The word “satyagraha” is associated with Gandhi’s defense of nonviolence. Satyagraha was one of the most important words to Martin Luther King, Jr. But the power of that  word for King wasn’t what we have come to mean  by it: “passive  resistance.” Rather,  King was mesmerized by this word and built his ministry on this word because of what Gandhi really meant  by it: “truth force” or “the  force of truth.”
If there  is one word for the 21st century,  it is satyagraha: the force of truth. In a culture  that  is governed by the love of force, God’s dream  would govern us by a very different  set of relationships: the force of love and the force of truth.
In a world of heavily rouged religions and heavily rouged people,  “real”  people of rounded  faith like Gandhi and King can seem  mightily weird. But Jesus helps  us become  NOT more straight-edged, straight-laced, ladder- backed  and proud human  beings.  . .
God calls us to be a peculiar people,  not ordinary.
You know that  Jesus  liked anything-but-ordinary, choosing  odd ducks  and “rare birds”  to be his disciples: only a few were married,  only a few had ordinary jobs, only a few had compliant dispositions. Although I am not a pacifist, and am struck  that  in Jerusalem it appears that  Jesus  let his disci- ples carry daggers  for self-defense, daggers  which were most likely with them  at the Last Supper, disciples of Jesus  are more inclined  to bare an arm than  to bear arms,  more embodiments of the force of love than  the love of force.
Jesus’  beatitudes rose up the meek and lowly, offering them  victory as their “least-of-these” stealth tactics flew under  the radar  of powers and principali- ties.  In fact,  in the Jesus  Dream there  is no “other,” only oneanother. One can no more separate itself from oneanother than  a wave can  separate itself from the ocean.  In spite  of academe’s fetishizing  the category of the “other,” Jesus  recognized  no such  thing as an “other,” only brothers  and sisters  and other body-parts. Who is your flesh and blood? Jesus  said that  everyone is. Jesus  redefined “family” to include  the whole human  family. Can you say to every one, your neighbor  and your nemesis, “You are flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone;  and I am flesh of your flesh and bone of your bone”  [Gen.2.23]. Or in Jesus’  exact  words, “Inasmuch as you’ve done it unto the least  of these  . . .”
Leave it to Gandhi to take Jesus’  “inasmuch” rule and make it into the #1 Test of whether  or not you are living God’s dream.
The Satyagraha Dream is a dream  of peace, a shalom  dream.  But there  is a new name  for peace: justice. Peace  is not the absence of conflict  [that  is death]  or the absence of force. Peace  is the presence of creative  friction and the right kind of force: the truth  force of justice  and love. The biblical  dream is full of conflict  and force: turning  swords into ploughs  that  furrow a path to the future,  and turning  spears  into pruning  hooks that  provide fruit for a hungry and hurting  world.
Our goal  is not that  you become  “spiritual,” or enter  an enlightened state, or that  you get converted  and join the “born-again” brigade,  or that  you become  a “better person”  or a “better lover.”
Our dream  is that  Christ will so live in us, and we will so live in Christ, learning  to love and care for the world in new and newly emboldened  ways. Where love proceeds, truth  follows, and grace abounds.