fighting

• primitive man enjoyed; early clans engaged in annual

70:1.6But even this did not work at first. When the early chiefs would try to iron out mis­un­der­stand­ings, they of­ten found it nec­es­sary, at least once a year, to per­mit the tribal stone fights. The clan would di­vide up into two groups and en­gage in an all-day bat­tle. And this for no other rea­son than just the fun of it; they re­ally en­joyed fight­ing.

• competitive substitutes for physical

74:7.107. The cul­ti­va­tion of play, hu­mor, and com­pet­i­tive sub­sti­tutes for phys­i­cal fight­ing.

• Jesus would not engage in

124:2.4Per­haps his most un­usual and out­stand­ing trait was his un­will­ing­ness to fight for his rights. Since he was such a well-de­vel­oped lad for his age, it seemed strange to his playfel­lows that he was dis­in­clined to de­fend him­self even from in­jus­tice or when sub­jected to per­sonal abuse. As it hap­pened, he did not suf­fer much on ac­count of this trait be­cause of the friend­ship of Ja­cob, a neigh­bor boy, who was one year older. He was the son of the stone ma­son, a busi­ness as­so­ciate of Joseph. Ja­cob was a great ad­mirer of Je­sus and made it his busi­ness to see that no one was per­mit­ted to im­pose upon Je­sus be­cause of his aver­sion to phys­i­cal com­bat. Sev­eral times older and un­couth youths at­tacked Je­sus, re­ly­ing upon his re­puted docil­ity, but they al­ways suf­fered swift and cer­tain ret­ri­bu­tion at the hands of his self-ap­pointed cham­pion and ever-ready de­fender, Ja­cob the stone ma­son’s son.

• restraining madman was closest Jesus came to

130:5.4One thing hap­pened on a visit to Fair Havens which Ga­nid never for­got; the mem­ory of this episode al­ways caused him to wish he might do some­thing to change the caste sys­tem of his na­tive In­dia. A drunken de­gen­er­ate was at­tack­ing a slave girl on the pub­lic high­way. When Je­sus saw the plight of the girl, he rushed for­ward and drew the maiden away from the as­sault of the mad­man. While the fright­ened child clung to him, he held the in­fu­ri­ated man at a safe dis­tance by his pow­er­ful ex­tended right arm un­til the poor fel­low had ex­hausted him­self beat­ing the air with his an­gry blows. Ga­nid felt a strong im­pulse to help Je­sus han­dle the af­fair, but his fa­ther for­bade him. Though they could not speak the girl’s lan­guage, she could un­der­stand their act of mercy and gave to­ken of her heart­felt ap­pre­ci­a­tion as they all three es­corted her home. This was prob­a­bly as near a per­sonal en­counter with his fel­lows as Je­sus ever had through­out his en­tire life in the flesh. But he had a dif­fi­cult task that evening try­ing to ex­plain to Ga­nid why he did not smite the drunken man. Ga­nid thought this man should have been struck at least as many times as he had struck the girl.

• Jesus would not engage in

133:1.3For days they talked about this prob­lem of man­i­fest­ing mercy and ad­min­is­ter­ing jus­tice. And Ga­nid, at least to some ex­tent, un­der­stood why Je­sus would not en­gage in per­sonal com­bat. But Ga­nid asked one last ques­tion, to which he never re­ceived a fully sat­is­fac­tory an­swer; and that ques­tion was: “But, Teacher, if a stronger and ill-tem­pered crea­ture should at­tack you and threaten to de­stroy you, what would you do? Would you make no ef­fort to de­fend your­self?” Al­though Je­sus could not fully and sat­is­fac­to­rily an­swer the lad’s ques­tion, inas­much as he was not will­ing to dis­close to him that he (Je­sus) was liv­ing on earth as the ex­em­pli­fi­ca­tion of the Par­a­dise Fa­ther’s love to an on­look­ing uni­verse, he did say this much:

