Fall 2025 · Vol. 54 No. 2 · pp. 295–297
Book Review
Fight like Jesus: How Jesus Waged Peace Throughout Holy Week
Harrisonburg, VA: Herald, 2022. 205 pages.
Jason Porterfield’s Fight like Jesus takes its place as the latest in a line of impassioned efforts to persuade Christians that peace theology (and nonviolent practice) should not be consigned to the periphery of the Christian theological vision but should occupy the center. Porterfield offers an illuminating and exegetically rich study of Jesus’ final days that is filled with illuminating cultural background that informs contemporary peacemaking practice. The book is aimed at a popular level and the author succeeds in creating a readable and engaging work.
Porterfield’s academic background includes a graduate theological degree from Fuller Theological Seminary. His ministry experience is primarily with Servants, an international network of Christian communities living and ministering among the urban poor. Porterfield brings a combination of biblical-theological acumen and evident pastoral sensitivity to the pain of human experience. This is one of the book’s chief strengths, and there is a deep longing for peace that is evident in the tone throughout.
The book begins with an impassioned prayer borne out of Porterfield’s own experience of grief at both the brokenness of the world and the apparent futility of his own efforts at peacemaking. “I beg of you,” he prayed, “teach me how to be a peacemaker!” (17). This prayer was answered through a fresh understanding of what Jesus was up to during the days leading up to his crucifixion and resurrection.
Porterfield takes the reader through a close reading of the gospel accounts of Jesus’ words and actions during Holy Week (“the greatest Peacemaker’s greatest week”). He begins with Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem p. 296 on Palm Sunday (Luke 19:42) and sees this as the interpretive key to everything that Jesus says and does over the subsequent days. While the hosannas are ringing and political dreams are being kindled, Jesus is grieving at how his central project is being misunderstood. The “things that make for peace” are on his mind and, according to Porterfield, they are the central motivator for all that follows. This is a thesis that leaves a few unanswered questions because it tends to place atonement theology in the background and Jesus’ immanent peacemaking strategy in the foreground. While both are relevant, not every reader will agree with Porterfield’s order of operations.
The book includes illuminating and revealing exegetical details, from the significance of palm branches (symbols of Israel’s quest for independence) to the denarius (a propaganda tool regarded by pious Jews as symbol of idolatrous allegiance to Rome) to the hammer (a potent symbol of Israel’s misguided political aspirations with implications for contemporary atonement theology). In focusing on these and other symbols, Porterfield adds color and insight to our reading of the Gospels while challenging the extent to which our hopes and practices might unwittingly align with those that Jesus opposed.
A few of Porterfield’s exegetical moves seem either stretched or overextended. He goes to great lengths to argue that the “whip” Jesus used as he cleansed the temple was little more than a wicker brush that couldn’t have possibly caused bodily harm, thereby exonerating Jesus of the accusation of “violence.”
A kind of binary thinking is present in this work that is captured well in Porterfield’s penultimate chapter on Good Friday. At Jesus’s trial, the crowd is offered the chance to free one of two criminals. In Jesus and Barabbas, he suggests, we are offered two different political strategies that are paradigmatic for all subsequent Christian thought and action. One is Jesus’ nonviolent approach to peacemaking. The other is Barabbas’s violent revolutionary nationalism. Christians, Porterfield concludes, must pick which messiah they want to follow. The reader is left wondering if these are the only available options. Are there approaches to the agonized question of violence that have motivations other than a misguided violent nationalism? Porterfield leaves this question mostly unexplored, which is a notable gap.
The reader who is already convinced of Porterfield’s thesis will find much to encourage them here, as his approach to Jesus will be familiar, and it is presented with freshness and clarity. The half-convinced reader will find a number of challenging exegetical jewels that will force a fresh consideration of Jesus’ radical example and its challenging implications, p. 297 particularly in a context of secularized political polarization where we are tempted to overinvest in our conflicts and vilify our enemies. The skeptical reader will find Porterfield a bit frustrating, as they will find their honest hesitations around nonviolence conflated with Barabbas-like dreams of violent political revolution.
In spite of these limitations, this is a highly readable and challenging book. Porterfield shines new light on Jesus’ expectation-busting journey through Holy Week and does not shy away from the implications for how Jesus’ disciples should strive for peace today.
