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by
Brian Zahnd
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August 27 - September 17, 2017
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.
Pharaoh and Caesar didn’t have to worry much about public sympathy for the hapless victims who ended up with arrows in their backs, but their modern counterparts do. Why? Because Christ has forever changed how we think about victims.
The abolition of slavery—wherever and whenever it has occurred—has always drawn its moral authority from Christ. The fall of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe was the result of Christian movements largely inspired by Pope John Paul II. In South Africa Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela looked to Christ for their ideals of justice and reconciliation that brought about the peaceful end to the racist policies of apartheid. And without Christ, how could humanity ever have produced a Mother Teresa?
Consider, too, that slavery, totalitarianism, and apartheid have been challenged, and in places overcome, not by Christians who sat back and blithely said, “It’s all going to burn,” but by Christians who believed that Jesus is Lord here and now.
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.
Among the important things my dad taught me was this jewel of counterintuitive wisdom: the majority is almost always wrong.
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.
In a very real sense, we can attribute the death of Jesus to cowardly leaders capitulating to a crowd committed to violent action.
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
The word scapegoat has its origins in the Bible. In Leviticus chapter 16, the King James Version of the Bible translates the Hebrew word azazel as “scapegoat.” The azazel was the banished goat that carried the sins of Israel into the wilderness. In other words, an innocent animal was blamed and banished and in this manner bore the sins of Israel.
We forget that when we see Christ dead upon the cross, we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies.
When I say it’s hard to believe in Jesus, I mean it’s hard to believe in Jesus’s ideas—in his way of saving the world.
Creating exemptions for the Sermon on the Mount and explaining when and where Jesus’s teaching does not apply is fine (in theory, I suppose); but at some point you have to decide what Jesus did mean with his kingdom imperatives on nonviolence and enemy love. Which is to say, we eventually have to ask ourselves what did Jesus intend and when do we need to turn the other cheek?
We believe in Jesus theologically, religiously, spiritually, sentimentally … but not politically.
So when Jesus comes along and says to us, “Love your enemy,” we instinctively feel how radical it is. He’s not just giving individuals a personal ethic; he is striking at the very foundation of the world! The world was founded on hating enemies, and now Jesus says, “Don’t do it!” When Jesus said, “Turn the other cheek,” he wasn’t just trying to produce kinder, gentler people; he was trying to refound the world!
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!
The cross strips naked the principalities and powers. The cross tears down the facade of glory that we use to hide the bodies of our slain victims.
Jesus founded his kingdom in solidarity with brutalized victims. 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 Jesus way and conventional power politics don’t mix. So we tell Jesus to mind his own business—to go back to church and to “saving souls” and not to meddle in the real affairs of running the world. We sequester Jesus to a stained-glass quarantine and appropriate a trillion dollars for the war machine. 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.
To believe in Jesus fully, to believe in Jesus as more than a personal Savior, to believe in Jesus without qualifications, to believe in Jesus as God’s way to run the world, to believe in Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount, to believe in Jesus as the unimagined solution for a world gone wrong and not as merely chaplain or cheerleader for our favorite version of the status quo is very hard to do. It also very controversial.
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.
They love Jesus. They believe the Bible. They’re exemplary citizens. But they also have some confused ideas about what it means to be a Christian and what Jesus meant when he talked about freedom. And it’s not the first time would-be disciples of Jesus have been confused about freedom. After all, freedom’s just another word for … what?
Nothing is truer than “Jesus saves,” but divorced from any real context, it’s little more than Christian graffiti.
The first thing we need to notice about John 8 is that it is bracketed by two attempted stonings.
Stoning is certainly not the most efficient way to kill, but it does have a couple of advantages over most other forms of public execution. 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.
Collective murder and the lies we tells ourselves about it—this is the context for what Jesus has to say about truth and freedom!
As soon as Jesus brought up the subject of freedom, they said, “I’m proud to be an Israelite, where at least I know I’m free!” Or something like that. Jesus said to the would-be disciples, “You need to be set free.” The would-be disciples retorted, “We are free!”
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 Jesus, freedom is liberation from sin—especially the particular sin of collective killing.
Listen to what Jesus said to the Judeans in response to their protest that they are freedom-loving children of Abraham and notice how Jesus brings up the issue of killing: “I know you are descendents of Abraham; yet you look for an opportunity to kill me, because there is no place in you for my word” (John 8:37).
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.
Jesus knew that what lies at the foundation of the crowd’s understanding of “freedom” was violence and murder. For the crowd, freedom was just another word for having the power to kill their enemies. The crowd said, “We’re talking about freedom,” but Jesus said, “No, you’re talking about killing.” Jesus was unmasking what lay behind the crowd’s euphemistic use of words like freedom.
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!
For the crowd, freedom was just another word for killing. For Jesus, freedom was another word for love. Obviously they were going to be at odds. 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?
“What did Abraham do?” We know that Abraham heard the call of God, left the city of Ur, journeyed to a promised land, and by faith, fathered a family in his old age. That is all part of Abraham’s story, but Jesus was talking specifically about killing. What did Abraham do that Jesus was calling the crowd to imitate in regard to killing? The answer is plain and simple: Abraham put down the knife. Abraham did not kill his son Isaac upon the sacrificial altar at Moriah. Abraham abandoned the sacred violence of human sacrifice. Abraham put down the knife. This is a big deal!
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.
If Abraham is the father of monotheism, Abraham is also the father of the abolition of human sacrifice.
(A thousand years later the Hebrew prophet Hosea would announce that God does not desire sacrifice at all—something Jesus twice affirmed. See Hosea 6:6, Matt. 9:13, and Matt. 12:7.)
Yet Jesus and the Judean disciples were quickly arriving at an impasse. The real problem was that Jesus and the Judeans had such divergent ideas about God. Their ideas about God were so divergent that they were really two different beings—one was the Abba of Jesus; the other is the satan.
The freedom that comes from God is not power to kill, but the choice to love.
We really do not want to hear that God is calling us to rethink what it means to be free. In his debate with the Judeans, Jesus constantly juxtaposed love and killing and showed that only one correlates with true freedom. But we can hardly bear to hear that freedom can never be achieved by killing our enemies. It flies in the face of everything we’ve been taught to honor and cherish. Jesus knows that most of the time, most people cannot bear to be told that killing in the name of freedom is just another word for being a slave to systemic sin!
Cain killed Abel. Cain lied to himself about it. Then Cain went forth with hands full of blood and a head full of lies to found human civilization.
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.
Of course, in the end, Jesus was also killed. But his death is what shames the whole system of “redemptive violence.”
What Abraham was looking for, and by faith had caught a fleeting glimpse of, was what Jesus was bringing! Jesus was bringing the reign and rule of God where freedom would not be a cover for killing but an expression of self-giving love.
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.
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
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.”5
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.