133:1.4“Ga­nid, I can well un­der­stand how some of these prob­lems per­plex you, and I will en­deavor to an­swer your ques­tion. First, in all at­tacks which might be made upon my per­son, I would de­ter­mine whether or not the ag­gres­sor was a son of God—my brother in the flesh—and if I thought such a crea­ture did not pos­sess moral judg­ment and spir­i­tual rea­son, I would un­hesi­tat­ingly de­fend my­self to the full ca­pac­ity of my pow­ers of re­sis­tance, re­gard­less of con­se­quences to the at­tacker. But I would not thus as­sault a fel­low man of son­ship sta­tus, even in self-de­fense. That is, I would not pun­ish him in ad­vance and with­out judg­ment for his as­sault upon me. I would by ev­ery pos­si­ble ar­ti­fice seek to pre­vent and dis­suade him from mak­ing such an at­tack and to mit­i­gate it in case of my fail­ure to abort it. Ga­nid, I have ab­so­lute con­fi­dence in my heav­enly Fa­ther’s over­care; I am con­se­crated to do­ing the will of my Fa­ther in heaven. I do not be­lieve that real harm can be­fall me; I do not be­lieve that my life­work can re­ally be jeop­ar­dized by any­thing my en­e­mies might wish to visit upon me, and surely we have no vi­o­lence to fear from our friends. I am ab­so­lutely as­sured that the en­tire uni­verse is friendly to me—this all-pow­er­ful truth I in­sist on be­liev­ing with a whole­hearted trust in spite of all ap­pear­ances to the con­trary.”

133:1.5But Ga­nid was not fully sat­is­fied. Many times they talked over these mat­ters, and Je­sus told him some of his boy­hood ex­pe­ri­ences and also about Ja­cob the stone ma­son’s son. On learn­ing how Ja­cob ap­pointed him­self to de­fend Je­sus, Ga­nid said: “Oh, I be­gin to see! In the first place very sel­dom would any nor­mal hu­man be­ing want to at­tack such a kindly per­son as you, and even if any­one should be so un­think­ing as to do such a thing, there is pretty sure to be near at hand some other mor­tal who will fly to your as­sis­tance, even as you al­ways go to the res­cue of any per­son you ob­serve to be in dis­tress. In my heart, Teacher, I agree with you, but in my head I still think that if I had been Ja­cob, I would have en­joyed pun­ish­ing those rude fel­lows who pre­sumed to at­tack you just be­cause they thought you would not de­fend your­self. I pre­sume you are fairly safe in your jour­ney through life since you spend much of your time help­ing oth­ers and min­is­ter­ing to your fel­lows in dis­tress—well, most likely there’ll al­ways be some­one on hand to de­fend you.” And Je­sus replied: “That test has not yet come, Ga­nid, and when it does, we will have to abide by the Fa­ther’s will.” And that was about all the lad could get his teacher to say on this dif­fi­cult sub­ject of self-de­fense and non­re­sis­tance. On an­other oc­ca­sion he did draw from Je­sus the opin­ion that or­ga­nized so­ci­ety had ev­ery right to em­ploy force in the ex­e­cu­tion of its just man­dates.

• Jesus would not engage in

140:8.4Je­sus had great dif­fi­culty in get­ting them to un­der­stand his per­sonal prac­tice of non­re­sis­tance. He ab­so­lutely re­fused to de­fend him­self, and it ap­peared to the apos­tles that he would be pleased if they would pur­sue the same pol­icy. He taught them not to re­sist evil, not to com­bat in­jus­tice or in­jury, but he did not teach pas­sive tol­er­ance of wrong­do­ing. And he made it plain on this af­ter­noon that he ap­proved of the so­cial pun­ish­ment of evil­do­ers and crim­i­nals, and that the civil gov­ern­ment must some­times em­ploy force for the main­te­nance of so­cial or­der and in the ex­e­cu­tion of jus­tice.

• to convince ourselves we are not afraid

160:3.4My phi­los­o­phy tells me that there are times when I must fight, if need be, for the de­fense of my con­cept of righ­teous­ness, but I doubt not that the Mas­ter, with a more ma­ture type of per­son­al­ity, would eas­ily and grace­fully gain an equal vic­tory by his su­pe­rior and win­some tech­nique of tact and tol­er­ance. All too of­ten, when we bat­tle for the right, it turns out that both the vic­tor and the van­quished have sus­tained de­feat. I heard the Mas­ter say only yes­ter­day that the “wise man, when seek­ing en­trance through the locked door, would not de­stroy the door but rather would seek for the key where­with to un­lock it.” Too of­ten we en­gage in a fight merely to con­vince our­selves that we are not afraid.