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by
Brian Zahnd
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December 28 - December 31, 2020
So let me declare from the very beginning: I believe in Jesus Christ!
According to this view, Christianity is mostly about the spiritual work of saving souls for an afterlife in heaven, and Jesus’s ideas about peace can be put on hold until the age to come.
But it's not my job to save souls, in fact I cant! Byt I can provide an example of what God can do with a soul He saves ... By living out Jesus' ideals
the mission of Christ extends far beyond the narrow spectrum of private spirituality and afterlife expectations.
Have we been so blinded by the bright lights of advertisers’ lies that the only true vision is peripheral vision?
The Empire of God converts the hearts of men one at a time.
I had to admit the apostles did not preach the gospel the way I was preaching it. (“Pray the sinner’s prayer so you can go to heaven when you die.”) In fact, in the eight gospel sermons found in the book of Acts, not one of them is based on afterlife issues!
If what we mean by “Jesus saves the world” gets reduced to “saved people go to heaven when they die,” then Jesus is simply the one who saves us from the world, not the Savior of the world.
When vicious competition and blind commitment to tribalism become more valued than the brotherhood of shared humanity, we let Satan loose in our midst.
If we believe the lie that they are “not like us,” we are capable of becoming murderers and monsters.
Of course I can hear the skeptics howl! They will point out that the world has seen plenty of atrocities since the advent of Christ. Indeed. But what skeptics often fail to realize is that it is precisely because of Calvary that we call these things atrocities and not normalcy.
Evil must masquerade as good; it’s the only disguise it can use … so that’s what it does.
and most of all from the angry crowd. The angry crowd wants only to assert its will, and this is often done in the destructive form of revenge and scapegoating.
But the cross shames the ancient deception that freedom and justice can be attained by killing.
We are mad if we imagine that the God of love revealed in Jesus will bless us in waging war. That is madness!
And we believe that surely God is on our side, because we feel so unified in the moment.
Because we're SO righteous!
Nothing unites a nation like war. But what’s so tragic is when Christian leaders pretend that a rally around the war god is compatible with worshipping the God revealed in Jesus Christ.
the disturbing truth is this—it’s hard to believe in Jesus.
our default response to this portion of the Sermon on the Mount is to craft exemptions, we might give the impression that we really don’t believe in Jesus’s ideas of nonviolent resistance and enemy love at all.
The Messiah was to be a conqueror like Joshua, a warrior like David, an avenger like Judah Maccabaeus. But Jesus kept talking about forgiveness, loving enemies, turning the other cheek.
Sinful tax collectors were merely a symptom of a sinful but hidden system.
They needed to kill, but they also needed to believe that killing was good. This is the basic (though hidden) political foundation of the world. It’s also evil. It’s an evil so well hidden that we hardly ever see it as evil.
Jesus was trying to lead humanity into the deep truth that there is no “them;” there is only us.
it is much easier to unite people around a Jesus who hates our enemies and blesses our wars than it is to unite people around a Jesus who calls us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.
And they’re good people.
You think?
Abraham abandoned the idea of killing in the name of God. This is what Jesus was talking about! This is what Abraham did!
The freedom that comes from God is not power to kill, but the choice to love.
When your city is built upon violence, freedom is just another word for killing your brother. But when your city is built upon love, freedom is just another word for being your brother’s keeper.
If we carefully examine how we use the word freedom, it becomes apparent that we use it to sanction our perceived right to pursue happiness in a self-interested fashion.
Labels are often a way to avoid thinking. “Oh, he’s one of those.” Case closed.
By making peace primarily a privatized spiritual peace, we are free to carry the banners of war down the road and keep the world as it’s always been—just one more war away from peace.
Huck Finn had been shaped by the Christianity he’d found in his Missouri Sunday school—a Christianity focused on heaven in the afterlife while preserving the status quo of the here and now.
The narrow gate is not a sinner’s prayer; the narrow gate is the practice of the Jesus way.
when I make the seminal Christian confession “Jesus is Lord,” I’m not just expressing something about my personal spiritual life; I’m also making a revolutionary political statement.
what I’ve learned through bitter experience is that a lot of people don’t want the game changed. They want to win the game—not change the game.
(This was the essence of the third wilderness temptation: to bow down to Satan in order to receive dominion over the nations. It was the temptation to become the latest Pharaoh, the latest Caesar, the latest beast.)
Jesus is now reigning over the nations, but we do not yet see the fullness of a world made right.
The real problem with empires is the hubris that impels them to impinge upon the sovereignty of God by seeking to rule other nations.
Jesus would not torture and kill his enemies; he would be tortured and killed … and forgive his enemies.
There is no them; there is only us.
