A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor's Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace

by Brian Zahnd

Though some may contest the point—and I’ve heard them do so for years—there is something profoundly unsettling about watching those who follow Jesus, the Prince of Peace, use weapons of warfare to kill others and still think they are somehow following Jesus. At the simplest level of evangelicalism—and by that I mean anyone who affirms salvation in Christ alone—it impossible for me to comprehend how a Christian can kill a non-Christian who is thereby prevented from turning to Christ, just as it is also beyond me how any Christian can kill another Christian at the orders of state military leaders. In both instances, the Christian renders to Caesar what is due only to Christ.

Our responsibility is not to chaplain the state but to call the state to repentance and to surrender to the King who is Lord. Our responsibility is to be an alternative to the state. Christians would do far more good for our country by learning not to look to DC for solutions but to the glorious Son of God, who loves us and gave himself for us and, in doing so, gave us a whole new way of life—one not shaped by the power of force but the force of the gospel.

The cross is the symbol of the politics of Jesus, and it is beginning to burn its way into the heart of so many in the church in the USA. We need it.

America is always right in war—I’d known that all of my life. Like many Americans, I had grown up believing that war was both inevitable in life and compatible with Christianity. So while America’s pastor prayed with America’s president in the White House and Wolf Blitzer gave the play-by-play, I ate pizza and watched a war on TV in my living room. It was better than Seinfeld!

Believing in the divinity of Jesus is the heart of Christian orthodoxy. But believing in the viability of Jesus’s ideas makes Christianity truly radical.

Divorcing Jesus from his ideas—especially divorcing Jesus from his political ideas—has been a huge problem that’s plagued the church from the fourth century onward. The problem is this: when we separate Jesus from his ideas for an alternative social structure, we inevitably succumb to the temptation to harness Jesus to our ideas—thus conferring upon our human political ideas an assumed divine endorsement.

And the result is that we reduce Jesus to being the Savior who guarantees our reservation in heaven while using him to endorse our own ideas about how to run the world. This feeds into a nationalized narrative of the gospel and leads to a state-owned Jesus. Thus, our understanding of Christ has mutated from Roman Jesus to Byzantine Jesus to German Jesus to American Jesus, etc. Conscripting Jesus to a nationalistic agenda creates a grotesque caricature of Christ that the church must reject—now more than ever!

We’ve now lived for more than a generation with the most haunting post-Holocaust/Hiroshima uncertainty: Can humanity possess the capacity for self-destruction and not resort to it? The jury is still out. But this much is certain—if we think the ideas of Jesus about peace are irrelevant in the age of genocide and nuclear weapons, we have invented an utterly irrelevant Christianity!

They don’t see the need to get the serious business of peacemaking mixed up with a religious figure—especially when the religion he inspired has so often been associated with violence and war. On the other hand, it too often seems that those who are most committed to the person of Jesus Christ see little need to get Jesus mixed up in the real-world work of peacemaking (which they view as slightly suspicious anyhow). Certainly the evangelical view of real-world peacemaking has been something like this: “Doesn’t Jesus have more important work to do?” 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. So the argument goes. But I think otherwise. Jesus Christ and the historical events of his crucifixion and resurrection are not to be separated from the ideas he preached about a kingdom of peace. Or let me say it this way: I believe in the Nazarene who one writer called “that preacher of peace.”

“All power is a form of violence over people.”

Surely an itinerant preacher from a provincial backwater poses no threat to the imperial might of Rome. Yet Pilate did see a potential threat in the revolutionary ideas of the Galilean.

When gradual change is perceived as positive and in general keeping with the status quo, we call it progress. But radical, paradigmatic change is something else, something more dangerous. We call it revolution. Revolutionary change is precisely what those in positions of privilege and power—people like Pilate—are most threatened by. This is why Yeshua and his ideas are perceived as dangerous.

If Yeshua had been content to confine himself to the dreamy world of afterlife expectations and had not harbored revolutionary ideas about human social structure, Pilate would have seen little reason to bother with Yeshua, much less crucify him. But Yeshua did have revolutionary ideas. And it was Yeshua’s ideas about an alternative arrangement of the world—an arrangement that might best be called peace—that resulted in his death by state-sponsored execution.

It seems we Christians have had a habitual tendency to separate Jesus from his ideas.

The catastrophe of church as vassal to the state would find its most grotesque expression in the medieval crusades when, under the banner of the cross, Christians killed in the name of Christ. The crusades are perhaps the most egregious example of how distorted Christianity can become when we separate Christ from his ideas.

For seventeen centuries Christianity has offered a gospel where we can accept Jesus as our personal Savior while largely ignoring his ideas about peace, violence, and human society. We have embraced a privatized, postmortem gospel that stresses Jesus dying for our sins but at the same time ignores his political ideas.

