More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brian Zahnd
Read between
January 10 - January 12, 2019
This is the gospel, but it’s hard for us to believe in a Jesus who would rather die than kill his enemies. It’s harder yet to believe in a Jesus who calls us to take up our own cross, follow him, and be willing to die rather than kill our enemies.
The Sermon on the Mount doesn’t work in Cain’s system—no matter how noble or sophisticated.
This begs the question of why Christians get so worked up over which side has the most representatives in Congress when the entire system is incapable of implementing what Jesus taught.
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. It broke my heart to learn that people are not as easily drawn to a gospel of peace as they are to a rally for war.
The first thing we need to notice about John 8 is that it is bracketed by two attempted stonings. This is significant. The chapter opens with the Pharisees wanting to stone an adulterous woman and closes with the crowd attempting to stone Jesus.
Why stoning?
First, stoning enables the entire community to participate in the killing. Second, stoning allows the individual to exonerate himself. Everyone throws a rock, so everyone participates. But the individual is allowed to tell himself, “It wasn’t me who killed; I just threw one rock.” In other words, stoning is a way for the community to participate in collective murder and lie to itself about it. And there you have it. Collective murder and the lies we tells ourselves about it—this is the context for what Jesus has to say about truth and freedom!
It should be readily apparent that the truth Jesus wanted these Judeans to see was no conventional truth of generic platitude. The truth Jesus was talking about in John 8 was so controversial that it incited the crowd first to insult and finally to violence.
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.
This was quite shocking. Jesus had just told a group of prospective disciples that they were actually looking for an opportunity to kill him! Why? Because collective killing is the sin Jesus told the crowd they were enslaved to and needed to be set free from.
The truth that Jesus was trying to show the nationalistic crowd of Judean disciples is that freedom attained and maintained by killing is another name for slavery!
Here is the question: Is freedom just another word for the power to kill, or is freedom just another word for the choice to love?
The episode of Moriah—what Christians call “the sacrifice of Isaac” and what Jews more accurately call “the binding of Isaac” (the Akedah)—is the subject of much rich and varied interpretation. But one important way of understanding the Akedah is that it is Abraham gaining the revelation that God does not want human sacrifice. This is a new trajectory for worship.
Abraham abandoned the idea of killing in the name of God. This is what Jesus was talking about! This is what Abraham did! This
is why Jesus told the crowd that if they were truly Abraham’s children they would do what Abraham did and not seek to kill in the name of God.
Jesus understood that he had been sent by his Father, the true and living God, to liberate humanity from false ideas about God—including the lie that God wants or sanctions killing of any kind. But for the most part, even would-be disciples were not willing to engage in a wholesale reevaluation of God if it undermined the basic foundation of the world.
The crowd’s response to what Jesus was saying was to insinuate a vulgar insult. “We are not illegitimate children.” That is their thinly disguised way of saying, “We’ve heard about the questionable circumstances of your birth; but we’re not bastards … like some around here.”
Actually, the only way to be fully free from complicity in our systems of violence is to embrace a radical prophetic poverty—the kind we find in the saintly lives of those like St. Francis and Mother Teresa. Admittedly, most of us cannot fully emulate their radical poverty, but it is from such lives that light shines on our dark foundations. This light enables us to at least recognize our complicity in violence and to seek a better way.
Violence cannot tolerate the presence of one who owes it nothing.
The Jews answered him, “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” (John 8:48) Now all pretense of civil discourse had been abandoned. These Judeans were decidedly not going to become disciples of Jesus. In their rage they leveled two accusations at Jesus. Revealingly, they accused Jesus of belonging to a despised ethnic minority, and ironically, they accused Jesus of having a demon.
When your city is built upon violence, freedom is just another word for killing your brother. But when your city is built upon love, freedom is just another word for being your brother’s keeper.
If we carefully examine how we use the word freedom, it becomes apparent that we use it to sanction our perceived right to pursue happiness in a self-interested fashion. We want the freedom to arrange the world in such a way that it serves the interest of our own self or our own group. But that is not freedom. That is the way to slavery and self-destruction.
David Bentley Hart put it this way: “Hell is the name of that false history against which the true story, in Christ, is told, and it is exposed as the true destination of all our violence.”
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.
To endorse the dominant view that the employment of violence is compatible with Christianity requires no courage at all—that’s just following the crowd. But to differ from the dominant view on the sanctity of state-sponsored violence may require an uncommon reservoir of moral conviction.
I don’t like labels. Kierkegaard was right when he said, “When you label me, you negate me.”
Labels are often a way to avoid thinking.
But I actually don’t claim the label of pacifist for this reason: pacifism is a political position on violence. It’s a position one could adopt apart from Jesus Christ—as
If my views on violence have changed—and they have—the blame falls squarely on Jesus! It’s not like I woke up one day and said, “Hey, I think I’ll adopt a position of Christian nonviolence just for the fun of it. I bet that will be popular!” No, that’s not what happened. What happened was once the red, white, and blue varnish was removed from Jesus and I learned to read the Gospels free of a star-spangled interpretation, I discovered that my Lord and Savior had a lot of things to say about peace that I had been missing. I was as surprised as anyone! But once you’ve seen the truth, you can’t
...more
On the Sunday of Jesus’s arrival in Jerusalem, the crowd of Passover pilgrims waved palm branches and shouted hosanna in a patriotic remembrance of the Maccabean revolt two centuries earlier. (It would be similar to how Americans remember the Revolutionary War and celebrate the Fourth of July.)
