Retaliation and violence are at the top of our minds today. It can feel like we are in a moment when violence is allowed, perhaps even normalized, from the level of nations and politics to our own relationships and the way we interact with each other.
A biblical example of a violent culture and the desire for retaliation can be found in Jonah:
“But it greatly displeased Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, ‘Please, Lord, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore, in order to forestall this, I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, and abundant in lovingkindness, One who relents concerning calamity’” (4:1–2).
Jonah is angry because God is not angry. The word “anger” is used six times in this chapter.
The Ninevites are horrifically violent, and Jonah is angry with good reason. He wants them to experience divine justice. He wants retaliation. He wants punishment. But he also understands that God is generous and kind. So Jonah flees, worried that God will show mercy rather than judgment. Then he waits east of the city to see if Nineveh will be punished.
In other words, Jonah becomes evil because of their evil. He is infected by the same supervirus.
Jonah’s sitting east of the city is symbolic. In Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve were sent out from the garden, angelic cherubim with flaming swords were set as guards east of the garden. Jonah finds himself exiled from life, as it were, by his own anger. It is an ironic callback to Genesis 3.
Too often, we falsely believe that people who resort to violence and retaliation have some sort of evil inside of them. But the Scriptures show us that at the root of anger, violence, and retaliation lies a kind of twisted longing for justice. The ones who inflict violence do so because they feel righteous. They feel that they are the mediators of God’s justice.
This is how retaliation distorts us. Sin is an illegitimate way of meeting legitimate needs. In our longing for justice, we may choose to address that legitimate need in illegitimate ways. One illegitimate way is through retaliation and violence. Violence is not usually motivated by a simple desire to do evil. Those who perpetrate violence often believe they are not the perpetrator. They believe they are the victim, and it is victims who feel they must perpetrate violence to stop the cycle of violence.
Jonah shows this clearly. He believes his desire to perpetrate violence is because he himself was violated. He believes himself to be the victim, not the perpetrator, yet he is the one sitting east of the city waiting for God’s fire to rain down on the Ninevites.
Psychologist Tage Rai and anthropologist and psychologist Alan Fiske explored this dynamic in their book Virtuous Violence. After studying many forms of violence across cultures and history, they found that people often support or engage in violence because they believe it is morally required. Violence does not always stem from a lack of morality. It can come from the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations.
This helps explain how violence, disregard, othering, and dehumanizing can grow not only from evil, but from a distorted longing for justice.
I have started running with my dog, and I carry an electronic dog whistle. It is a battery-powered device that you point at an animal to disrupt negative behavioral patterns, such as lunging at other dogs. But in one area where I run, many dogs are off-leash, in spite of the leash law. When they approach my dog, and my dog feels threatened, I feel just and righteous. I want to point the whistle, not at my dog, but at the other dogs. The owners will not even know what is happening, because they cannot hear the whistle. They are the ones violating the leash laws of the city, and I am the compliant one. It is my moral, ethical, and justice instinct that causes me to believe I must train all the dogs.
It is easy to recognize the impulse. We want to retaliate. We need to retaliate. We should retaliate. It is our moral duty.
Terrence Real describes this as “offending from the victim position.” In that stance, a person thinks, “If you hit me, I get to hit you back twice as hard with no shame or compunction, because, after all, I’m your victim.” Whenever we offend from the victim position, we wind up in the absurd position of being perpetrators who feel victimized even as we attack.
This is the heart of retaliation: almost all perpetrators see themselves as victims. We might assume that those who lash out feel powerful and dominant, but many feel, in that moment, that they are the wronged party. Someone has betrayed them, abandoned them, or assaulted them first. Violence at all levels is fueled by the righteous anger of the victim, and standing up to our thirst for revenge, no matter how justified it might feel, is a large part of learning to live nonviolent lives.
Oddly enough, underneath our desire to retaliate, there may be a buried desire to heal. Retaliation may represent a distorted wish to make the one who hurt us feel what they made us feel so that they might understand and be accountable. But retaliation cannot heal what has been broken. It can only continue the cycle.
As Christians, we are called to understand that this is the gospel: Christ, who knew no sin, became sin. He stopped the cycle. He absorbed it into himself, putting an end to our need to retaliate. He channeled that energy and turned it, flipping it from retaliation to reconciliation. This is the ministry Christians are called to: moving from retaliation toward reconciliation. He paid the ultimate price for righteousness and justice. He satisfied our ancient longing so that we can be called forth into a brighter light than the one we are trying to shed through retaliation and violence.
Each of us is capable of being both victim and perpetrator, and so is the person we oppose. Who will save us from the cycle of moralism and finger-pointing? The cry of the criminal, whether the criminal knows it or not, is for Christ. The cry of the righteous, whether named or unnamed, is for Christ. Only Christ can save the victim from the perpetrator and the perpetrator from himself.
This is the ministry of reconciliation: not denying the need for justice, but refusing the false righteousness that allows our anger to make us more like what we oppose. Rejecting retaliation does not mean ignoring harm, minimizing injustice, or refusing accountability. It means refusing to let the pursuit of justice turn us into mirrors of the violence we condemn. To follow Christ is to repent not only of our badness, but also of the goodness we use to justify retaliation, and to commit ourselves to the ministry, not of retaliation but reconciliation.
This article is adapted from a sermon delivered by Peter Sung at Newport Covenant Church in Bellevue, Washington. This is part of our ongoing “From the Pulpit” series, where we share inspiring messages from the Covenant community.
