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

by Brian Zahnd

It seems that human civilization is incapable of advancing without shooting brothers in the back.

“But just look at the world! How has Jesus made the world any different than it’s always been?” It’s a fair question and one we should tackle head-on. So let’s take the question at face value and ponder just how Jesus has made the world different from what it’s always been.

It may be that we are so immersed in the influence of Christ that we fail to recognize it.

Our present age without the life of the one who reset the calendar would be, I have no doubt, a kind of hell on earth.

It appears that there is something in our collective imagination that is darkly aware of the capacity we possess for unprecedented destruction.

Jesus’s achievement in giving humanity

an ethic of mercy through the incarnation of love has already done much to save the world from the fate of a self-inflicted Gehenna.

The incarnation has, without question, made the world a more humane place by raising the dignity of every individual.

it is precisely because of Calvary that we call these things atrocities and not normalcy. Without the life of Christ, would we call massacres and genocides atrocities, or would we call them just the way things are? Did the pagan world have the ethical resources to produce what has come to be known as “human rights”?

In the pre-Christian pagan world, what we now call atrocities were largely seen as simply the triumph of the strong over the weak, the way of nature, the way things ought to be.

A world that had never seen a Christmas and never celebrated an Easter would still be a pagan world bereft of compassion for the poor,...

the victimized—the very people Jesus brings out of the shadows through his life and teaching. Jesus further establishes compassion as the way we are to relate to the weak and suffering when he makes our treatment of them the criterio...

Jesus has taught us to see the sick, the poor, the prisoner, and the stranger as his brothers … as our brothers … as Jesus himself! This is something entirely new. It was not something bequeathed to us by the pagan world. It was not something the pagan world was capable of producing.

in reconfiguring the world around love instead of competition, Jesus answered Cain’s question with a resounding yes … and then said to us, “And here are your brothers; take care of them.”

It is naive and historically unwarranted to think that this kind of compassion—care for those least able to contribute to the welfare of the community—would be regarded as a virtue without Jesus Christ.

David Bentley Hart

It is simply the case that we distant children of the pagans would not be able to believe in any of these things—they would never have occurred to us—had our ancestors not once believed that God is love, that charity is the foundation of all virtues, that all of us are equal before the eyes of God, that to fail to feed the hungry

or care for the suffering is to sin against Christ, and that Christ laid down his life for the least of his brethren.

Jesus has saved the world from the self-centered, brother-denying ethic witnessed in Cain—an ethic that viewed the helpless as undeserving of aid and unworthy of compassion.

After all it was the followers of Jesus who pioneered such radical innovations as hospitals, orphanages, leprosariums, almshouses, relief for the poor, and public education.

I’m still looking for the Nietzsche hospital or the Voltaire children’s home.

I’m not suggesting that a world reimagined according to mercy captures all of what it means for Jesus to be the Savior of the world … but it’s part of it.

What the city of Cain in its Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman expressions excelled at was building an empire by making victims out of those who got in the way.

Cain forgets Abel. Cain forgets that Abel existed, that Abel was human, and most of all Cain forgets that Abel was his brother.

Today the victims of all systems of greed, injustice, and exploitation are given a face—and it is the face of Christ. That Jesus won his kingdom in a way that gives him solidarity with victims everywhere is something that would have been utterly inconceivable to Ramesses the Great, Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar.

Christ has forever altered the way the world looks at those victimized by the ambitious and powerful.

The post-Easter world has come to have an instinctual empathy for the victim. This is something new. This is a phenomenon that never existed before the world began to see the face of Christ in the face of nameless victims. This doesn’t mean that principalities and powers no longer victimize, but it does mean that they can no longer do so with impunity—the cross of Christ exposes their exploitation of the innocent as shameful.

The Advent of Christ and the spread of Christianity has done much to make the world a more humane and livable place by nurturing a concern for the oppressed and bringing to light those confined to a forgotten underclass.

abolition of slavery—wherever

Eastern Europe was

Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela

The idea that human dignity is to be accorded to every person no matter their social status is an

idea that would be impossible without the life of Christ. This is part of how Jesus repairs the world.

Laboring in the name of Jesus to make the world a better place does not undermine faith in the Second Coming; rather it takes seriously God’s intention to repair the world through Christ and anticipates this hope by moving even now in the direction of restoration.

Tikkun olam. Repairing the world.

It’s high time that a morbid fascination with a supposed unalterable script of God-sanctioned–end-time–hyperviolence be once and for all left behind.

A secret (or not-so-secret) longing for the world’s violent destruction is grossly unbecoming to the followers of the Lamb.

Among the important things my dad taught me was this jewel of counterintuitive wisdom: the majority is almost always wrong.

It was a warning to be suspicious of the crowd, to not trust the crowd, to resist going along with the crowd.

one of the responsibilities of a just democracy is to protect the minor...

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 ...

The crowd is incapable of entertaining the idea that it may be a great evil.

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.

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

My father was a peacemaker. He believed in civil discourse. He believed in respectful dialogue.

sometimes compromise for the sake of finding common ground is a nobl...

to be a peacemaker often involves dissenting from the majority, especially from the “crowd,” and most...

The angry crowd wants only to assert its will, and this is often done in the destructive form of revenge and scapegoating. The angry crowd is cruel, stupid, and dange...

The peacemaker is the one who tries to create space fo...

Sadly, this is why so many of the great peacemakers of history have ended up as martyrs—from Jesus to Ga...