When Jesus saw that his vision for the kingdom of God had been conscripted by a violent nationalistic agenda, he wept and lamented the fate of Jerusalem. The patriotic crowd wanted the second coming of Joshua the Canaanite killer or David the Philistine slayer or Judah “The Hammer” Maccabeus. But Jesus was not the second coming of any Jewish war hero—he was the first coming of the Prince of Peace!
Post-Constantine Christians have learned to be quite comfortable in claiming the peace of Christ while waging war upon their neighbors. We have made the Pax Christus a private affair while holding to the Pax Romana as the only way to arrange the world.
The means never justify the ends. The means are the ends in the process of becoming. If the means are violence and killing, the end will be violent death. Jesus taught this: “All who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matt. 26:52).
We have become so accustomed to interpreting all of Jesus’s warnings of impending judgment as references to a postmortem hell that we often screen out his actual message.
Jesus wept over Jerusalem because their fate could have been avoided. If they had believed in Jesus as the messianic Prince of Peace instead of a messianic Lord of War, Jerusalem could have actually become the City of Peace. Instead, they chose the path that led to a hellish nightmare of siege, famine, cannibalism, destruction, and death.
Millions had accepted Jesus and shouted hosanna, but they did not know the things that make for peace. They prayed a sinner’s prayer, “got right with God,” and kept their slaves. They had a faith that would justify the slave owner while bringing no justice to the slave.
Twain did a masterful job of showing us how wrongheaded Christians can be about what constitutes salvation. For Huck to act according to justice, he had to think he was committing a great sin. For Huck to act Christlike, he had to think he was forsaking Christianity. For Huck to love his neighbor as himself, he had to think he was condemning his soul to hell. Think about that a while!
When we don’t know the things that make for peace, we can barrel down the highway to hell, all the while singing about how much we love Jesus and how wonderful it is to be saved. This should disturb us. How can it be that generations of religiously observant people can say all the right things about Jesus and still be on the wrong road? How can we know the things that make for a good church service but not know the things that make for peace?
The things that make for peace are the two great commandments: love of God and love of neighbor, but especially the second command. (Love of God is only validated by a cosuffering love of neighbor.)
If we console ourselves with the promise of heaven in the afterlife while creating hell in this present life, we have embraced the tawdry religion of the crusader and forsaken the true faith of our Savior.
I came to understand that what Jesus tends to call the kingdom of God, Paul tends to call salvation, but they’re talking about the same thing!
This kingdom paradigm revolutionized my theology—soteriology, eschatology, ecclesiology, and political theology all had to be reworked under the rubric of the kingdom of God. So today when I make the seminal Christian confession “Jesus is Lord,” I’m not just expressing something about my personal spiritual life; I’m also making a revolutionary political statement. And that’s a game-changer!
Once you see that Jesus has his own political agenda, his own vision for arranging human society, his own criteria for judging nations, then it’s impossible to give your heart and soul to the power-based, win-at-all-costs partisan politics that call for our allegiance.
So viewed through the American lens, Christianity is seen to endorse democracy and capitalism, just as it was once seen in Europe to endorse monarchy and feudalism. To even suggest that Jesus doesn’t necessarily endorse every aspect of Jeffersonian democracy and laissez-faire capitalism is enough to get you burned at the stake (hopefully only in a metaphorical sense).
What if Jesus has no interest in endorsing some other political agenda because he has his own?! That would change everything.
Listen carefully to what Jesus told Caiaphas. After Jesus acknowledged that he was indeed Israel’s Messiah, he added that he was also the mysterious Son of Man and that Caiaphas would from now on see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of God and coming in the clouds of heaven. The phrase from now on should make it quite clear that Jesus was not primarily talking about his Second Coming. Jesus was not referencing something that would take place way off in the future but something that was coming to pass in the present moment, something contemporary with Caiaphas. Recognizing this is a big
...more
Daniel’s dream was that the Son of Man ascended up into the clouds of heaven and was given dominion over the nations. It was this vision that shaped both the apocalyptic expectations of first-century Jews and informed Jesus’s understanding of his identity and vocation. Jesus saw himself as the Son of Man who would receive dominion over the nations and liberate the world from the tyranny of military empires. But he would not attain this dominion through violence for that would make him just another beast!
Jesus was condemned to death by both Caiaphas and Pilate for the same reason—he claimed to be a king. Not a “spiritual king” over a “spiritual kingdom” but a real king over a political kingdom—but a very different kind of political kingdom. It is a kingdom that you have to be born again to even perceive, as Jesus told Nicodemus. And as Jesus told Pilate, his kingdom would not come from the world system of empires. The kingdom of the Son of Man would not be based upon the coercive power of the beasts but upon the cosuffering love of a new humanity formed around Messiah.
Why is Luke so careful to mention a cloud in his account of Jesus’s ascension (Acts 1:9)? Luke hopes we will connect the dots and recognize that in his death, resurrection, and ascension, Jesus has inaugurated the reign of Daniel’s Son of Man over all peoples, nations, and languages. Which is exactly the gospel that the apostles preached throughout the book of Acts! But do we believe that gospel?
What I’m trying to say is that Jesus is Lord. Today. Right now. For real. Jesus will appear for the final judgment, but he is already ruling and judging the nations in righteousness. We may prefer to opt for one of the dualistic options of either liberal utopianism or conservative dispensationalism, but the truth is we must live in the tension of the now and not yet. Jesus is now reigning over the nations, but we do not yet see the fullness of a world made right.
