In 2016, a conservative Christian friend reluctantly voted for Donald Trump, despite her personal dislike for him, out of a long-held allegiance to Republican ideas and pro-life commitments. Now, as a matter of conscience, she cannot vote for him again. She aligns with the objections to his presidency made by other Christians like Mark Galli, the former editor of Christianity Today, who argued that “no matter how many hands we win in this political poker game, we are playing with a stacked deck of gross immorality and ethical incompetence.” However, her Christian community — mostly white and middle class, a fact which aligns with polls that indicate over 80% of white evangelical Protestants plan to vote for Trump again — continues to justify their support for the president, arguing that though he is not perfect he will give them the conservative judges and policies they have wanted for so long. They are still playing the game to win with the same stacked deck.

Now, with the balance of the Supreme Court leaning strongly to the right for the next generation or more, their moral compromise with the man who tipped his hand from the outset when he said, while still a candidate, that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose any voters,” appears justified. Because what they are getting in return for their loyalty is what Trump promised in that very same speech: “Christianity will have power.”

Watching other Christians support Trump now, my friend said, feels like she is watching Peter cut off Malchus’ ear. I had not thought of the story of Peter and Malchus* in a long time but the recognition I felt in her analogy is visceral. Like Peter, blindly wielding a sword to power his way to the kingdom of God, Christians who support Trump have chosen their preferred weapon in their fight for their Christian vision. And their sword is Donald Trump.

At first glance, the story is a straightforward lesson in non-violent resistance. The short version of this lesson is: A disciple or follower of Jesus maims the slave of the high priest, apparently believing he is defending his teacher. Jesus chastises him and orders him to put down his sword, thereby revealing a fundamental misunderstanding between disciple and teacher. Jesus admonishes the crowd that has come to arrest him but nevertheless peaceably surrenders even while his disciples flee in fear. Even the writer of the “Ethics and War in Comparative Religious Study” in The U.S. Army College Guide to National Security Issues saw its value when they included a lengthy exegesis of the varying Gospel accounts of Jesus’ arrest as primary source documents for the pacifist roots of Christianity. However, upon closer reading, the story begins to tilt out of reach. The story retains its non-violent heart but the path towards arrival feels further away than when you. Yet, by the end you feel compelled to continue to reach for it. 

To begin with, three of the four gospels leave the attacker and victim unnamed, including the writer of Mark who stays characteristically hazy and weird about the whole incident like a bad witness to a crime telling the vaguest version possible — someone cut off someone’s ear — and then inexplicably ending the story with an anecdote about how this one guy had to run away naked. Perhaps the writer of Mark knew better than the others to not even try to cleanly package the disorienting strangeness of this story. Or perhaps the Gospel writers knew it did not matter to name those involved as it could have been anybody, any of us, in other words.

By tradition, however, Peter is the named aggressor. Ultimately, despite this and through a path of reconciliation that extends beyond his denial of Jesus, Jesus’ death, and experienced resurrection, he becomes a leader and hero of the movement. By contrast, there is Malchus, the one whom Peter aggresses upon. He is the victim but not the hero. After all, he came to arrest Jesus with an armed crowd.

However, Malchus was a doulos, or slave, to Caiaphas, the high priest of the Temple. There is little I can say about Malchus in the particular as he does not have a biographical footprint in the New Testament except that we are told he had at least one other family member who was also a doulos to the high priest (John 18:26) and who had been with him in the olive grove to witness the altercation between Malchus and Peter. We meet Malchus’ relative as he tries to warm himself over a shared fire in the cold open air, a simple detail which gives sensory testimony to the feeling that this is a family, at least two members deep, held in poverty and bondage, to the house of the high priest.

Since the occupation of Judea by Rome, the high priest had become a puppet of Roman interests in the guise of religious vestments. According to Reza Aslan in his book, Zealot, “Rome even kept custody of the high priest’s sacred garments, handing them out only on the sacred festivals and feast days and confiscating them immediately after the ceremonies were complete.” This modicum of religious freedom was bestowed by the captor to the captive in exchange for taxation and deference to Rome and help in keeping law and order, including the religious policing of insurrection against the emperor. But the co-opting of Temple life by its occupiers was a distressing and intolerable reality for many Jews and the source of long-standing sectarian disagreement and conflict.

