The Kingdom vs. The Empire, Pt. 3

I understand that what I write is not easy — but it’s also not my idea.  I have been wrestling with the ideas of pacifism, non-violence, and the Christian’s role in politics since I came up out of the waters of baptism over a decade ago.  I realize that my opinion will upset, offend, or disturb many, and I’m okay with that. However, it is too important and issue to not discuss and discourse.  I am a man, not God – and I believe the Bible as His holy word.  Read this with the understanding of, “He might be wrong.”  Read your Bible, test the scriptures, and pray.  But most importantly, let the Holy Spirit guide your convictions and beliefs, not traditions.  With that being said, let us finish this series.

There is a part in the Gospel narratives that we’ve read many times but have a tendency to just skim through.  It’s the part where the crowd chooses between Jesus and Barabbas.  By tradition, Pilate freed one prisoner every year at Passover, so he asks the crowd to choose.

I can imagine (speculative) the behind-the-scenes drama that unfolds as Pilate and Caiaphas (the High Priest) converse on the situation and its solution.  These two power players, one political, the other religious, needed each other.  Despite their contempt for one another, the needed each other to maintain their positions of power.  You’ll recall in the Gospels that Pilate had two very notable prisoners who were both condemned to be executed:  Jesus of Nazareth and Barabbas.  I can imagine Pilate asking Caiaphas which one should be released.  At that moment, Caiaphas was presented with a choice.  Let’s look at the two.

Barabbas was a famous, heroic Jewish patriot.  He was willing to lead a war of independence against Rome. He was arrested for murder and inciting a riot to induce a violent revolution.

Jesus, in stark contrast, was a preaching the revolutionary idea of the peaceable kingdom of God that is founded on love and forgiveness.

Pilate admonished the High Priest to choose wisely. and then it is taken to the people for a final vote:

²¹ The governor again said to them, “Which of the two do you want me to release for you?” And they said, “Barabbas.” ²² Pilate said to them, “Then what shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?” They all said, “Let him be crucified!” (Matt. 27:21-22, NIV)

The choice was made: the people and the Sanhedrin wanted a violent messiah, not a peaceful one. The wanted the freedom fighter to lead a revolt, not a Prince of Peace to bring restoration.  In Bulgakov’s book, The Master and the Margarita, Bulgakov’s Pilate makes a shocking statement to Caiaphas in his retelling the story:

“Remember my words, High Priest:  you are going to see more than one cohort here in Jerusalem!  Under the city walls you are going to see the Fulminata legion at full strength and the Arab Calvary too.  Then the weeping and lamentation will be bitter!  Then you will remember that you saved Bar-Abba and you will regret that you sent the preacher of peace to his death!” (pg. 36)

That fictional Pilate reminds us of the historical reality:  Just one generation after the crucifixion, Jerusalem finally got its war of independence…and it was left as a smoldering Gehenna.Forty years after the resurrection, Jerusalem was thrown head-long into a hell of Roman warfare and the ceaseless bombardment of roman Catapults that launched 100 pound payloads day and night.  Most of the city died violently while some starved and the rest were enslaved.

However, in real-life it was not Pilate, but rather Jesus that told of this fate that was coming upon Jerusalem.  That’s why we have this interesting verse as Jesus enters the city for Passover week:

 

⁴¹ And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, ⁴² saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. ⁴³ For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side ⁴⁴ and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.” (Luke 19:41-44, ESV) 

1st Century Jerusalem rejected the Prince of peace and suffered horribly.  The “city of peace” became a smoking heap of rubble “where their worm never dies and the fire is never quenched” (Mark 9:48).  Their awful destiny could’ve been avoided, but only if they were willing to release their white-knuckle death grip on the pattern on violence and see the world through the eyes of God.  History tells us of their choice, and sadly they clung to the old lie of Satan and the ways of Cain…and not one stone was left unturned in “God’s city.” In rejecting the Prince of peace, Jerusalem had gone to hell.

So what about you and me?  Will we end any better?  Do we recognize “the things that make for peace?” Do we recognize that Jesus is Immanuel?  Do we have the audacity to believe the Prince of Peace of longs to lead his creation back to His peaceable kingdom?

At this point, I fear that we do not…not most of the time, anyway. It seems that we have buried our heads and cannot fathom the world that exists other than the way it does today.  Our own imaginations have been commanded and hijacked by the principalities and powers of this dark world.  As Walter Brueggemann describes it:

“Our culture is competent to carry out almost anything and imagine almost nothing.”

So here we are…twenty centuries after Caiaphas, who for the sake of his nation, and Pilate, who for the sake of his empire, condemned the Prince of peace to death in favor of retaining the things as they are and normalcy of violent revolution and militaristic empire.

