Prayer as a Weapon: Clasped Hands as Nonviolent Uprising

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Matthew Anslow | Tuesday, 23rd June 2015

Last month Matt Anslow delivered the Tinsley Lecture, the annual public lecture of Morling College's Tinsley Institute on mission, evangelism and ethics. His topic was Prayer as a Weapon: Clasped Hands as Nonviolent Uprising.

Transcript

“To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.” (Karl Barth)

On March 21 a group of nine Christians, myself included, held a peaceful prayer vigil in the office of Australian Immigration Minister Scott Morrison. We were praying about and protesting the inhumane asylum seeker policies of the Australian government.

Five of the group were eventually arrested for trespassing, though the charges were later dismissed in court. A similar vigil has subsequently been held in Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s office.

Our act of civil disobedience, taking the form of public prayer, generated numerous responses. We have received much support—far more, in fact, than we would have expected—from church leaders, people of all different faith traditions, atheists, and media.

Our action also attracted its fair share of disapproval, ranging from personal abuse to theological diatribes. Much of this centred on our use of prayer.

On the one hand were the fashionable and cheap shots taken at us by some atheists, those who ridicule the practice of prayer without, apparently, understanding what prayer actually is. (This is in contrast to those atheists who have shown a deep respect for our action, some having even attended our recent public prayer vigils, despite that it stems from a worldview they do not themselves hold.) One contrarian, in a comment on a Huffington Post report of our action, exemplified the kind of inanity I am talking about: “Well they should have been arrested for thinking that prayer was going to do anything at all.” Such a comment betrays a common assumption that prayer has only instrumental value for Christians.

On the other hand were those Christians who, in addition to quoting (largely without a sense of context) parts of Romans 13:1–5 and Matthew 6:5–8, asserted the private nature of prayer, to the exclusion of public expressions such as demonstrated by our action. (Admittedly this is even more puzzling given that many of the same people would be dismayed by talk of the removal of The Lord’s Prayer from the opening of Parliament.)

In what follows I want to argue for a silhouette vision for prayer in the public sphere as an alternative to both ‘unscientific’ instrumentality and private piety.

I do not expect what I will write will be convincing to those who do not share my worldview; I accept this out of hand. After all, as Stanley Hauerwas has suggested, “Christians must live in a manner that their lives are unintelligible if the God we worship in Jesus Christ does not exist” (emphasis mine). It would be unreasonable to expect people with very different assumptions about the world to agree with me. Likewise, it would be equally unreasonable to subject prayer to a legitimating standard based on assumptions that those who practise prayer do not necessarily hold.

I do, however, hope to open up a different conversation about some unknown or neglected aspects of prayer, both amongst those who do not believe prayer has any ‘use’, and amongst those who see prayer as entirely or even primarily a private affair. I deem this to be a worthwhile conversation given the number of recent acts of prayerful protest, such as that undertaken by our group, those at Whitehaven’s new mine at Maules Creek, and the ongoing Swan Island Peace Convergence.

Prayer as alternative language
In George Orwell's well-known story Nineteen Eighty-Four one of the values of the ‘Party’ that governs the fictional nation of Oceania is ‘Ignorance is Strength.’ Ignorance, in the form of falsified history, becomes a value because of its ability to control subjects through destroying memory and thus independence.

One of the ways in which such ignorance is achieved amongst the populace is the rewriting of language in the form of “Newspeak.” In this rewriting of language it is not that new words are invented, but rather that old words are destroyed, and retained words stripped of any secondary meanings that are deemed to be undesirable (“unorthodox”) by the Party. The effect of such a reduction in language is the limitation of critical thought. This is made abundantly clear to Winston, the main character, by his friend Syme:

In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year? ... Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?

In other words, inasmuch as thought itself is based on words and language, the redefinition and reduction of language suppresses thought. Control of language, then, has the very real potential to cause an epistemological crisis, not merely for an individual, but for a society. None of this is to make a case for or against a Wittgensteinian understanding of vocabulary and truth (“The limits of my language means the limits of my world”); rather, it reminds us of the vast influence of language on thought and knowledge. Vocabulary, at the very least, forms a foundational framework for how we conceive of reality and, most pertinently for us, ethics.

The act of prayerful civil disobedience that my friends and I committed was in response to an issue about which thought and knowledge have been co-opted by drastic shifts in language. Think of terms and phrases like ‘Illegals,’ ‘border protection,’ and ‘tougher policy.’ What do these mean in the context of the asylum seeker issue, and how have they been changed for this purpose? The notion of tougher policy is an interesting example. When I was a child I was taught that to be tough meant to stand against bullies and perpetrators, not the weak and desperate. How language changes…

Much ink and many pixels have been spent in discussing these and other uses of language in regard to asylum seekers, and I will refrain from repeating such discussion. Wherever our language has come from, what we have now is a set of incoherent language forms—not unlike the absurd ‘Ignorance is strength’­—that have shaped the very attitudes, the very conception of reality, of a good portion of the Australian population regarding asylum seekers.