Miroslav Volf says: Pilate deserves our sympathies, not because he was a good though tragically mistaken man, but 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.2 This is how the wheels came off: once it was decided a Christian emperor wielding a “Christian sword” was a suitable way to run the world, the kingdom of God announced by Christ got relocated to a distant heaven or a far-off future, leaving Jesus out of a job as Savior of the world. Of course Constantinian Christianity couldn’t quite get away with simply dismissing Christ himself, so he was given the reduced role of saving souls and presiding over a religion of private piety. This is not to suggest that Christ isn’t the source of salvation of the human soul, but I am suggesting that the mission of Christ extends far beyond the narrow spectrum of private spirituality and afterlife expectations. Jesus actually intends to save the world! And by world, I mean God’s good creation and God’s original intent for human society.

I still have hope. Why? Because of the way the Jesus story is told. On Good Friday, the procurator of superpower ideology and the priests of colluding religion rejected his ideas. He was condemned, sentenced, tortured, executed, pronounced dead, and buried in a tomb bearing the imperial seal of Rome. Strike up another victory for the Empire. The End. Yet that’s not the end of the story … On Easter Sunday, the ideas of that preacher of peace were vindicated by the power of resurrection! Yes! Easter Sunday and the resurrection of Jesus changed everything! If Jesus had remained in the tomb with its stone sealed by the imperial authority of Rome, Jesus’s ideas would have died with him. But the resurrection changes all of that. The resurrection is not only God’s vindication of his Son; it is the vindication of all Jesus taught. Easter Sunday is nothing less than the triumph of the peaceable kingdom of Christ. Easter changes everything. Easter is the hope of the world, the dawn of a new age, the rising of the New Jerusalem on the horizon of humanity’s burned-out landscape. Easter is God saying once again, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him!”

Taken seriously this is a bold claim (and among skeptics a debatable one): Jesus is the Savior of the world. But this is what our Christian Scriptures tell us. (Explicitly in John 4:42 and 1 John 4:14, and in other ways throughout the entire New Testament.) Yet for that thought to make us happy enough to soar above the dismal status quo, it has to be liberated from the emaciated world of trite religious cliché. 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. But this is not what the apostle John meant when he spoke of Jesus as the Savior of the world. John was talking about something much bigger and much more expansive than individuals “accepting Jesus as their personal Savior.” John (and the rest of the apostolic writers of the New Testament) presented Christ as the Savior of God’s good creation and the restorer of God’s original intention for human society. This is the gospel! This is the apostolic gospel, and it’s a gospel that gives us an eschatology of hope. By eschatology of hope, I mean a Christian vision for the future that is redemptive and not destructive—more anticipating the New Jerusalem and less obsessed with Armageddon.

Among the important things my dad taught me was this jewel of counterintuitive wisdom: the majority is almost always wrong. I remember him saying that to me on many occasions. It was a warning to be suspicious of the crowd, to not trust the crowd, to resist going along with the crowd. My father, as a judge and a man of politics, knew that one of the responsibilities of a just democracy is to protect the minority from the majority. And why? Because the majority is not as interested in truth as it is in power—and power in the hands of a crowd is often used for revenge and scapegoating. The disturbing truth is that a crowd can too easily become a lynch mob, whether literally or metaphorically.

course lynch mobs never think of themselves as such—instead they imagine they are simply good people committed to truth and justice, taking a stand against a great evil. The crowd is incapable of entertaining the idea that it may be a great evil. Evil must masquerade as good; it’s the only disguise it can use … so that’s what it does. “Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14 ESV). Crowds never think they are doing evil. But then, crowds are easily duped. Crowds are not wise. Crowds don’t think. Crowds only react … usually to fear.

We need more peacemakers. It’s the peacemakers who save the world from the unthinking mob.

A crowd under the influence of an angry, vengeful spirit is the most dangerous thing in the world.

This is why if you follow an angry crowd—even if it calls itself Christian—you are likely to be wrong. Even if you’re not wrong in the actual issue, you will probably be wrong in spirit. So never follow an angry crowd.

To follow Christ is to differ from the crowd. To differ from the crowd is to be controversial. To be controversial by differing from the crowd is to run the risk of becoming a scapegoat yourself. And this is exactly what Jesus became—the innocent scapegoat who ended the injustice of scapegoating. Jesus became the sacrificial victim who ended violent sacrifice. In dying at the hands of our sins, Jesus saved us from scapegoating and violent sacrifice. Jesus will never lead a crowd.

Even these many years later I can remember the names of those most often selected to be the scapegoat. Through no fault of their own, they were forced to bear the insecurities—the “sins,” if you will—of the rest. It may seem like nothing more than “kids being kids,” but it’s not innocent. It is, in fact, an adolescent inauguration into the demonic. The fear of being exposed … the group selection of the one to be picked on … the relief that it’s not you … the bonding achieved by the crowd’s cruelty to the scapegoat. … All of this is what the satanic is about. It’s also what human sacrifice is about. Unfortunately, as we leave the playground for adulthood, we don’t leave scapegoating behind; we just become more sophisticated with it. But scapegoating is one of the evils Jesus came to save the world from. He did it by becoming the ultimate scapegoat—by dying for our sins.