And where are we at?  Wars continue to define us.  Freedom remains a euphemism for the power to conquer and kill.  Violence is still seen as a legitimate way of changing the world…and I suggest all of this is nothing more than an outright betrayal of Jesus and his ideas.

But I am still holding out hope.  How?  Because Jesus’ story is still told.  On that Friday twenty centuries ago, the representative of the superpower ideology and the high priests of the cooperative religion rejected Jesus.  He was condemned, sentenced, tortured, crucified, and pronounced dead and buried in a cemetery that bore the official Imperial Seal of Rome.  But that’s not the end…

That Sunday the ideas and ideals of the Prince of Peace were vindicated through the Resurrection!  The Resurrection changes everything!  If Jesus had stayed in the grave with its seal of Rome, Jesus’ ideas would’ve died with Him. But the resurrection changed everything!  Easter Sunday is the ultimate and tangible manifestation of the triumph of the peaceable Kingdom of Christ.  Easter redeems it all.

Isn’t it time that we let go of our assumed agreements with Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, and their worn-out, death-dealing ideas?  Isn’t it time we took very seriously the revolutionary, life-changing, life-giving ideas of Jesus – the Christ – the One whom God raise from the dead and declared to be Lord and Christ?  Isn’t it time we became as children and used our imagination to once again imagine the radical otherness of the Kingdom of God?  Isn’t it about time that we realize that the peaceable Kingdom of God starts here and not and isn’t reserved for the ethereal “sweet by and by?”

The American Church especially could benefit from a fresh look, maybe even for the first time, of Jesus being liberated from the lens of militaristic empire and its chaplaincy religion.

I know.   At this point you’re thinking, “I can’t do this!  I can’t rethink or question what I have been taught as long as I have been alive?  I can’t rethink everything I’ve ever believed about patriotism, apple pie, freedom, and “God Bless America.”

Sure you can.  I am.  And it’s not easy.  Many will call you crazy. unlearned in the Scriptures, wrong, or dismiss you…but reeber…they dismissed Jesus too.  Once you extricate Jesus from subservience to a nationalistic agenda, you can rethink everything in the light of Christ.

Peace,

Scott

The Kingdom Vs. the Empire, Pt. 2

If you didn’t get the first part, read it here.

The Kingdom of God is so radically different from the earthly empires.  From the ways it advances, to the ways it protects and defends.  I will be the first to admit it is very hard to grow up in a nationalistic fervor of patriotism and history, and not get caught up in the empire.

So when did all of this “muddy-ness” that blurred the Kingdom and the Empire begin?  Well, we can track it back to one man: Constantine.

in 312 A.D., General Constantine came to power after winning a decisive battle at Milvian Bridge where he took the symbols of Christianity and, as Brian Zahnd says, “…placing them as talismans on weapons of war.” Since Constantine emerged the victor of the Roman Civil War, he ascended the throne of Emperor. Throughout the P.R. Campaign, he attributed his victory to the “Christian God.”  Very quickly Christianity became Christendom as it was inaugurated as the official state religion of the Roman Empire.  The Edict of Milan came in February of 313, and thus the Holy Roman Empire was born.

Almost instantly the church became the “state chaplain” to the Romans.  This new role, that was never intended by God, by the way, would set the church on a course that would pair it with national politics, and ultimately culminate in some of the darkest parts of church and world history:  The Crusades and the Middle Ages.

Both of these historical events and periods serve to show us how far Christianity came off the rails when it embraced servitude to the Empire over service to the Kingdom. Just like in my last post, this is precisely what happens when we separate Jesus from His ideas and superimpose Him onto ours.

Unfortunately, it is not a thing of the past.  We still do this today. for 1700 years Christianity has embraced Jesus as our personal Saviour, but completely dismiss His teachings on peace and non-violence.  Brian Zahnd describes our situation like this:

“We [Christians] have embraced a privitized, postmortem gospel that stresses Jesus dying for our sins but at the same time ignores His political ideas. This leaves us free to run the world in the way it has always been run:  by the power of the sword.  Under pressure from the ideology of the empire, concepts like ‘freedom’ and ‘truth’ gain radically different meaning than those intended by Christ. Freedom becomes a euphimism for ‘vanquishing’ (instead of loving) our enemies; ‘truth’ finds its ultimate form in the will to power (expressed in the willingness to kill).  This is a long way from the ideas of peace, love, and forgivness set forth by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.” (Zahnd, Farewell to Mars)

We too quickly (and too often) forget that it was Jesus ideas that made Him a threat to the powers that be. But look at our ‘gospel’ today.  It’s been sterilized and domesticated, it’s been neutered of it’s incredible power to transform the hearts and mind of humanity.  If Jesus would’ve gone around preaching this postmortem, sanitized ‘gospel’ that we preach, Pilate would have shrugged his shoulders, released Jesus, and told him to stay home and stop being weird. But that’s not what happened, right?  Why?  Because Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas knew that Jesus was a threat – Jesus was teaching against the Empire (or as we label it today, a global superpower).

