Intent to show them what He meant by love, and how to develop an unselfish concern even for those one would not normally "like," Jesus chose to bring together around Him a rather disparate group of men, twelve in all. There were some zealots, radical militants from his home province of Galilee, men from the Jewish resistance movement like Simon Peter and Simon the Zealot. Jesus also chose Matthew, a former tax-collector who had collaborated with Roman officials in his work.

Jesus brought them all together, worked daily to train them in new openness and attitudes of acceptance, so that their energies could be redirected in more productive work than guerrilla raids on Roman legionnaires by the militants or incessant scheming to get-ahead by former collaborators with Romans. It was a necessary experiment -- and a risky encounter - but through it Jesus saved the militants from their hate and Matthew from money-grabbing (and the violence that went along with holding his position through armed support allotted for tax collectors).

Salvation from the attitude that spawns violence is a need in our time as well. Aggressively violent persons and groups keep our newscasts filled with sad news as they use violent means to gain their ends. The recent death of hostages at the hands of terrorists is etched in our memories. All of us reacted painfully to such passionate selfishness, such evident blindness to humane values, and to that untamed spirit of aggression that continues to block understanding because the rules of regard have been scrapped. Our world needs to be saved from violence.

We all know how difficult it is to think non-violently when you are face to face with a sensed hostility against yourself. But Jesus came to save us from that kind of triggering attitude and response. We must let Him do so. Much help in understanding the application of His insights into this problem has been given by Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Jr.

Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited is a central interpretation of the background and techniques of non-violence as Jesus taught it; King read deeply in this book during the bus boycott year in Montgomery, and it proved a reliable guide for his successful pilgrimage to non-violence through understood use of agape love.

George Washington Carver used to caution his students and friends against hate, retaliation and violence. For instance, in January 1921, invited to Washington, DC to speak about the possibilities of the peanut as a commercial product, Carter sensed hostility from some of the white Southerners who were members of the House Ways and Means Committee, the group responsible to decide about the advisability of a higher tariff on imported peanuts.

Carver had come to Washington at the request and expense of the United Peanut Association of America, a group of growers eager to protect their then-infant business from the lower costing peanuts imported from the Far East -- peanuts grown in China, processed in Japan, and then sent here for sale.