The word scapegoat has its origins in the Bible. In Leviticus chapter 16, the King James Version of the Bible translates the Hebrew word azazel as “scapegoat.” The azazel was the banished goat that carried the sins of Israel into the wilderness. In other words, an innocent animal was blamed and banished and in this manner bore the sins of Israel. (Which was a vast improvement over human sacrifice!) Over time, scapegoat came to mean a person blamed by the crowd for the wrongdoing of others. But we must face the truth that scapegoating, though effective in producing peace and unity in the community, is a sin to be saved from. What is sinful about it is that an innocent person (or minority group) suffers for the sins of the crowd. It is untruth. It is injustice.

The gospel narratives make it clear that Jesus filled the role of scapegoat. With his crucifixion Jesus defused the powder keg of tension that had been building in Jerusalem during the governorship of Pontius Pilate. Jesus was a scapegoat for Pilate and Caiaphas and for the dangerous crowds they both sought to appease. We even have the curious remark about how the Roman governor Pontius Pilate and the Jewish king Herod Agrippa became friends around their mockery and condemnation of Jesus. Even Herod with his soldiers treated him with contempt and mocked him; then he put an elegant robe on him, and sent him back to Pilate. That same day Herod and Pilate became friends; before this they had been enemies. (Luke 23:11–12) Do you see how it works? These two powerful adversaries—Pilate and Herod—found a way to neutralize their enmity and become friends. They did it by treating Jesus with cruelty and contempt, by making him an object of mockery. Pilate and Herod found a scapegoat for their fear and loathing. Through the “miracle” of the scapegoat, these...

By becoming a scapegoat, Jesus dragged the demonic practice of scapegoating into the light where it could be named, sham...

We must not continue to build Babylon upon the blood of sacrificial victims—instead we are invited to join the New Jerusalem built on the blood of Jesus. Jesus is the Lamb of God who became the final scapegoat. Jesus is the sacrificial victim who shows us that sacrifice is not what God wants. God wants mercy, not sacrifice; forgiveness, not scapegoating. Jesus is the Good Shepherd who forgives us and calls us out of the crowd and into his little flock.

The majority is almost always wrong. The crowd is untruth. Scapegoating is demonic.

As ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has said: Unless our actions are founded on love, rather than on fear, they will never be able to overcome fanaticism or fundamentalism. … Only those who know—deep inside the heart—that they are loved can be true peacemakers. Our peacemaking ultimately stems from and relates to love for all of God’s creation, both human and environmental. In this form, peacemaking is a radical response to policies of violence and the politics of power.

Christ is against the crowd because of the crowd’s deep inhumanity and dark allegiance with the satan. But Christ calls to each soul lost in the crowd, seeking to gather all of us to his little flock—a flock redeemed from the demonic crowd learning to live beyond fear and without a need for scapegoats. The flock liberated from fear, living together peaceably, never building unity on a sacrificial “them”—this is the universal flock of the Prince of Peace. That the world might become the little flock of Christ is the peacemaker’s hopeful dream.

René Girard, Sacrifice

But 9/11 was also a test. It was a test for America in ways that we are still coming to terms with. It’s a test for our democracy as we struggle to balance security and liberty. In different ways 9/11 was a test for the American church. Will we succumb to the temptation of scapegoating? Will the church scapegoat Muslims in the twenty-first century as the church scapegoated Jews in previous centuries?

We are mad if we imagine that the God of love revealed in Jesus will bless us in waging war. That is madness! But it’s a pervasive and beloved madness. And I know from experience that it’s hard to oppose a crowd fuming for war. When we have identified a hated enemy, we want to be assured that God is on our side as we go to war with our enemy. And we believe that surely God is on our side, because we feel so unified in the moment. Everyone knows the nation is most unified in times of war. 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.

Jesus didn’t seem very interested in exposing symptomatic sinners—tax collectors, drunkards, prostitutes, etc. Instead Jesus challenged the guardians of systemic sin—the power brokers of religion and politics.

Look at the borders on a map. What are they? Nearly always they are the boundaries of ancient enmities where the blood of hated victims has been shed. Lines on a map, far from being benign, tell a bloody tale. At the dawn of human civilization, tribal identities were formed around a shared hostility toward an enemy “them.” Contrary to what Rousseau romantically imaged, anthropologists insist there was never a time when human communities lived peaceably and without war. The shared identity necessary for organizing the world was based around a common hatred—a common hatred hallowed in collective murder.