In making Jesus the state chaplain of Rome and Constantinian Christianity, what we’ve unknowingly done is to invent a Manichean (an adherent of the dualistic religious system of Manes, a combination of Gnostic Christianity, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and various other elements, with a basic doctrine of a conflict between light and dark, matter being regarded as dark and evil) Jesus who saves our souls but leaves us free to run things the way we see fit.  That’s precisely what we want, right?  Especially if that belief has us in a nation that sits atop of the superpower food chain.  Seventeen centuries of church history suggest that we embrace this all too readily and embrace Jesus as the Savoir of our personal (a.k.a. private, individual) soul, but largely unchanged by His ideas of Kingdom vs. Empire. Commenting on this Miroslav Volf says,

“Pilate deserves our sympathies, not because he was a good though tragically mistaken man because we are not much better.  We may believe in Jesus, but we do not believe in His ideas, at least not His ideas about violence, truth, and justice.” (Volf, Exclusion and Embrace)

This is where the train screamed off the tracks.  A ‘Christian’ Emperor wielding the ‘Christian’ sword of Imperial dominance became a logical way to run things, and the Kingdom of God was packed up and relocated to some distant, after-you-die, ethereal concept that became innocuous to say the least.  Jesus was demoted as Savoir of the world, to a personal Savoir who only cared about what you do privately. This is NOT to suggest that Jesus isn’t the Savoir of our souls – He is!  But it is to help us see that the mission of Christ extends way beyond a privatized, sterile, personal religion coupled with some good afterlife benefits.

Do not forget that Jesus actually intends to redeem and restore the world! To restore God’s SHALOM, the original perfection and holiness of the Creation, and that includes God’s ideas about love, justice, peace, non-violence, and forgiveness.

The brass tacks of it all boil down to this:  Far too many of us believe in the Risen Lord Jesus, but flat out reject His political ideals – the REVOLUTIONARY ones. We have kept Jesus in the “religion” box to keep Him from meddling in our politics, wars, and laws that we may, even inadvertently worship the Empire, the State as some sort of benevolent deity to fuel our nationalistic zealousness and imperial dominance.

Perhaps it would do us well to remember the Jesus of the Holy Gospel, the Savoir of all mankind and the Savoir of the world.  The redeemer of human politics, and the ultimate champion of justice and peace.

See you next time,

Scott

The Kingdom versus the Empire, Pt. 1

I have to be honest: I am the least qualified to write this post. Why?  Well, I’m still working through it.  I’m still fighting my own self on this.  My prayer and hope are, that God will use my bumbling, struggling, still-working-on-it life to help somebody else.

I am part of the 9/11 Generation.  I can remember where I was when it all went down – I was in Freshman English with Mrs. Fairchild at Parkersburg High School in Parkersburg, West Virginia.  I watched, with the world, as two towers full of people crashed to the ground.

The following days/weeks/months were a blur of patriotism and nationalistic fervor as we prepared to go to war.  This war was a “new kind” we were told…and it would be televised on the 24/7 news networks.  I learned who people like Chris Matthews, Bill O’Reilly, Wolf Blitzer, and Tom Brokaw were.  I was certainly entertained.

I had no qualms with America going off to war; that’s what we do, right?  America went all over the world “Making the world safe and protecting democracy.”  At any rate, America was the back-to-back world war champions.  It was what I grew up inundated with “American exceptionalism” and military pride that fomented over generations.

I had also grown up being taught that war, America, and apparently Christianity were completely compatible.  So for almost 11 years I watched the War on Terror live on TV from my couch…never giving it a second thought.

But then…as I was preparing a sermon I read some of the words of Jesus in Matthew and I was absolutely taken back.  I had read Scripture through the lens of Western-American Christianity and forgotten that Jesus of Nazareth preached a radically different message than what I previously thought.  This first-century wandering preacher that we divide time by became the incarnation of Isaiah’s ancient prophetic title, “Prince of Peace” and taught a radically different way to be human in a crazy, violence loving world.  He taught that the Kingdom of God was (and is) a place first and foremost, of peace.

He taught that while this Kindom exists in this world, it is completely incompatible with the current systems in place.  Why?  Because it is a kingdom of peace, and He is the Prince of Peace.

