The Greater Jihad

Lead on King Eternal, the day of march has come

Henceforth in fields of conquest Thy tents shall be our home

Through days of preparation, Thy grace hath made us strong

And now O King Eternal we lift our battle song. 

Many of the hymns of my childhood shared a common theme—we Christian believers are at war and must be prepared to do battle at any moment. From “Lead On, O King Eternal” and “Onward Christian Soldiers” through “Soldiers of Christ, Arise,” to “Who is On the Lord’s Side?” I learned a spiritual vocabulary of aggression, violence and warfare. I was never clear about exactly who we were supposed to be fighting or how to recognize the enemy, but I knew I had been drafted into an army, whether I liked it or not. And in the more than six decades of my life, world events have regularly made it clear that religion and aggression, faith and violence, often go hand in hand.

In the Gospel of Luke, James and John, known as “the sons of thunder,” have this sort of thing in mind when they ask Jesus for permission to call fire down from heaven to consume the Samaritan town that refuses to put Jesus up on his way to Jerusalem. It is no surprise that Samaritans would turn Jesus away, because the center of Samaritan religious worship was in Samaria, not in Jerusalem where Jesus was going, as it was for Jews. Samaritans and Jews then were as different as Catholics and Unitarians today, as different as Sunnis and Shi’ites. James and John want to kick ass and take names, all in the interest of spreading the word that the Messiah has come and if you don’t like it or believe it, watch out! But Jesus won’t let them do it; he even “rebukes them” for thinking of such a thing. And the disciples, even those in his inner circle, are confused yet again. If you have the power to establish the truth and eliminate those who won’t follow it, why not use that power?

A book I recently finished reading for the second time, Stephanie Saldana’s The Bread of Angels published in 2010, places the reader in the middle of such questions. Saldana’s book is a memoir of the year that she spent from September 2004 to September 2005 on a Fulbright scholarship in Damascus, Syria studying Arabic. It would be another five or six years before the current civil war in Syria that has claimed over 100,000 lives to date would erupt, but Syria in the early years of the twenty-first century, as it had been for decades, was a place of both religious and political tension. These tensions were heightened by the fact that Stephanie’s home country, the United States, had invaded Syria’s neighbor to the east, Iraq, just a few short months prior to her arrival in Damascus.

Stephanie lives in the Christian section of the Old City of Damascus, surrounded by Arabs who follow the liturgical rites of the oldest known form of Christianity, but her daily walks across the city place her in contact with the predominantly Muslim working urban class. She particularly befriends Mohammed, who keeps a carpet shop and looks like Groucho Marx. Although his carpets are extraordinarily beautiful, often the product of his own painstaking restoration, business is slow and his shop is almost always empty. In response to Stephanie’s sympathetic concerns, Mohammed tells her a story.

When the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, was returning from battle, he stopped on the top of a hill before entering the city. He turned to his companions and he said “Now we return from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad.” Do you know what that means, Stephanie? The lesser jihad, the jihad of holy war, is simply to fight in a military battle. But the greater jihad is to work all day repairing carpets without any new business. It is to feed your family. The greater jihad, Stephanie, is just to live.

In Arabic the word “jihad,” so frightening to many non-Muslim Westerners, simply means “struggle.” The point of Mohammed’s story—told from within the context of a religion that shares a history of violence and warfare with Christianity—is that the greatest struggle of the life of faith is not winning converts or defending one’s beliefs against those with whom one disagrees. The greater struggle of faith is worked out in the daily grind—the struggle of weaving divine threads into the often mundane tapestry of a particular human life. As a novice monk tells Stephanie toward the end of her book, “Resurrection is not an event in the past, but a concrete reality, something we look for every day.” So where is this concrete reality to be found? How are we to participate in the greater jihad of faith?

A familiar passage from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians provides a direction. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.” At first read, these characteristics are not particularly remarkable, certainly not as attention-getting as the gifts of the Spirit—tongues, interpretation, prophecy, healing, and the like—that Paul lists elsewhere. Jeanne pointed out to me the other day that while the gifts of the Spirit direct attention to the person with the gift, the fruits of the spirit are directed outward away from the person exemplifying the fruit. Love, generosity, kindness—these are expressed toward others, channeling divine energy away from oneself into the world. And note that these are the fruits of the Spirit.

A tree does not expend extraordinary effort or grit its leafy teeth or work overtime to produce fruit. A tree’s fruit is the natural result of health, growth, maturity, and time. These fruits cannot be rushed—often waiting and silence are the best incubators. The greater jihad cannot be won as one might win a battle or war; it must be lived. As the great thirteenth-century Muslim poet and mystic Rumi wrote, “If you want to witness the resurrection, then be it.” Energized by the fruits of the spirit, the life of faith introduces the kingdom of God into the world.

Lead on, O King Eternal, till sin’s fierce war shall cease

And holiness shall whisper the sweet amen of peace

For not with swords loud clashing, nor roll of stirring drum

But deeds of love and mercy thy heavenly kingdom comes.