Of course, such issues of language and epistemology are not restricted to the issue of asylum seekers. In his 1978 essay ‘Agricultural Solutions for Agricultural Problems,’ farmer and poet Wendell Berry notes the industrialisation of our language:

Now we do not flinch to hear men and women referred to as ‘units’ as if they were as uniform and interchangeable as machine parts. It is common, and considered acceptable, to refer to the mind as a computer: one’s thoughts are ‘inputs’; other people’s responses are ‘feedback.’ And the body is thought of as a machine; it is said, for instance, to use food as ‘fuel’; and the best workers and athletes are praised by being compared to machines.

The effect of this “revolution of language” on our values has been profound according to Berry, since it has shifted our very images of life and work from being organic to mechanised. It is no wonder then, he thinks, that our food systems have become polluted and exploitative. The same problems of language could be exported, in one sense or another, to any of the major issues faced by humanity.

What has this all to do with prayer? My contention is that prayer should not to be viewed in a reductive way that sees it primarily in instrumental terms as a petitionary means to seek a desired outcome. While petition is indeed a component of prayer, at least as Jews and Christians understand it, it is not in the crude cause-and-effect sense assumed by most detractors of religious devotion. If we can speak of prayer having an instrumental element, it is the almost the opposite of what is commonly assumed. The aim of prayer is not primarily to change things ‘out there,’ since before we pray God knows what we need and his grace is abundant. On the contrary, prayer is instrumental inasmuch as it changes the one who prays.

Prayer is, in part, a retraining in language. By introducing and socialising people into a new vocabulary, prayer shifts the framework of thought and perception, since to make a habit of some form of language necessarily changes our thinking and perception. Such habits are slow transformations, much as rocks on a beach smoothed by waves over time. Prayer is such a habit. This in itself is not unique to prayer, since any new language set achieves an equivalent shift. But this is striking in regards to prayer for at least two reasons: first, prayer is rarely, if ever, thought of this way in the public sphere; and second, the language of prayer is, for Christians, fundamentally revelation.

After all, Christians do not actually know how to pray. That is the Scriptural testimony, at least; it is in fact the Spirit of God who knows how to pray (Romans 8:26), and, as Sarah Coakley has said, “The Spirit is always there, closer to us than we are to ourselves, closer than kissing, constantly begging permission to pray in us.” The language and habit of prayer is only possible because of the Spirit. This is important because it guarantees that genuine prayer is not the will to power.

Prayer as the Seed of Revolution
But it is not only that we do not know how to pray, but we also do not know what to pray. What is the content of this new language? For Christians, what we are to pray is taught to us by Jesus in the Lord’s Prayer (Matt 6:9–13). All genuinely Christian prayer is derived from the Lord’s Prayer—“A disciple’s prayer is founded on and circumscribed by it,” (Bonhoeffer). In the context of the first century this prayer represented language that was at once liberating and unprecedented—a unique habitual set of language.

To begin with, the address of the prayer to ‘Our Father’ relativises all human relationships— before and above all other socially constructed roles, we are all siblings and therefore fundamentally equal. This address also thwarts any attempt to make the object of ultimate loyalty and devotion something less than the Father of all people, an obvious subversion of the Pater Patriae, the Roman emperor (‘Father of the fatherland’), and the temporal political realities he symbolises.

To pray “your kingdom come” is to reject the pretensions of all earthly kingdoms, structures with universalising ambitions that inevitably coerce and violate. It is to reject those [dis]orders that do not conform to the will of God. It is to be a person incorporated into a community shaped to participate in a new world that is unimaginable without revelation.

What is this new world? What is God’s will? Apparently its nature is reflected in daily bread for all and forgiveness of debts. Those shaped by such prayer over time learn to imagine an economics in which there is enough for all. Moreover, to make forgiveness a form of habitual language, and thus a pattern of thought, revolutionises human interactions, subverting expectations of retribution and favouring humility and the offer of merciful embrace.

Lastly, to ask that God “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” recognises that we are not to cut ourselves off from the world. We remain in the world and we have responsibilities within it, but we are not to ignore or succumb to the evils in it.

Such language is able to reshape the one who prays the prayer. They can come to embody an alternative reality to that reflected by nationalism, violence, greed and retribution. Prayer in the manner of the Lord’s Prayer can never be a merely private affair: it always has public and political implications. Prayer rearranges our very desire, and in doing so drives us to action. As Karl Barth says, “God, resists the torrent of human injustice and evil, and therefore . . . (Christians) cannot cease to oppose it as well in their own place and manner.”

