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by
Brian Zahnd
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January 10 - January 12, 2019
But I also believe in Jesus’s ideas—the ideas he preached about the peaceable kingdom of God. And that’s what makes me a radical Christian. 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.
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.
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!
Yet Pilate did see a potential threat in the revolutionary ideas of the Galilean. 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.
This bifurcation between Jesus and his political ideas has a history—it can be traced back to the early fourth century when Christianity first attained favored status in the Roman Empire. In October of 312, the Roman general Constantine came to power after winning a decisive battle in which he used Christian symbols as a fetish, placing them as talismans upon the weapons of war. (The incongruence is absolutely stunning!) Having emerged victorious in a Roman civil war and securing his position as emperor, Constantine attributed his military victory to the Christian God. In short order, the
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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.
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
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.
As Walter Brueggemann describes our situation, “Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing.”4
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!”
There are no “Christian nations” in the political sense. The risen Christ does have a “nation” (see Matt. 21:43), but it’s not a nationalized body politic, rather it’s the baptized body of Messiah!
It’s not that God is opposed to nations—he’s not.
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.
Jesus is not a heavenly conductor handing out tickets to heaven. Jesus is the carpenter who repairs, renovates, and restores God’s good world.
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.”
Tikkun olam is the idea that although the world is broken, it is not beyond repair—that it’s God’s intention to work through humanity in order to repair his creation.
“We are forbidden to despair of the world as the place which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted.”
Of course tikkun olam is properly a Jewish concept, but it is a Jewish concept that Christians can and should embrace. A Christian understanding of tikkun olam is that God is restoring all things through Jesus Christ.
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.”
Agriculture-based civilization was a double-edged sword.
An agriculture-based economy introduced the new concept of land ownership, and once land could be owned, it could be coveted and fought over. This propelled civilization down the road to tribalistic social structure.
In the Bible the genesis of homicide is told like this: Cain, the tiller of the ground, met his sheep-tending brother, Abel, in a field. Was there a dispute over land? Cain killed his brother and then lied to God (and himself) about what he had done. After the murder Cain ventured east of Eden to build the first city. There you have it—human civilization founded in murder. And the rest is history. Literally.
In a world that spills the blood of the innocent, it’s easy to despair. But it’s the world Abel, Ötzi, and Neda were slain in that Jesus came to save.
It works like this: once the world came to see Christ’s death upon the cross as an act of cosuffering love and an alternative to violent revenge, it introduced a saving grace that helped mitigate man’s inhumanity to man. Nothing has done more to confer dignity upon the individual person than the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. If God can become human, then we must reconsider how we treat our fellow humans. The incarnation has, without question, made the world a more humane place by raising the dignity of every individual.
There’s always another Armageddon looming on the horizon, threatening to perpetuate the bloody ways of Cain and throw more Abels in a mass grave. But we are not to cooperate with that vision. We are to resist it. We are to anticipate a future created by the Prince of Peace through the very lives we live. We are to work in concert with Jesus Christ as he labors to repair the world. Yes, tikkun olam!
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.
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.
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.”
The crowd loves their violent heroes. The crowd is predisposed to believe in the idea that “freedom and justice” can be achieved by violence.
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. Never!
Jesus loves you, but he may not love the crowd you have aligned yourself with.
“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.”
The majority is almost always wrong. The crowd is untruth. Scapegoating is demonic.
We don’t belong to the fear-based crowd desperate to control others through political power. We’ve been liberated from that worn-out paradigm. We don’t need to manage our fear like that anymore. We’ve heard Jesus tell us not to be afraid because it’s the Father’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom. Receiving God’s government as a sheer gift of grace liberates us from the anxious drive to fight for “our rights.” Because we pray, “Thy kingdom come,” we don’t have to desperately clutch to some mythical past. We can believe in the future. Dread gives way to hope.
Unless our actions are founded on love, rather than on fear, they will never be able to overcome fanaticism or fundamentalism. …
We forget that when we see Christ dead upon the cross, we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies.
Which is why, I suspect, for so long, the Gospels have been treated as mere narratives and have not been taken seriously as theological documents in their own right. We want to hear how Jesus was born in Bethlehem, died on the cross, and rose again on the third day. We use these historical bits as the raw material for our theology that we mostly shape from a particular misreading of Paul. In doing this we conveniently screen out Jesus’s own teachings about the kingdom of God and especially his ideas about nonviolence and enemy love.
What Jesus’s brothers didn’t believe was that Jesus could be the Messiah by going about it the way he was!
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. Who could believe in a nonviolent Messiah? A nonviolent Messiah was incongruent. John wants us to know that not even Jesus’s own brothers could believe in a Messiah like that!
We believe in Jesus theologically, religiously, spiritually, sentimentally … but not politically.
Because when it comes to political models for running the world, we find it hard to believe in Jesus.
Jesus said, “The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify against it that its works are evil” (John 7:7). We need to be careful not to rush past this. It’s all too easy to hear this simple sentence as religious jargon and move on without a moment’s thought. Let’s not do that. What was Jesus really saying here? Jesus was telling his brothers (James, Joses, Judas, and Simon according to Mark 6:3) that the world hated him but not them. What are we to make of this? Why did Jesus say the world hated him but not his brothers? Jesus said it’s because he testified against the evil
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What was this evil that the world, including Jesus’s brothers, was comfortable with, but which Jesus testified against? What evil of the world did Jesus expose and, in so doing, cause the world to hate him—even to the extent of seeking to kill him? It was the systemic and hidden evil that is the very foundation of the world!
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 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!
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. Always.
