Nonviolent Resistance of the Saints

In the Oscar-winning film “I’m Still Here,” we witness the resilience and endurance of Eunice Paiva, the wife of a disappeared politician under Brazil’s military dictatorship. Rubens Paiva was a Congressman when the military overthrew the government in 1964. He returned to his previous career as an engineer but helped smuggle letters to relatives of regime opponents. Members of the Brazilian military descended upon his home in Rio de Janeiro and imprisoned him, along with Eunice Paiva. And, like so many people taken and killed by the military dictatorship—he disappeared. Eunice was released after several days, returning to her shaken family, but Rubens was never heard from again, nor was any official information provided about his whereabouts or fate. Whispers from a journalist friend pointed to the obvious—that the state murdered Rubens. Eunice held her family together, advocated for twenty-five years until after the eventual re-emergence of democracy, until she finally received the official death certificate. It’s a harrowing and simultaneously beautiful movie about the story of one woman’s slow and persistent resistance and one family’s loving endurance amid authoritarian rule.

The Brazilian military initiated a coup d’etat after President Goulart introduced sweeping reforms aimed at helping the poor. Policies like land reform that redistributed unused rural land to peasants were deemed by the Brazilian right-wing as “communist-inspired,” and the military took action. The United States was right there, ready to aid the military coup, with a mission that would have lent U.S. Navy and Air Force officers to the cause named “Operation Brother Sam.” The military takeover was not opposed, and the U.S. did not implement its secret operation.

I’m thinking these days about the United States’s long collusion with dictators in Latin America, from its readiness to participate in the Brazilian coup to the CIA-involved Chilean overthrow, friendly relations with dictator Augusto Pinochet, and many more. The disappearances that happened in Brazil and elsewhere are now starting in my own country. Instead of the scapegoating category of communism and the “red scare,” it is now terrorism, “support for Hamas,” and an imagined immigrant crime problem.

Palestinian activist Mahmoud Kahlil is a legal resident of the United States with a green card who led nonviolent actions opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza at Columbia University. Now he sits in an ICE detention center in Louisiana. The list is growing.

Coverage in Democracy Now and The New York Times tells me the following. Georgetown professor Badar Khan Suri—who studies and teaches about religion and peace—is not an activist. Still, Homeland Security agents raided his home in Virginia, arrested him without cause, and now he, too, sits in a (different) Louisiana ICE detention center. Momodou Taul is a PhD student at Cornell University and a pro-Palestinian activist facing deportation. This week, Homeland Security agents apprehended Tufts student Rumeysa Oztur. She is a Turkish citizen in the United States on a student visa who was on her way to a dinner to break her Ramadan fast. She signed an op-ed that criticized Tufts for failing to acknowledge the Palestinian genocide. The reason Homeland Security provided for terminating her visa? That she had engaged in activities in support of Hamas.

Here is a call for the nonviolent resistance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and hold fast to the faith of Jesus. —Revelation 14:12

The readers of John’s apocalyptic vision lived under an imperial state: the Roman Empire. They were very familiar with the imperial tactics of disappearances, erosion of civil liberties, persecution, and imprisonment. The South African theologian Allan Boesak considers Revelation a subversive book—the critique of unjust power in the book is so symbolically incisive that it became underground literature:

Because of their political perception and challenge in such dangerous times, these [apocalyptic] books could not be written in the “normal” way. Any person who has ever lived under political oppression, where every move is watched and every word carefully weighed and where every other person could be an informer, knows this.… These books were, in the real sense of the word, underground protest literature.

John uses a word to encourage his readers-hearers to continue in faithful resilience: hypomone. It’s often translated as “patient endurance.” But a commentator I trust named Brian Blount says that the Greek is much more active and determined than passive waiting. He renders it instead as “nonviolent resistance.”

In the cascade of visions in Revelation, here’s a quick summary of where we’ve been around chapter 14. In chapter 13, readers witness beastly monsters: a dragon, a sea beast, and a land beast, all symbolizing structures of evil and oppressive imperial power. Rome is writ large in metaphor and archetype.

The Beasts are Rising

The beast's followers even have their bodily brand of 666, a tricky linguistic way to refer to the Roman emperor. At the beginning of chapter 14, we see the Christ-Lamb standing on the sacred mountain of Zion. The followers of Christ-Lamb, too, have their own brand, with God’s name written on their foreheads.

The Temple Within and the Fight Without

Then, John gives us three angels flying and heralding the good news (14:6) of divine love and justice, which is always true, and the terrible news that divine judgment is coming. (Much more on this in future weeks). John lists some of the horrible things that will happen—fire, sulfur, and the like—and then provides his pastoral clarity: Here is a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and hold fast to the faith of Jesus.

The endurance John calls Revelation readers to is not passive withdrawal. It is faith-filled nonviolent resistance. When John uses the word hypomone, he links it to faith. The faith he has in mind is inherently political. It is faith that God holds reality with love, justice, and peace, even when we can’t perceive it. It is faith that the realm of Jesus Christ will last and the rule of empires and power-hungry leaders will pass away. But this resistance is fiercely embodied and, to quote Blount quoting another scholar, involves “unbending determination, an iron will, the capacity to endure persecution, torture, and death without yielding one’s faith. It is one of the fundamental attributes of nonviolent resistance.” This resistance is revealed in the tenacious patience and courage of Eunice and Ruebens Paiva, the determined resolve of civil rights organizers like Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin, climate organizers like Greta Thunberg and the Sunrise Movement, democracy-defenders in courts and communities across the United States, and those decrying the genocide in Gaza like Mahmoud Kahlil.

There is the fierce side of “nonviolent resistance,” but there is also the patient side of enduring. The endurance John of Patmos counsels is not only for activists. It is for those who, in small and large, ordinary and extraordinary actions, live their lives with the faith that oppression and evil do not have the last word. I often experience my meditation sits as “patient endurance.” I’m not solving anything when I sit in silence, nor am I succeeding at anything. Contemplative prayer is an exercise in failure by any measurable standards. But it’s also the place where I bring my powerlessness, my cries, and my personal and political pain to God. Like the cyclist or runner, I’m training. Somehow, the act of prayer day in and day out trains me to remember and participate in a deeper reality. Contemplative practice sustains me in a trust that reality is far more expansive and truth far more piercing than authoritarians would have us believe.

Photo by Luca J on Unsplash

It’s time to cry out to God, to our legislators and to anyone who will listen. I recommend reading this thoughtful Substack post by Cameron Bellm about the necessity of crying out prayerfully at this time. All of us are asked to do what we can to edge us collectively toward greater love, compassion, liberation, peace, and community. The diversity of our actions will mirror the diversity of who we are.