When my friends and I prayed as an act of public protest against inhumane asylum seeker policies, what we are attempting to symbolise is that we are complicit in the problem. We are those whose desires need to be transformed through ongoing prayer, and in seeking to publicly dramatise this we hope to invite others (including the Immigration Minister) on the same journey, not for our sake, but for the sake of the more than 1000 children in detention.

If prayer is a weapon, an uprising against the world’s disorder as Barth says, it is a weapon that that we turn on ourselves as those disordered. In this sense prayer is a public act since the world is witnessing a moment in the needed transformation of our world and are thereby invited to take part. It is the seed of a nonviolent revolution.

I take Barth’s insistence that prayer is the beginning of a kind of uprising to be true. The act of prayer—including forming an alternative set of language habits to the world and relinquishing the will to control—is indeed radical, a kind of uprising. But what is implied here by ‘uprising’ is unique. Uprisings tend to imply a will to power, but prayer as uprising is the making of the purposes and will of another (namely, God) our own. Such an act of humility is a sign of openness to guidance and reconciliation.

Prayer as alternative historical consciousness
The phrase from the Lord’s Prayer that I left unexamined above is the second petition: “Hallowed be your name.” The act of prayer is an acknowledgement that we are not ‘ultimate’ in any sense.  To pray that God’s name is hallowed is not for God’s benefit—God is already hallowed. Rather, it is for our benefit, and the benefit of the world.

If prayer is to acknowledge that we are not ‘ultimate’, this implies that it is not our responsibility to generate a plan for history. And this is indeed good news, since all such historical goals eventually de-escalate into coercion for the so-called ‘greater good’. Genuine prayer, as a relinquishment of the necessity to assert such control, is the rejection of violence and coercion as a historical tool.

Prayer is, in a sense, an anti-weapon. It is the act of seeking to align ourselves to God’s plans for history, as Christ has done. And like Christ, the one who prays must be willing to embrace suffering as the only way of determining the meaning of history. In the words of John Howard Yoder, “The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection.” Or as Tom Wright puts it, in prayer we “resonate with the pain of the world” because the Spirit of God who dwells in us also groans from within the heart of the world. In this way we get in touch with the living God who is doing a new thing. Prayer in the manner of Christ construes the meaning of history very differently to the powers-that-be.

Prayer is the willingness to be patient and to renounce imposing our own desires on others. It is part of what Yoder calls “the readiness to renounce our legitimate ends whenever they cannot be attained by legitimate means.” This does not exclude the possibility of confrontation, though confrontation is always accompanied by a readiness to forgive.

The action of my friends and I was hopefully a genuine expression of such patience. We did indeed engage in a confronting act, though we sought to invite rather than coerce those who were most responsible for the evil being protested. For us prayer was the most pertinent act in this circumstance because to protest on the basis of our own historical desires would indeed be coercive. Praying was a sign that we did not ultimately represent ourselves qua agents of change, but rather as those trying to be obedient to the will of God.

This, somewhat ironically, gets at the heart of Matthew 6:5–8, a passage that was continuously lobbed at us after our public prayer actions. The problem Jesus addresses here is not praying in public per se, but rather the use of prayer as an instrument for attaining social honour. To do such would be to seek after a reality where the one who prays is esteemed, rather than God and God’s reign over history. If, however, public prayer genuinely seeks the will of God and not the one who prays, then it becomes part of the activity of what Bonhoeffer calls “the Visible Community,” a community that seeks to display to the world a life of good works that glorify God (cf. Matthew 5:13–16).

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Prayer is the beginning and means of a reorientation of human relationships around divine love and freedom as embodied in Christ.

This is one of the reasons why Christians pray in relation to asylum seekers, or any social issue facing humanity. It is only in recognising and confessing our own complicity in evil and the taintedness of our very desires that we can hope to be freed from these forces. A will conformed in prayer to that of the loving, suffering, nonviolent Christ is required to work towards the transformed relationships necessary for sustainable social change.

Such a transformed will can never be passive in the face of evil, as the God of Jesus Christ is not. For this reason prayer cannot simply be private. But such a transformed will can also never be coercive in response to evil, as the God of Jesus Christ is not. For this reason prayer cannot simply be instrumental.

On the contrary, prayer is a weapon that turns upside down the very notion of weapons, the very notion of history, and the very notion of humanity.

Matt Anslow is married to Ashlee, works for an international development NGO, is a PhD candidate in theology at Charles Sturt University, and is an organiser for #LoveMakesAWay. He and Ashlee live in a small [un]intentional community in Sydney where they try to put their convictions into practice in the context of the mundane. Matt is also an editor of On The Road. You can follow him on Twitter.