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. It’s an evil concealed behind flags, anthems, monuments, memorials, and the rhetoric of those who have won their wars. The hidden foundation of hatred and murder is why world history is little more than the record of who killed who, where, when, and what for.

Jesus’s call to love our enemies presents us with a problem—a problem that goes well beyond the challenge we find in trying to live out an ethic of enemy love on a personal level. How can a nation exist without hating its enemies? If nations can’t hate and scapegoat their enemies, how can they cohere? If societies can’t project blame onto a hated “other,” how can they keep from turning on themselves? Jesus’s answer is as simple as it is revolutionary: instead of an arrangement around hate and violence, the world is now to be arranged around love and forgiveness. The fear of our enemy and the pain of being wronged is not to be transferred through blame but dispelled through forgiveness. Unity is not to be built around the practice of scapegoating a hated victim but around the practice of loving your neighbor as yourself—even if your neighbor is your enemy. Jesus was trying to lead humanity into the deep truth that there is no “them;” there is only us.

The cross is shock therapy for a world addicted to solving its problems through violence. The cross shocks us into the devastating realization that our system of violence murdered God!

The crowd never believes in Jesus. Only the little flock that accepts its vulnerability can believe in Jesus. If you tell those rushing to war that their hatred of enemies and their plan for the organized killing of enemies is evil, the crowd will hate you. War is sacred. It lies beyond critique. To critique it is blasphemy. The crowd hates blasphemy. The crowd wants to kill blasphemers. The crowd knows that the criticism of their violence is blasphemy because they know their cause is just. They believe it. And from their perspective their cause is just. They can prove it. Both sides can prove it.

It’s hard to believe in Jesus! To believe in Jesus fully, to believe in Jesus as more than a personal Savior, to believe in Jesus without qualifications, to believe in Jesus as God’s way to run the world, to believe in Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount, to believe in Jesus as the unimagined solution for a world gone wrong and not as merely chaplain or cheerleader for our favorite version of the status quo is very hard to do. It also very controversial.

But a few years later, when I encountered Jesus in a fresh and new way, when I began to take the “words in red” seriously, when I repented for my war prayers and war sermons, when I started preaching peace sermons, then criticism came. Oh, believe me, it came! People left the church over my “new direction.” My new direction was that I began to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously. My new direction was that I began to see the kingdom of Christ as God’s alternative society. My new direction was to believe that peacemakers are the children of God.

I learned that 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.

For the Judean crowd gathering around Jesus, freedom was something primarily political. Their essential idea of freedom was that it was a form of power, especially power over and against national enemies. To come straight out and say it, freedom was a euphemism for lethal power—the power to kill. When you had power to kill your enemies and the will to do so, you were “free.” When you had the biggest, most well-trained, best-equipped, most lethal military—then you were “free.” But it’s not freedom in the form of lethal power that Jesus sees as true freedom. For Jesus, freedom is liberation from sin—especially the particular sin of collective killing. Do you think I’m overreaching to make this point? Am I inserting my own ideas into the text? Have I arbitrarily identified collective killing as the sin Jesus was talking about in John 8? Hardly! Listen to what Jesus said to the Judeans in response to their protest that they are freedom-loving children of Abraham and notice how Jesus brings up the issue of killing: “I know you are descendents of Abraham; yet you look for an opportunity to kill me, because there is no place in you for my word” (John 8:37).

Jesus knew that what lies at the foundation of the crowd’s understanding of “freedom” was violence and murder. For the crowd, freedom was just another word for having the power to kill their enemies. The crowd said, “We’re talking about freedom,” but Jesus said, “No, you’re talking about killing.” Jesus was unmasking what lay behind the crowd’s euphemistic use of words like freedom. Jesus was telling them a truth about themselves that had long been hidden from them—a truth they really don’t want to know.

For the crowd, freedom was just another word for killing. For Jesus, freedom was another word for love.

Violence cannot tolerate the presence of one who owes it nothing. It’s why everyone at a stoning needs to throw a rock. If someone at a stoning doesn’t participate, they are in danger of becoming the next victim. For the illusion of innocence to work, everyone must participate in the collective murder. The one who won’t throw a rock becomes a prophet shining light on the evil of stoning. The community must then either repent or stone the prophet.

Indeed, an angry crowd is the most dangerous thing in the world! What finally sent the crowd over the edge was Jesus’s claim that he was what Abraham was looking for. Abraham was looking for a city not built by Cain. Abraham was looking for a city whose architect was God. Abraham was looking for a way out of the vicious cycle of reciprocal violence masquerading under the guise of freedom. Abraham was looking for a way of structuring human civilization that came not from the satan but from the eternal I AM. What Abraham was looking for, and by faith had caught a fleeting glimpse of, was what Jesus was bringing! Jesus was bringing the reign and rule of God where freedom would not be a cover for killing but an expression of self-giving love.