“See, Lord, here are two swords”

Luke 22:38

As Christians, we don’t respond to our enemies with swords any more. Rather, we respond with acts of love. Nowhere is this truth demonstrated than the time the detachment from the high priest came to arrest Jesus (Lk. 22:47-53).

At the end of His conversation with the disciples in the upper room, Jesus spoke about the condition of the disciples after His ascension. He had been their sufficiency, and they lacked nothing. But now they needed to prepare for life without His physical presence (v.36). Peter may have misunderstood Him. Maybe buying swords for themselves was the Master’s call to arms against the Roman government. He is the people’s Messiah after all. The much-anticipated revolution had finally come. So, Peter carried his sword into the Garden of Gethsemane. But, why didn’t Jesus tell Peter to put his sword away before the garden incident? Afterall, He knew what Peter would do with it, didn’t He?

This question strikes the heart of everyone who goes through suffering of some kind. Unfortunately, no answer has sufficiently satisfied the aggrieved, so I don’t intend to engage it here. I can only state the fact that God has a purpose for everything.

In the issues of swords in the Upper Room, the Master teacher certainly had a purpose for allowing Peter to carry the sword into Gethsemane – to use it as a picture lesson to all of us (v.38).

When the aggressors finally showed up, Peter may not have been shocked. His Master was under attack, and he felt compelled to strike back the way he knew best – eye for eye, tooth for tooth. The world’s protocol is to meet violence with violence. That’s self-defense, and it showed strength. God had allowed it from antiquity for a season until now. As Jesus said about the question of divorce, it was “because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning” (Matt. 19:8).

In the realm of King Jesus, it’s no more the letter of the law, but the heart of it. God’s answer to the wickedness of this world is not retribution, but love (Jn. 3:16). When He espoused on how His disciples should respond to their enemies, Jesus said we should love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matt. 5:44). We should feed them when they are hungry. That’s radically opposite the world’s way. Nobody feeds his enemy when they’re hungry. You leave them to stew in it to send a lesson. But now Jesus is teaching something different that doesn’t reveal strength. Rather, it displays the highest form of weakness. Peter had this worldly mindset when he cut off the ear of Marcus.

“No more of this!” Jesus said. And He practically illustrated His radical teaching. He touched the ear of Marcus and restored it (Lk. 22:51).

What love! What a picture of the new way He came to show us – a revelation of God’s heart for the world.

Do you live this way as His disciples?