Atonement, Justice, and Peace: A Baptist-Anabaptist Conversation

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Darrin W Snyder Belousek & Respondents | Tuesday, 16th June 2015

On May 31 last year, Dr Darrin Belousek joined members of the Anabaptist Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) and guests for a day-conference exploring themes presented in his book Atonement, Justice, and Peace: The Message of the Cross and the Mission of the Church.

Dr Belousek's talks, based on various parts of his book, explored the subject of atonement, in particular the controversial subject of penal substitutionary atonement. His talks were each followed by short responses by Baptist and Anabaptist scholars—Dr Graeme Chatfield, Dr Anthony Petersen, Matthew Anslow, and Dr David Starling.

The talks, including the responses, are linked below. The responses, having been edited in light of the conversations that occurred at the symposium, have also been compiled and published in the most recent issue of the Pacific Journal of Baptist Research.

Three additional talks have also been included, which were given by Dr Belousek at a gathering the day after the conference. Here Belousek explores issues broader than penal substitution, including reconciliation (1), economic and criminal justice (2), and peace and war (3). To download the files, it may be necessary to right-click the download links.

ATONEMENT, JUSTICE, AND PEACE CONFERENCE

Lecture 1—Jesus’ Death and Christian Tradition: Ancient Creeds and Trinitarian Theology
Response: Dr Graeme Chatfield—PhD (Bristol, UK); Baptist Minister; former lecturer in Church History at Morling College; Visiting Adjunct Professor in Church History and Historical Theology at TCMI Institute (Austria & Eastern Europe); Associate Dean, Australian College of Theology.

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Lecture 2—Jesus’ Death and the Old Testament: Atoning Sacrifice and the Suffering Servant
Response: Dr Anthony Petersen—Lecturer in Old Testament and Hebrew at Morling College; Baptist Minister; PhD (Queen's University Belfast); Author of Behold Your King: The Hope for the House of David in the Book of Zechariah.

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Lecture 3—Jesus' Death and the Synoptic Gospels: New Exodus and New Covenant
Response: Matthew Anslow—Educator for TEAR Australia; undertaking PhD on Jesus' prophetic vocation in Matthew's Gospel (Charles Sturt University/United Theological College); Anabaptist; editor of On The Road.

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Lecture 4—Jesus’ Death and the Pauline Epistles: 'Mercy Seat' and Place-Taking
Response: Dr David Starling—Lecturer in New Testament and Theology at Morling College; PhD (University of Sydney, thesis published as Not My People: Gentiles as Exiles in Pauline Hermeneutics); Baptist Minister.

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ADDITIONAL TALKS

Talk 1—Shame For Us: The Cross of Christ in the Drama of Reconciliation

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Talk 2—What is Just?: Repayment in Kind, the King of God and the Cross of Christ

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Talk 3—All Things New: Christ, Cross, and Creation

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Dr Darrin W Snyder Belousek is Lecturer in Philosophy and Religion at Ohio Northern University and in Religion at Bluffton University. He has published many articles, both scholarly and popular, in diverse areas: theology, consistent ethic of life, war and peace, social justice, ethics and economics, science and religion, and philosophy of science (subject of his Doctoral Thesis; he also has a degree in physics). He has recently published, Good News: The Advent of Salvation in the Gospel of Luke. A Mennonite, he has served for seven years in mission assignments through voluntary service and international teaching.

A Prophet of God’s Justice: Reclaiming the Political Jesus (Part 2.2)

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Chris Marshall | Tuesday, 9th June 2015

Read the previous part of this series here.

In the previous instalment, Chris began by describing Jesus' two-fold political strategy as the prophetic denunciation of the injustices and social evils of the prevailing social order on the one hand, and the calling together of an alternative community to live according to the standards of God’s kingdom of justice and peace on the other. He also discussed two aspects of this strategy—1. a rejection of social discrimination, and 2. a critique of economic exploitation. Here Chris continues his discussion of aspects of Jesus' political strategy.

JESUS’ TWO-FOLD POLITICAL STRATEGY (continued)

3. A mistrust of governmental power: The ministry of Jesus was conducted in the context of an occupied country. Ultimate power resided in Rome but indigenous rulers were allowed to exercise jurisdiction over their own territories, as long as they did so in the interests of the empire. In Jesus’ day, Galilee was controlled by Herod Antipas, while Judea was controlled by a Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, although internal affairs were administered by the Jewish Sanhedrin.

As a result, Jesus was confronted by three main forms of institutional or political power: the spiritual and domestic authority of the Jewish religious leaders, the civil authority of Herod and the Herodians, and the imperial and military authority of Rome. And he was critical of the way all three exercised their power.[1] The basic presupposition of his political critique was that sovereignty or kingship belongs exclusively to God. God alone possesses ultimate authority in human affairs, and God’s justice must be the measuring rod against which the exercise of all human authority is to be evaluated.

