Non-Resistance and the Sword

The meaning the tradition read into Moses’s death is the gospel of non-resistance. The former robber, who had lived by the sword, died refusing to lift it, citing the Lord’s own word — “all who take the sword shall perish by the sword” — and choosing martyrdom over both flight and violence. This file draws out that theology: the martyrdom embraced by free choice, the conformity to Christ who would not be defended by the sword, and the way Moses’s death completed and sealed the conversion of a man of violence into a witness of peace.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; martyr)

“All Who Take the Sword”

The hinge of the martyrdom-tradition is a single dominical saying. When his brothers urged him to flee the coming barbarians, Moses answered that he had been waiting for this day, “that the word of the Lord Christ might be fulfilled which says, ‘All who take the sword will perish by the sword’” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Moses 10; trans. Ward 1984, citing Matthew 26:52). The word is Christ’s own, spoken in Gethsemane to the disciple who drew a blade to defend him — “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). By citing it as the warrant for his refusal to flee or fight, Moses places his own death squarely in the pattern of his Lord’s: as Christ would not be defended by the sword and gave himself up to those who came for him, so Moses would not be defended by the sword and gave himself up to the raiders. The martyrdom is, in the deepest sense, an imitatio Christi — a conformity to the Passion of the One who refused the sword (cf. the same gospel pattern in the Martyrdom of Polycarp’s “martyrdom according to the gospel”; on the genre, see The Church Fathers).

The Martyrdom of Choice

What distinguishes Moses’s martyrdom is that it is unmistakably chosen. He is not surprised by the raiders, nor trapped, nor killed while resisting; he foresees the danger, urges the other brothers to flee, and deliberately remains, framing his staying as the fulfilment of the gospel word he has been awaiting “for so many years” (Ward 1984, Moses 10). This is martyrdom as a free and deliberate act of self-offering — not death merely suffered but death embraced. At the same time, the tradition is careful to distinguish this from recklessness or the courting of death: Moses urges the others to flee and does not require them to die with him; only those who freely choose to remain share his end. The non-resistance is his own free conformity to Christ, offered and not imposed.

This careful balance matters. The early Church, in its soberest witnesses, warned against volunteering for martyrdom and against the provoking of one’s own death (the Martyrdom of Polycarp refuses to praise those who hand themselves over; see St. Polycarp of Smyrna). Moses’s death does not transgress this guard-rail: he does not seek out the raiders or provoke them; he simply declines, when the danger comes, to escape it by flight or to meet it with violence, and accepts the death that comes. His martyrdom is the gospel’s own pattern — not the seeking of death, but the refusal to save one’s life by the sword.

The Robber Who Would Not Lift the Sword

The theological power of Moses’s death lies in its perfect reversal of his life. He had been a man of the sword in the most literal sense — a brigand, a killer, the terror of the Nile delta, who had once carried a blade between his teeth across a flooded river to take revenge (see The Robber and the Slave). That a man so steeped in violence should die refusing violence, and should die citing the very word of Christ against the sword, is the tradition’s crowning proof of what grace had done in him. The conversion that began with his flight to Scetis was completed at his death: the man who had lived by the sword died by the gospel’s word against it, and the whole arc of his life — from violence to peace, from robbery to self-gift — was sealed.

The desert saw in this a deep truth about repentance. Grace did not merely restrain Moses’s violence; it inverted it, turning the man who had killed into the man who would rather be killed than kill. His non-resistance was not weakness — he was, by every account, a man of immense physical strength who could have fought — but the strength of his old nature now wholly converted, the ferocity that had served robbery now spent in the refusal to harm. The martyr of non-resistance is the same Moses as the chief of brigands, but turned completely around; and the turning is the work of grace.

Non-Resistance in the Gospel and the Desert

Moses’s death gives sharp form to a theme that runs through the gospel and the desert alike: the call to non-retaliation, the bearing of injury without returning it, the overcoming of evil with good. “Do not resist the one who is evil,” “love your enemies,” “bless those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:39, 44; Romans 12:14, 21) — these are the commands the desert took with full seriousness, and Moses’s whole maturity was an exercise in them: the bearing of insult at his ordination, the refusal to judge, the meekness under contempt, and finally the refusal to defend even his own life (see Humility and Self-Knowledge and The Teacher of Non-Judgment). The martyrdom is the logical end of this whole disposition: a man who would not defend his dignity against an insult would not defend his life against a sword. The non-resistance of the death is continuous with the humility of the life.

It is worth stating plainly what the tradition does and does not claim. It does not make Moses a theorist of pacifism or draw from his death a general doctrine about the sword in the hands of the state or the soldier — the desert did not work that way. It makes a narrower and deeper claim: that this man, formed by years of self-surrender and conformity to Christ, chose at the end to die rather than to kill, fulfilling in his own flesh the word his Lord had spoken. The death is reported as the tradition gives it, pinned to the Apophthegmata (METHODOLOGY §3.5); its meaning, which is the point the desert preserved it for, is the gospel of non-resistance fulfilled in the most unlikely man — the robber who would not lift the sword.

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 59. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Abba Moses 10: the citation of “all who take the sword will perish by the sword” and the embraced martyrdom.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The raids on Scetis; the desert’s witness of non-resistance.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The martyr-tradition and its gospel patterning.)
The Holy Bible (Matthew 26:52, the word against the sword in Gethsemane; Matthew 5:39, 44; Romans 12:14, 21, the commands to non-retaliation). (The scriptural ground of the non-resistance Moses fulfils.)