer: Our 'Secret Weapon' in an Age of Us Against Them

by Scott Sauls

Jonathan Edwards, taught us that gentleness—he called it “a lamblike, dovelike spirit”—is not an optional extra but instead is “the true and distinguishing disposition of the hearts of Christians.”

gentleness is the most Christian way we can be.

Jesus himself sets the tone for everyone who wants to stop using him and start following him.

“This generation is the first to turn hate into an asset.”

Dr. John Perkins, the eighty-nine-year-old Christian minister and civil rights icon/activist, said these words at a recent leaders’ gathering in Nashville,

Whatever the subject may be—politics,

outright hate increasingly shape our response to the world around us.

John Perkins knows suffering. His mother died when he was a baby. His father abandoned him when he was a child. His brother was killed during an altercation with a Mississippi police officer. As a black man during the civil rights era, he endured beatings and imprisonments and death threats. Since that time, Perkins has faithfully confronted injustice, racism, oppression, and violence while also advocating valiantly for reconciliation, peace, equality, healing, and hope.

If anyone has a right to be bitter, if anyone has a right to turn hate into an asset and use it to his own advantage, it is John Perkins. Yet instead of feeding the cycle of resentment and retaliation, he spends his life preaching against these wrongs while advocating for forgiveness and moving toward enemies in love.

With the moral authority of one who practices what he preaches, Perkins’s life is a sermon that heralds reconciliation and peace between divided people groups. He has built his life upon the belief that his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, has left no option except to advance neighbor-love through the tearing down of what scripture calls “dividing walls of hostility.” This is an essential task for those who identify as followers of Jesus Christ, who laid down his life not only for his friends but also for his enemies.

Jesus is a God of reconciliation and peace, not a God of hate or division or us-against-them (Eph. 2:14–22). He ...

every person bears the image of God and is a carrier of the divine imprint. Because of this, every person is also entitled to being treated with honor, dignity, and respect.

In the end, those who injure become as miserable as those whom they injure.

Those who vandalize someone else’s body, spirit, or good name also vandalize themselves.

The prophetic voice comes from a righteous, Holy Spirit–filled anger that causes Christ’s ambassadors to rise up in the name of love and say, “No more!”

While rising up to advance righteousness, God’s people must also engage the inner battle to “sin not” in their anger

Many of the world’s most important human-rights initiatives—abolishing

have harnessed the energy of righteous anger.

On the other hand, if we are not careful, anger that starts out as righteous can become unrighteous, injurious, and counterproductive to the name and cause of Jesus Christ.

As Bono, the front man for the rock band U2, once said in a concert, “We must be careful in our efforts to confront the monster not to ourselves become the monster.”

While true faith is filled with holy fire, it is a fire that is meant for refining and healing, as opposed to dividing and destroying. If our faith ignites hurt rather than healing upon the bodies, hearts, and souls of other people—even those who treat us unkindly—then something has gone terribly wrong with our faith.

the Bible is careful to warn that all anger, including the constructive righteous kind, should be arrived at slowly and not from a reactive hair trigger. “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger;”

If God’s default response to human offense is to be slow in his anger—even the righteous kind—how much more should this be true of us,

Jesus renounced outrage and advanced the power of a gentle answer throughout his ministry.

Perkins concluded that the best and only way to conquer outrage was with what he called a love that trumps hate.

Perkins wrote in 1976. “And sometimes, it really hurts. But it always brings peace . . . You have to be a bit of a dreamer to imagine a world where love trumps hate—but I don’t think being a dreamer is all that bad . . . I’m an old man, and this is one of my dreams: that my descendants will one day live in a land where people are quick to confess their wrongdoing and forgive the wrongdoing of others and are eager to build something beautiful together.”

To those who are prone to injure, the call is to repent and to engage in the noble work of renouncing hatred and exercising love.

To all of us, the universal call is to lay down our swords, listen, learn from our differences, and build something beautiful.

In our current cultural moment, outrage has become more expected than surprising, more normative than odd, more encouraged than discouraged, more rewarded than rejected.

Outrage has become something we can’t get away from, partly because we don’t seem to want to get away from it.

Instead of getting rid of all bitterness, rage, and anger as scripture urges us to do (Eph. 4:31), we form entire communities around our irritations and our hatreds.

The whole idea of being for something has gone out of style. Instead, we prefer to preach an angry “gospel” about whatever we have decided to stand against.

Outrage sells. For our generation, hate has been commodified. It has been turned into an asset.

Jesus’ gentle answer was bold and costly. His gentle answer included pouring out his lifeblood and dying on the cross. Our gentle answer will be costly as well. We must die to ourselves, to our self-righteousness, to our indignation, and to our outrage. For “whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it”

Because Jesus has covered all of our offenses, we can be among the least offensive and least offended people in the world.

This book is as much about what must happen to us and inside us as it is about what must be done by us to engage faithfully in a world of us-against-them.

In the year 1874, William Gladstone was competing in the election for prime minister of the United Kingdom. Well known among his contemporaries for being a highly capable man by virtue of his sharp wit, expansive knowledge, and decorated track record, Gladstone was a formidable candidate for the role. Yet it was his opponent, Benjamin Disraeli, who seemed to have the endearing edge. What made Disraeli more attractive to some was his widely known and celebrated ability to help people see their own value. While Gladstone had no problem helping people see how important he was as an accomplished man, Disraeli helped people see how important they were. One evening, a woman named Jennie Jerome, famously known as the mother of Sir Winston Churchill, had an opportunity to converse with each of the candidates at a dinner party. When asked by a reporter about the experience and her impression of each of the candidates, she replied, “When I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But when I sat next to Disraeli, I left feeling that I was the cleverest woman.”

one of the most remarkable things about Jesus is his affection for and gentleness toward not the righteous, but sinners;

In Luke’s gospel, for example, tax collectors are mentioned six times—including

in every instance the posture toward them is positive.

The world looks at the likes of Zacchaeus and wants to judge, reprimand, and punish. Jesus, on the other hand, moves toward him, calls him by name, and offers to eat with him. Looking up at this lonely crook, Jesus says, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today” (Luke 19:5).

Jesus and Christianity do not discriminate between good people and bad people. Instead, Jesus and Christianity discriminate between humble people and proud people. “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6).

outsiders and outlaws,

This is the fundamental difference between human religion and Christianity. Whereas human religion puts the likes of Zacchaeus, the greedy CEO, and others like them into the category of “them” or “the bad people,”

I have been told countless times by nonbelieving people that they would never consider becoming Christians because of all the Christians they know who are hypocrites. “So many Christians,” the argument goes, “talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk.” As Huffington Post contributor Francis Maxwell has said, “Ahhh, Christianity in America. Or should I say, the single greatest cause of atheism today. . . . The type of people who acknowledge Jesus with their words, and deny him through their lifestyle.” Citing broad ubiquitous evangelical support of immoral, predatory men who become political candidates and win elections with the widespread support of people who identify as Christian, Maxwell also writes, “It’s okay to prey as long as you pray.”

Christ did not come into the world to affirm and accept the good people, but rather to rescue and receive the people who are not good.

hypocrisy in no way negates Christianity, but rather establishes it.

if we pastors were required to live without hypocrisy in every area about which we presumed to speak, we would have nothing left to preach.

“Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke

This movement of Jesus toward Zacchaeus—before Zacchaeus does anything good or does anything for Jesus—is another feature of Christ that sets him apart from every other religious leader, philosopher, politician, or self-help guru. Jesus—like the Christian faith he came to establish—says to Zacchaeus and to every other person, “You belong even before you come to believe.”