(i) Throughout his ministry Jesus was frequently opposed by Jewish religious leaders, both scribal and priestly. Jesus responded to their opposition with blistering denunciations of their conduct and role in society.[2] The most extensive example of this is found in Matthew 23. A careful reading of this chapter shows that it was not their theological views Jesus objected to; it was their misuse of religious power to entrench injustice. They used God’s law to “lock people out of the kingdom of heaven” and to overburden the weak without lifting a finger to help (vv 1–4,13–16). They abused their sacred trust to accrue personal prestige and kudos (vv.5–7). They presented themselves as paragons of virtue, but were full of extortion and greed within (v 25). They condemned the violence of the past, but were more than ready to shed innocent blood themselves (vv 23–39). Most tellingly, they majored on legal minutiae at the expense of what matters most to God: justice, mercy and faithfulness.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel! (Matt 23:23–24).

(ii) The Herodian elite were also threatened by Jesus and sought to destroy him (Mark 3:6; cf. 12:15). When some sympathetic Pharisees warn Jesus that Herod Antipas is out to kill him, Jesus sends a message of defiance back to “that fox” (Luke 13:31–33). Later when tried by Herod, he refuses to co-operate with his interrogation (Luke 23:6–12).

(iii) Jesus was also critical of Roman power. It is true that Jesus never voiced direct opposition to Roman rule, and he never called for the violent expulsion of the Romans from the holy land. But this does not mean that he was indifferent to Roman control or secretly approved of it. Several considerations show he was not detached from this issue. To begin with, Jesus’ entire mission presupposed a repudiation of the Roman boast that they had already introduced the Golden Age of “peace and stability”. His proclamation of the kingdom of God was tantamount to a rejection of the Pax Romana [“Roman peace”] as the order God intended. As Wengst observes, “anyone who prays for the coming of the kingdom of God, expects it very soon, and sees the sign of its dawning in his own action, has no faith in the imperial good tidings of a pacified world and human happiness in it; he does not regard this situation as the peace that God wants, but is certain that it will end soon”.[3] Jesus regarded the Roman Pax as a pseudo-peace and he refused to give his blessing to it.[4] Indeed he recognised that his mission would destabilise the present “peaceful” order because it was based on oppression and injustice.[5]

As well as this, Jesus’ ethical teaching and whole manner of life constituted an implicit criticism of the abusive use of power by Rome. The gospels present a Jesus significantly at variance with the values and the patterns in terms of which the Romans built their empire. Jesus opts for the sick and the poor; the Romans despised the weak and rewarded the strong. Jesus stresses humility and service; the Romans took pride in their own superiority. Jesus stresses the sharing of surplus possessions; the Romans enacted oppressive taxes in order to increase the wealth of the metropolis of Rome and its predatory elites. Jesus emphasises the sovereignty of God; the Romans affirmed pagan gods and the persona of the emperor. Jesus rejects the use of the sword; the Romans built an empire based on horrendous violence.[6]

Consistent with this, there are also several places where Jesus explicitly criticises the Roman authorities for the way they exercised their power. In one saying, which Luke significantly places at the Last Supper immediately prior to his arrest, Jesus underlines the coercive and self-serving nature of Roman rule.[7] In another he speaks disparagingly of the material trappings of Gentile rule and says that greater respect is owed to the least in the kingdom of God than to kings and rulers.[8] In yet another he anticipates violence and murderous opposition to the gospel from Gentile governors and kings.[9] Jesus’ most important statement on Roman authority occurs in the so-called Tribute Question, which I have already commented on.[10]

As well as speaking critically of the abusive use of power in surrounding society, Jesus required his discipleship community to turn prevailing patterns of power and greatness upside down. In this new society, there is to be no hierarchy of status, as prevailed in the contemporary religious community.[11] There is to be no domination of the weak by the powerful, no lording it over one another in the manner of Gentile rulers.[12] True greatness is shown by striving to be of least account![13] Leadership is servanthood.[14] And the wider social impact of the new kingdom community is not dependent on possessing human clout and influence, but on power of dependent faith, prayer and forgiveness.[15]

4. A repudiation of violence and war: Jesus knew full well that the existing system sanctioned violence to achieve its ends. He was well aware of the brutality of Roman rule. He spoke of Pilate’s ruthlessness, and of how the Romans domineered their subjects.[16] He knew that he himself would face torture and death at Roman hands,[17] and that his followers also faced the prospect of persecution and crucifixion.[18] He spoke gravely of the time ahead when the Romans would employ the dreadful horror of siege warfare against Jerusalem.[19] He also knew the violence that seethed beneath the surface of Jewish society.[20] Jesus was no starry-eyed idealist when it came to the subject of political violence.