It is important to name Roman interference and control that hangs over the Gospels like a guard’s watchtower. Without doing so, zeroing in on Malchus’ role or the high priest in this story is risky. Because even approaching by inches the broader religio-political conflict that results in Jesus’ death and of which Malchus is a cog in the machine, it is important to remember: there are no Christians in the story of Jesus. Jesus’ own teachings and ethics were deeply grounded in his life and faith as a Jew and birthed out of a long, continuous tradition of Hebrew prophets preaching love and justice. His life and death occurred inside the complexity of Jewish history unfolding in manifold directions during a time of intense suffering and oppression under the rule of Roman empire.

Therefore, it would be irresponsible and dangerous to consider the events around Jesus’ death without also contextualizing those gospel accounts as commentary within a deepening intra-Jewish conflict that, in time, ruptured into full schism and anti-Jewish rhetoric by the early Christian Church and, ultimately, outright anti-semitism. Nearly two millennia of unforgivable atrocities against the Jewish people have ideological roots in a shallow and uncritical reading of the Gospels, Christian arrogance and amnesia about Jesus’ Jewishness, and easy acquiescence to the power of empire. So when I bring attention to Malchus being a slave to the high priest, I am not making a comment on Malchus’ Jewishness. I am highlighting his servitude — and in less obvious ways, the state of his master’s servitude, too. Malchus did lose an ear but, more importantly, he had already lost his freedom to powers that were also not free. This was empire working at every level, no matter how small.

That Malchus did not also lose his life that night is an amazing detail of this story. Simon Peter was a fisherman, after all, and unless he was developing master swordsman skills during his rare hour of free time between subsistence fishing and discipling within the fraught realities of life in an occupied territory, it is unbelievable he would have landed that blow with anything but the strangest of luck. However, assuming one could land the sword through ear flesh like William Tell’s arrow through the apple, then why in the name of all things holy would you use that lethal precision to aim for a slave’s ear? Why, in defending your leader from imminent arrest and execution, would you attack the one who had no power to change that reality? What was Peter even fighting for when he picked up the sword?

The common re-telling of Malchus’ story involves Jesus miraculously re-attaching his ear before the authorities arrest him. But this version of events is only accounted for in the Gospel of Luke. In the other gospels, Jesus does not make any apparent move to heal him. I do not try to iron out the difference between gospels on this point. Rather, I imagine Malchus lives on in two universes: one in which his ear was healed, the other in which it was not. If you follow Malchus, the story turns like prism across the pages, colors of meaning shifting with the light and the parable opens like a kaleidoscope.

In one universe, Malchus is likely ordered, as a doulos, to march down with the crowd down to the olive grove to arrest another alleged insurrectionist, one of those self-proclaimed “King of the Jews” threatening Judea’s tenuous stability and safety under the rule of Rome. And it turns out, this rebel was, in fact, dangerous because one of his followers, some brute with a sword, attacked Malchus and cut off his ear. The insurrectionist did nothing to stop him and instead made a glib comment to the crowd: “Am I leading a rebellion that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me?” As indicated by his missing ear, yes, yes, he was. As a result, he feels no pity or Jesus when he hears the details of his crucifixion the next day. Instead, he goes back to his life, the one first marked by slavery, the second marked by the maiming of his body at the hands of a follower of Jesus. There was, in loved experience, no difference between them.

In the other universe, Jesus heals Malchus. A criminal to be executed by the Roman state heals him, a slave. I imagine in this universe that when Malchus hears the details of Jesus’ execution — details that are all too familiar to him in the era of Roman occupation — he feels a grief and an agitation overtake him. Another wrongly convicted man who will be tortured and executed by the Roman state revealed a healing power unmatched by empire. The healing of violence done against his body heals something within. As a result, he can no longer abide any inner alignment with the outer circumstances of his slavery.

Of course, when my conservative Christian friend returned this story to my consciousness, she in no way meant for me to universe-split the story and take the poetic license that I am. For her, Malchus was healed. Full stop. She sees this story as a historical account in a way that I do not and this means we read scripture in profoundly different ways. However, despite our theological differences, my friend and I both see deeper wisdom in this story that bridges that distance. We both believe there is healing power in this story that it is not only about an ear.

Part of the tragicomedy of this story, however, is that no one understands Jesus — neither his followers or his opponents. So I must submit that neither my friend or I fully understand and that even as I stake my own political position in this election season I am reminded by this story that you can believe you are in a righteous fight and yet be the farthest away from understanding what and who you are fighting for.

In Matthew, Jesus responds to his followers: “Put your sword back in its place…for all who draw the sword will die by the sword,” And in Luke, Jesus simply commands: “No more of this.” Jesus’ disciples do not know what to do with this command and they flee, likely for their lives. I can only imagine their bafflement and confusion, too, because just a few hours before at their last meal together, Jesus had commanded them: “If you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one,” (Luke 22:36). The disciples respond that they have two swords and Jesus responds, mysteriously: “That is enough!” Two swords could not have possibly been enough to power their way to victory. But in good faith, Peter tried with one and Jesus shut him down. What madness was Jesus preaching that he would command them to carry swords but not use them?

