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

by Brian Zahnd

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.

Conscripting Jesus to a nationalistic agenda creates a grotesque caricature of Christ that the church must reject—now more than ever!

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

René Girard says it like this: Violence is the enslavement of a pervasive lie; it imposes upon men a falsified vision not only of God but also of everything else. And that is indeed why it is a closed kingdom. Escaping from violence is escaping from this kingdom into another kingdom, whose existence the majority of people do not even suspect. This is the Kingdom of love, which is also the domain of the true God, the Father of Jesus, of whom the prisoners of violence cannot even conceive.6

Far too many American Christians embrace a faulty, half-baked, doom-oriented, hyperviolent eschatology, popularized in Christian fiction (of all things!), that envisions God as saving parts of people for a nonspatial, nontemporal existence in a Platonic “heaven” while kicking his own good creation into the garbage can! Framed by this kind of world-despairing eschatology, evangelism comes to resemble something like trying to push people onto the last chopper out of Saigon. But this is an evangelism that bears no resemblance to the apostolic gospel proclaimed in the book of Acts. Christianity’s first apostles evangelized, not by trying to sign people up for an apocalyptic evacuation, but by announcing the arrival of a new world order. The apostles understood the kingdom of God as a new arrangement of human society where Jesus is the world’s true King. Put simply: because Jesus is Lord, the world is to be redeemed and not left in ruin.

Salvation is a restoration project, not an evacuation project! Or as Thomas Merton put it, “Eschatology is not an invitation to escape into a private heaven: it is a call to transfigure the evil and stricken world.”3

Cain obviously didn’t think he was his brother’s caregiver. And neither did Pharaoh or Caesar—the heirs of Cain’s city. But 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.”

Tikkun olam. Repairing the world. Healing wastelands. Laboring to make a dying world livable again. This is the vision of the apostles and prophets. This is the prophetic paradigm the people of God are to coordinate their theology and lives with. We are not to be macabre Christians lusting for destruction and rejoicing at the latest rumor of war. 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.

Søren Kierkegaard was saying the same thing my father taught me when he made this succinct observation: “The crowd is untruth.”

Kierkegaard then goes on to further indict the crowd with this stinging critique, “The crowd is indeed untruth. Christ was crucified because he would have nothing to do with the crowd.”

As Kierkegaard said, “To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions.”2

“To have a scapegoat is not to know that one has one. As soon as the scapegoat is revealed and named as such, it loses its power.”

As the climax of the Hebrew prophetic tradition, Jesus did not merely testify against symptomatic sin—in fact, he spent very little time doing this. Rather, Jesus struck at the heart of the systemic evil that has provided the foundation for human civilization. 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. Jesus knew that tax collectors were greedy and violent, but he was more interested in focusing his prophetic critique on the foundations of greed and violence that inevitably produce greedy and violent people. Sinful tax collectors were merely a symptom of a sinful but hidden system. The sinful and hidden system of greed and violence is “the world.” Jesus, in his prophetic preaching, was shining a light on the dark foundation of the world: “I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world” (Matt. 13:35).

That’s the problem with the bumper-sticker approach to the Bible—preaching devolves into sloganeering.

stoning is a way for the community to participate in collective murder and lie to itself about it.

Jesus brings us the truth that will set us free. The truth is that God is love and light. The truth is that our enemies are really our alienated brothers. The truth is there is no “them”—there is only us. The truth is that freedom is love, not power. The truth is there is another way to arrange human civilization than what we have known. The truth is that the way of war is a lie. It comes from the father of lies, the father of murder.

The truth is: God is love and our enemies are our brothers. Freedom is just another word for what happens to us when we live in the light of that truth. Do we have the courage to embrace the truth that will set us free? Or would we rather keep throwing rocks at those who tell us that the way of war and violence is a lie that keeps us enslaved to sin and Satan?

The world has proclaimed freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs: only slavery and suicide! For the world says: “You have needs, therefore satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the noblest and richest men. Do not be afraid to satisfy them, but even increase them”—this is the current teaching of the world. And in this they see freedom. But what comes of this right to increase one’s needs? For the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; for the poor, envy and murder. … And no wonder that instead of freedom they have fallen into slavery.3 Dostoevsky is simply echoing what Jesus said long before him.

Violence in the name of freedom always circles back to hell. Jesus is the way out. In the midst of our sanctioned practice of collective killing done in the name of freedom, Jesus comes and speaks the truth that will set us free.

Jesus brings freedom to the world in a way different from Pharaoh, Alexander, Caesar, Muhammad, Napoleon, and Patton. Jesus sets us free not by killing enemies but by being killed by enemies and forgiving them … by whom I mean us. Forgiveness and cosuffering love is the truth that sets us free—free from the false freedom inflicted by swords ancient and modern.

The moment the church took to the Crusades in order to fight Muslims, it had already surrendered its vision of Jesus to the model of Muhammad.

I pledge no allegiance to elephants or donkeys, only to the Lamb.