Aware that the established order would use lethal force to oppose his kingdom-initiative, three existing options were available to him. He could take the Zealot option and strive to bring in the kingdom by military force. Or he could take the Qumran option and advocate the complete withdrawal of his messianic community into the desert away from the corruption of surrounding society. Or he could take the Establishment option and seek to make the best of a poor situation by co-operation or collaboration. Jesus rejected all three. Instead he chose the way of non-violent, sacrificial love and required the same of his followers (Matt 5:38–48). Jesus totally rejected war and violence as having any place in the exercise of God’s rule. To fight for the kingdom with the weapons of the enemy was to lose the kingdom by default. To fight for the kingdom by turning the other cheek, going the second mile, praying for one’s persecutors, loving one’s enemies, was to achieve true victory over satanic evil. It was a revolutionary way of being revolutionary. As Wright observes:

Anyone announcing the kingdom of YHWH was engaging in serious political action. Anyone announcing the kingdom but explicitly opposing armed resistance was engaging in doubly serious political action: not only the occupying forces, but all those who gave allegiance to the resistance movement would be enraged.[21]

It is here that Jesus’ exorcisms carried an important political message. It was common in Jesus’ day for people to ascribe the abject suffering of God’s people under Roman rule to the activity of superhuman demonic forces standing behind their pagan oppressors and their indigenous quislings. One manifestation of this spiritual tyranny was the susceptibility of vulnerable individuals to demonic possession. When Jesus cast out demons, therefore, he was not only healing the victims of societal dysfunction; he was symbolically challenging and defeating the spiritual authorities standing behind foreign repression. This is made extremely clear by the military language and imagery used to describe the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac in Mark 5:1–20, where a “legion” of demons is “dismissed” to enter a “troop” of unclean pigs, who then “charge” headlong down a slope and are “drowned in the sea”.[22] This episode is perhaps intended to underscore that personal and social liberation from the debilitating impact of colonial control is not to be achieved by military rebellion, and is not dependent on the violent expulsion of the Romans, but is available even now to those who embrace the renewing and peace-making power of God’s kingdom made available in Jesus.

Arguably it is by their compromise with military violence that the Christian credentials of so much conservative Christian politics are most open to question. It could not be sadder for Christian witness today that the two leading architects of the invasion of Iraq and the two most unapologetic proponents of the so-called war on terrorism are both confessing Christians who claim divine endorsement for their trust in the “tumult of war” (Hosea 10:14) instead of the “gospel of peace” (Eph 6:15) in their quest for international security.

CONCLUSION
Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God was a political gesture that impinged directly on the major dimensions of social and political life—the use of wealth and power, the exclusion of the weak and disadvantaged from full participation in the wider community, and the employment of lethal violence to protect the unjust status quo. Jesus was critical of the prevailing social order and called for communal repentance (cf. Matt 11:20–24). He also laid down a new ethic for his followers so that they could serve as an instrument of societal renewal. In his messianic community, the weak are to be honoured, wealth is to be shared, leadership is to take the form of servanthood, and the way of non-violent, sacrificial love is to prevail. The vision of the coming kingdom and its justice is to be the supreme concern of its existence (Matt 6:33). That is to say, the primary formative power over its way of life is not the past or the present but the future, the new day coming, the time when God will put all things to right. As a colony of the age to come planted in the midst of the old order, the kingdom community is to serve both as an alternative expression of human community that summons mainstream society to change (a city set on a hill, Matt 5:14), and as a subversive force for change within the existing socio-political order (salt and light, Matt 5:13, 16).

Such is also to be the concern of the Christian community today, even if its social and political matrix is very different to that of first-century Palestine, and even though the task of translating Jesus’ political vision into concrete policies today is extremely difficult. But in broad terms, inasmuch as the biblical vision for the kingdom of God is the setting up of a universal realm of peace and justice on earth, the church as the community of the kingdom is called to a twofold political task. On the one hand, it is to proclaim the breakthrough of God’s new order by giving visible expression in its own life to the peace, justice and righteousness of God’s kingdom. On the other hand, it is to work tirelessly for peace and justice in surrounding society, to struggle against the forces of the old age—forces of nationalism, militarism, materialism, sexism and racism—which Christ has dethroned and which one day shall finally yield to God’s glorious future. Such is the politics of Jesus.

This article originally appeared in On The Road 32.

[1] For a brief summary see M. Hengel, Christ and Power (Dublin: Christian Journals, 1977), 15–21; James D.G. Dunn, Christian Liberty: A New Testament Perspective (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1993), 27–52. More fully see Alan Storkey, Jesus and Politics: Confronting the Powers (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 1–94.