To be honest, it is hard to not want to reach for some kind of sword now, to cut through the noise and chaos of this time. Though I can hear Jesus’ words to carry the sword yet not live by it, I feel my hand reach for it when I see Christians in my own circle unquestioningly supporting a man who weaponizes words, destroys civic trust, endangers public well-being, and makes a mockery of their own sacred values because they think the ends will justify the means. And under the rolling waves of heartbreaking news, the incessant world-ending losses, the mind-numbing isolation and debilitating grief that millions of Americans are bearing up under right now, I understand all of us would wish for a magic weapon to reach for right now, to cut through the chaos to find peace. But if we had such a weapon, all we would see is millions of swords raised, each thinking one was fighting for a better world to come, many of those voices shouting in unison: “Christianity will have power.” And all we would manage is mutually guaranteed self-destruction.

Cornel West writes in Democracy Matters, “To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely — to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.”

The power in Christianity is not given by presidents or credentialed by judges or fought for by the sword. Rather, Christianity’s greatest power is found on a terrifyingly undefended path of Love. Neither disengaged from the world or weaponized against it, the Christian path requires a response to the revolutionary mandate of healing and liberation yet not pick up the sword.

When I was about twelve years old, I learned about blasphemy. I was going through a bratty pre-pubescent phase and one day I heard the hymn “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord” and shot back some glib comment about how that was a stupid question because of course I hadn’t been there when they crucified Jesus. Shocked and dismayed by my comment, my mom cut me off, telling me what I had said was blasphemy. I was hearing the words but not understanding their meaning. I was a little white girl not understanding anything about this song. And instead of trying to understand its meaning, I was making a joke about a kind of suffering I would never know. But in thinking about that song now, how it arose out of the canon of African American spirituals, out of the collective abyss of suffering carved into the souls of millions of African American slaves over hundreds of years, I approach that hymn again with a humbling awareness: I was not there when Jesus was crucified.

Yes, the story of Malchus compels me to take a step back and leave my sword at my side and examine new ways to use my privilege and power in society without causing harm. It holds me to account when I say that I want “to step in the name of love as if (I) may land on nothing.” But it also confronts me with the question of where I would even be in the story. It is comforting to my ego to think that I would have been one of the disciples, to imagine that my greatest error would have been simply to misunderstand Jesus and to love him so much that I would act to defend him. But truly, would I even be standing in the olive grove that night? Are there signs in my life now that I would have dared follow a radical teacher like him? Or would I be resting comfortably with my privilege in my bed somewhere in middle-class occupied Roman territory grateful that the powers-that-be are keeping the law and order while I sleep? When I hear Christians unquestioningly vote for Trump, I hear, too, how they would be asleep somewhere in their beds far away from the wrongful arrest of a man named Jesus, as far away as they are now from being able hear the call to justice by the voices in the streets chanting “Black Lives Matter” in protest of a system that normalizes police killings and wrongful arrests of black people. 

The kaleidoscopic nature of this story refuses easy understanding or my arrival at the “right” side. But it does require an engagement with the mercurial wisdom of this story that refuses to be grasped by both hands. Personally, I believe there are paths to salvation and liberation that do not go through Jesus and I believe in the sacred power of story to wake us up to ourselves and each other. But if your spiritual life is tethered to a knowledge of Jesus and you are voting for Trump this year, if you are about to deliver a blow of your chosen sword because you believe anyone who says, “Christianity will have power” as though it could ever be given by the emperor, or the president, to begin with, then I hope the story of Malchus will give you new questions to grapple with in this election season: Can we wake up to Peter with his sword drawn out of self-righteous confidence and misguided love, who does not even know what or who he is fighting for? Can we wake up to Malchus who is both injured by the violence of empire and by violent resistance to empire because of the legacy of slavery that binds him to this story against his will? Can we wake up to the presiding influence of the Roman empire, the one character in this story who is both present but invisible and whom the Gospel writers did not dare hold accountable for the injustice of this scene? Can we wake up to what heals instead of destroys? Can we wake up to the words Jesus saying, simply: “No more of this.”

*The Gospel of John is the only one that names the victim as Malchus and identifies the attacker as Simon Peter. For simplicity’s sake, I will continue to name them here as the writer of John did.