I believe we have made a grave mistake.  We believe the Gospel accounts of Jesus and the traditional doctrines of Orthodox Christianity…but we have ripped Jesus out of context to “tame” Him and his ideas to fit our likes and contexts.  That, however, is a very dangerous maneuver.  Why?  Because we cannot divorce Jesus from His ideas and teachings and still claim to follow Him.  This is especially true in Jesus’ political ideology.  Brian Zhand says,

“The problem is this:  when we separate Jesus from his ideas for an alternate social structure, we inevitably succumb to the temptation to harness Jesus to our ideas – thus conferring upon our human political ideas a assumed divine endorsement.” (A Farewell to Mars, Ch. 1)

In doing this, we literally find ourselves dancing in step with the powers and principalities of darkness that govern the systems of the “world” in a contrary fashion to God.  This is a system set up and built upon violence, hate, war, fighting, and murder.  The travesty of this is that when we participate in this we reduce Jesus to a get-out-of-hell-free card who endorses our own ideas on how to run the world.  “This feeds into a nationalized view of the Gospel and leads to a state-owned Jesus.” As a result, since around the 4th Century Jesus became Roman Jesus, then Byzantine Jesus, then European Jesus, then German Jesus, and now American Jesus.  Because of this, we have conscripted Jesus to fit our national agendas and I believe the church MUST reject this now more than ever.  We must understand Jesus, not as a nationalistic proponent of politics of the world, but we must re-understand, re-learn about the Jesus, the Prince of Peace who triumphs over idolatrous nationalism and stands directly against the ancient practices of violence and war.

Brian Zhand has some startling conclusions on this:

“Okay.  Let’s step back and take a look at where we stand as a people and a planet.  It’s easy to imagine that the world doesn’t really change – that it simply marches around the maypole of violence, trampling victims into the mud the same as it ever has.  But as true as that may be, something has changed. We are postsomething.  If nothign else we are post-1945 when the enlightenment dream of attainable utopia went up in smoke – literal smoke!  From the chimneys of Auschwitz to the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima.  After 1945, we lost our blind faith in the inevitability of human progress. A threshold was crossed, and something important changed when humanity gained possession of what previously only God possessed:  the capacity for complete annihilation.  In yielding to the temptation to harness the fundamental physics of the universe for the purpose of creating city-destroying bombs, have we again heard the serpent whisper, ‘You will be like God’?”

Oppenheimer, the father of the Atomic Bomb, upon witnessing it’s first successful test in the New Mexico desert quoted Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita and said, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” It was that day that humanity became gained the literal ability to be “destroyers of the world.”

Here’s my point:  in this Post-Holocaust, Post-Atomic civilization if we begin to believe that Jesus’ thoughts and teaching on peace are irrelevant in the age of genocide and nuclear armament, then we are guilty of inventing a false, unbiblical, untrue Jesus…and that leads to a completely irrelevant Nationalistically-tainted Christianity.

Here’s where this gets real.  Jesus has a conversation before his crucifixion with the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate.  Here’s the exchange as John records it:

³³ So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him,“Are you the King of the Jews?” ³⁴ Jesus answered, “Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?” ³⁵ Pilate answered, “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me. What have you done?” ³⁶ Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.” ³⁷ Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truthlistens to my voice.” ³⁸ Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” (John 18:33-38, ESV) 

See, in this we miss two things:  First, according to verse 36, Jesus Kingdom is NOT of this world.  That’s where He explains that if it were, an army of followers would rise up and defend Him…but that’s not the way of Jesus.  Second, Jesus’ teaching and life were so radically opposed to the Roman ideas that I’ll bet He was killed (from a purely political standpoint, but we know there was a spiritual reason that was primary) because He said that Caesar wasn’t lord, but He was.

It wasn’t the man who upset Rome, but the man’s ideas.  Pilate understood how powerful this idea was…and Rome knew the power of ideas.  Ideas that force change gradually are called progress, but ideas that cause rapid, pattern-shifting, culture moving change create something quite differing:  Revolution.

The powers that be hated that.  That is precisely what Pilate and the Jews hated about Jesus – the ideas he had were revolutionary and changed the power structure that favored them.  That still happens today, by the way.

So what has happened over the past 2,000 years that has caused those of us who confess that “Jesus is Lord” have created a religion that separates Jesus Christ, who died on the Cross for the sins of mankind, from the ideas of the same Jesus who just by existing threatened the structure of human civilization?

Jesus ultimately knew that Christianity would triumph…but not in the way we wish – not by force or violence.  It would triumph because of peace and love.  It would triumph not by the might of nations or the bombs of civilization, but in the selfless acts of love that cherish life, regard its sanctity and rally to protect it.

We cannot embrace a Jesus who endorses nations to war.  We cannot embrace a Jesus who wears an American Flag t-shirt. We cannot embrace empire…and we must repent and embrace the Kingdom of God.  We cannot, as a church, any longer afford to ignore the ideas of Jesus – the cost will be more than we can bear.

Blessings as we ponder this together. If this resonates with you, share it with those you love!

Scott