[2] See e.g. Mark 7:6–23; 12:1–12, 41–44; 13:9–10; Luke 11:42–44; 16:14-15; 18:9–14.

[3] Wengst, Pax Romana, 55.

[4] Cf. John 14:27; 18:36.

[5] Cf. Matt 10:34f; Luke 23:1–2.

[6] See R. J. Cassidy, Jesus, Society and Politics: A Study of Luke’s Gospel (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1983), 17.

[7] Luke 22:25 cf. Mark 10:42/Matt 20:25.

[8] Matt 11:18/Luke 7:25.

[9] Mark 13:9f/Lk 21:12–13; cf. Matt 24:9.

[10] Mark 12:13–17/Matt 22:15–22/Luke 20:20–26.

[11] Matt 23:8–12

[12] Mark 10:42–43

[13] Mark 9:33–37/Matt 18:1–6/Luke 9:46–48; Mark 10:13–16/Matt 19:13–15/Luke 18:15–17.

[14] Luke 22:26

[15] Mark 11:20–25. On this passage, see Marshall Faith as a Theme, 159–74.

[16] Luke 13:1; 22:24–27.

[17] Mark 10:33–34/Matt 20:17–19/Luke 18:31–34.

[18] Mark 13:9–10/Luke 21:12–13; Mark 8:34–38.

[19] Luke 19:41–44; 21:20–24; 23:27–31.

[20] Matt 23:29–36; Luke 9:7–9, 19; 13:31–35; Mark 13:9–13.

[21] Wright, Jesus and Victory, 296, cf. 450, 465, 564–65.

[22] On this see Richard Dormandy, “The Expulsion of Legion: A Political Reading of Mark 5:1-20,” Expository Times 93/10 (2000): 335–37; Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1988), 190–94; Horsley, Jesus and Empire, 99–104.

Prof Christopher Marshall is the Diana Unwin Chair in Restorative Justice in the School of Government at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. He specialises in New Testament theology and ethics, peace theology and practice, and restorative justice (both theory and practice), and is an expert in the study of contemporary Anabaptist theology. His books include Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime and Punishment and Compassionate Justice: An Interdisiciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice.

A Prophet of God’s Justice: Reclaiming the Political Jesus (Part 2.1)

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Chris Marshall | Thursday, 4th June 2015

Read the previous part of this series here.

In the introduction to Part 1.1 of this series, Chris said:

“In this paper I want to offer an appraisal of some of the political themes that emerge in the gospel accounts of the ministry of Jesus. My thesis is radically simple (as well as simply radical) – it is that Jesus was an overtly political figure, that he had an identifiable political platform, and that the political values, commitments and priorities we see displayed in his teaching and praxis ought to play a determinative role in shaping and directing all subsequent Christian engagement in the political process.”

Having argued that "Jesus’ message of the dawning kingdom of God had significant political implications," Chris changes focus in the remainder of this series to discuss the positive dimensions of Jesus' political strategy.

JESUS’ TWO-FOLD POLITICAL STRATEGY
Broadly speaking Jesus’ political stance was characterized by a prophetic denunciation of the injustices and social evils of the prevailing social order on the one hand, including a strident declaration of divine judgment on the existing centres of power responsible for oppression and injustice, and, on the other hand, by the calling together of an alternative community to live according to the standards of God’s kingdom of justice and peace and thereby to model and effect the renewal of Israel as a whole. Commentators often underestimate the potential societal impact that such a “contrast society”, planted in the heart of mainstream society, is capable of. But, as Gerhard Lohfink observes, “the anti-social and corrupt systems of a dominant society cannot be attacked more sharply than by the formation of an anti-society in its midst. Simply through its existence, this new society is a more efficacious attack on the old structures than any program, without personal cost, for the general transformation of the world”.[1]

This twofold strategy of judgment and renewal, of confrontation and reconstruction, of political resistance and social revolution, is evident in at least four major areas of contemporary social life addressed by Jesus.[2] And, to reiterate my underlying thesis, it is the priorities, values and commitments we see at work in Jesus’ activity here that ought to furnish the normative framework for all subsequent political engagement in his name.

1. A rejection of social discrimination: Supremely characteristic of Jesus was his orientation to the social margins—the destitute, the weak, social outcasts, women, children, Samaritans, the physically deformed, those in prison, the sick and the possessed. The dawning of the kingdom of God, insisted Jesus, was good news for the socially disadvantaged.[3] It brought to them both the present comfort of knowing God’s acceptance and blessing despite their social exclusion and often self-blame, and the reassurance that God was now at work, through Jesus and mission, to end their suffering and restore them to freedom and wholeness.

