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

by Brian Zahnd

How I reached the point where I could weep over war and repent of any fascination with it is part of what this book is about—it’s the story of how I left the paradigms of nationalism, militarism, and violence as a legitimate means of shaping the world to embrace the radical alternative of the gospel of peace.

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. With little awareness of what we are doing, we find ourselves in collusion with the principalities and powers to keep the world in lockstep with the ancient choreography of violence, war, and death.

we reduce Jesus to being the Savior who guarantees our reservation in heaven while using him to endorse our own i...

Understanding Jesus as the Prince of Peace who transcends idolatrous nationalism and overcomes the archaic ways of war is an imperative the church must at last begin to take seriously.

In yielding to the temptation to harness the fundamental physics of the universe for the purpose of building city-destroying bombs, have we again heard the serpent whisper, “You will be like God”?

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!

people committed to the idea of peace as a real alternative to the paradigms of power and violence often see Jesus and his followers as peripheral to the cause of peace. 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.

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.

fascinating novel The Master and Margarita, Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov

Pontius Pilate

belonged to a system of power that had produced the greatest economic and military superpower the world had ever known.

It wasn’t so much the man who upset the Roman governor, but his ideas. Pilate understood the nature of ideas. Ideas are powerful, because they are the engines of potential change—and change can be dangerous. 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.

Jesus always understood that Rome (and the colluding religious powers) would initially refuse to be converted and would crucify him for his ideas. Jesus called these revolutionary ideas “the kingdom of God.” Jesus also believed that ultimately the kingdom of God would triumph … but not through violence.

Almost overnight the church found itself in a chaplaincy role to the empire and on a trajectory that would lead to the catastrophe of a deeply compromised Christianity.

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.

This leaves us free to run the world the way it has always been run: by the power of the sword.

It was Jesus’s ideas about truth and freedom that made him dangerous to the principalities and powers. But today our gospel isn’t very dangerous. It’s been tamed and domesticated. If Jesus of Nazareth had preached the

paper-thin version of what passes for the “gospel” today—a shrunken, postmortem promise of going to heaven when you die—Pilate would have shrugged his shoulders and released the Nazarene, warning him not to get mixed up in the affairs of the real world.

while we believe in Jesus as Savior of the private soul, we remain largely unconvinced about his ideas for saving the world.

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.

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.

In short the problem is this: far too few who believe in the risen Christ actually believe in his revolutionary ideas. There is a sense in which we create religion as a category to keep Jesus from meddling with our cherished ideas about nationalism, freedom, and war.

Yeshua Ha-Notsri (Jesus of Nazareth) and Bar-Abba (Barabbas).

Caiaphas gave Pilate his answer: “The Sanhedrin requests the release of Bar-Abba.” The Sanhedrin had made its choice: they wanted a violent messiah, not a peaceful messiah.

“If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!

you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God. (Luke 19:41–44)

Their horrible fate could have been avoided, but only if they were willing to renounce the paradigm of violence and see the world through the new paradigm offered by “that preacher of peace.” Sadly, they clung to the old

lie. And not one stone was left upon another.

Do we recognize the things that make for peace? Do we recognize the visitation from God in the life and message of Immanuel?

As Walter Brueggemann describes our situation, “Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing.”

Wars continue to define us. Freedom remains a euphemism for the power to kill. Violence is still viewed as a legitimate way of shaping our world.

On Easter Sunday, the ideas of that preacher of peace were vindicated by the power of resurrection!

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.

Isn’t it time we abandoned our de facto agreement with Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, and their worn-out, death-dealing ideas?

Isn’t it time for the stranglehold of the status quo to give way to the possibilities of prophetic imagination? Isn’t it time for the peaceable kingdom of Christ to be considered a viable option in the here and now and not forever relocated to the “sweet by-and-by”?

At the very least, we ought to take a fresh look and evaluate with new eyes what Jesus of Nazareth actually taught about the dark foundations of human civilization and the alternative he offers in the kingdom of God.

it’s not that hard either—as long as you are willing to reexamine everything in the light of Christ.

Once you extricate Jesus from subservience to a nationalistic agenda, you can rethink everything in the light of Christ.

great and powerful nations shape God into their own image; great and powerful nations conscript God to do their bidding. Great and powerful nations use the idea and vocabulary of God to legitimize their own agenda. Great and powerful nations project God as a personification of their own national interests.

This is not to say that everything great and powerful nations do is evil—far from it. They maintain order, provide security, produce industry, maintain civility, educate the populace, preserve culture, and so on. But neither are they to be confused with the kingdom of Christ.

God has appointed the nations with their rich diversity and unique cultures. Nations are essential for how a person becomes a person with a particular language, identity, and culture. What God is opposed to, and has always been opposed to, is empire—rich and powerful nations that believe they have a divine right to rule other nations and a manifest destiny to shape the world according to their agenda.

God has made his Son the true, present, and eternal emperor of the world. With their nationalistic agendas the empires of this age make themselves a rival to Christ.

Girard is certainly right when he says the majority of people don’t even

suspect the existence of a kingdom that is sustained by the love of God and operates without violence.

I think I caught a glimpse of truth out of the corner of my eye. A ghost, a whisper, a suspicion, a subtle and subversive rumor. So dangerous that every army would be commanded to march against it; so beautiful that it would drive those who see it to madness or sanity.

Have we been so blinded by the bright lights of advertisers’ lies that the only true vision is peripheral vision?

So when Christ came he did not bring another empire of men built upon a lie as the liar in the desert tempted. Instead he brought the Empire of God, Good News! The government of justice and mercy, grace and truth, and the truth is every empire of man is built upon a lie,

Religion as the whore of Empire. This is what killed Jesus. And Paul. And Peter. And Polycarp. And Huss. And Bonhoeffer.