Jesus combated social discrimination at two levels. He openly criticised the self-righteous arrogance of the religious experts,[4] and knowingly antagonized them by seeking intimate fellowship with sinners and outcasts.[5] At the same time, he assembled a new inclusive, egalitarian community in which the poor were to be given preference,[6] the sick and the imprisoned cared for,[7] women accorded dignity and equality,[8] children esteemed as models to be emulated,[9] and Samaritans and Gentiles embraced as equal objects of God’s favour.[10] From this it follows that any modern political programme that marginalises racial, ethnic or social groups, and which ignores or exacerbates the plight of the weak and downtrodden to promote the interests of the strong, even if it calls itself a “Christian” option, is diametrically opposed to the politics of Jesus.

2. A critique of economic exploitation: It is surely impossible to read Luke’s Gospel without sensing Jesus’ profound hostility to materialism and the relational and societal damage it causes. As an alternative source of security, the pursuit and hording of surplus wealth creates a barrier to radical trust in God and his kingdom.[11] Moreover, in a patronage-based economy the concentration of massive riches in the hands of a few was evidence of structural injustice in society. The rich prospered at the expense of the poor. Jesus’ words “for you always have the poor with you” should not be taken as a sign of his passive acquiescence to poverty in society.[12] They are, in fact, an implied rebuke, for according to Deuteronomy 15:11 enduring poverty was evidence of a failure to keep the laws of the covenant by practicing mutual sharing and collective responsibility.

Jesus’ use of the intriguing term “mammon of injustice” (Luke 16:9) may even imply that he saw in the single-minded pursuit of wealth an inherent tendency towards injustice. This is confirmed in his overt attack on the greedy rich of his day. “Woe to you who are rich now, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you shall hunger” (Luke 6:24-25). Jesus criticised the rich for three related evils: for accumulating unneeded surplus,[13] for ignoring the needs of the poor,[14] and for corruption and exploitation of the weak.[15] It is in this connection that we should probably understand Jesus’ climactic confrontation with the Temple establishment—which was undoubtedly his most overt and daring political-prophetic action.[16] There is no time to explore this extremely important episode here, but it was probably the way the Temple system had become integrated into the imperial system of domination and exploitation that Jesus most strongly objected to.[17]

By contrast, Jesus pronounced beatitude upon the poor. “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger, for you shall be full. Blessed are you who weep, for you shall laugh” (Luke 6:20-21).[18] Jesus is not here turning poverty, hunger and tears into “spiritual values” in themselves. The poor, the starving and the sorrowful are not blessed because of their condition but because God intends to reverse their situation. When God’s kingdom comes in its fullness, poverty and pain will be no more. In the meantime, God’s kingly power is at work in Jesus and his followers to bring healing and liberation and to create a new community to work against poverty, hunger and misery. Thus, as Klaus Wengst observes:

…the beatitudes prove also to be declarations of war against poverty, hunger and tears: they are concerned for radical change. They look to the coming kingdom of God for this change ... But this expectation is not just to be waited for; it has a reality in behaviour to match. When Jesus turns to those on the periphery, in his fellowship with his followers, people are already filled, already laugh, who would otherwise be pushed aside and have nothing to laugh about ... the hungry are filled and ... the domination of one person by another has come to an end.[19]

Not only were the poor and hungry to find dignity and acceptance within the new community, but a whole new attitude to material possessions was to prevail therein. Following Jesus entailed a commitment to share one’s material resources with those in need.[20] A lifestyle of simplicity,[21] material dependence[22] and constant vigilance against the “deceitfulness of riches” (Mark 4:19) are to be the hallmarks of the new community. In these ways, Jesus’ followers were to live ‘as if’ the provisions of the biblical Jubilee were being enacted in their midst.[23]

How very different is the prevailing political landscape of global capitalist society today, which makes an idol of market forces, promotes consumerism as a means of political survival, and, while mouthing platitudes to the contrary, exacerbates the plight of the poor and dispossessed in pursuit of an ever-greater concentration of wealth and power.

Read the final instalment in this series here. This article originally appeared in On The Road 32.

[1] G. Lohfink, Jesus and Community: The Social Dimension of Christian Faith (London: SPCK, 1985), 95. So also John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 40.

[2] For the section that follows, see, more briefly, my Little Book of Biblical Justice (Intercourse: Good Books, 2004), 49–64. No attempt will be made to assess the authenticity of the various sayings ascribed to Jesus, nor to delineate the redactional interests of the individual evangelists. The themes reviewed here are sufficiently pervasive in the gospel traditions to be confident that they substantially reflect the perspective of Jesus, even allowing for sometimes extensive redactional shaping of the materials by the gospel writers.

[3] Luke 4:18–20; Matt 11:2–6/Luke 7:18–35.

[4] See e.g. Matt 9:13; 21:31; Luke 6:24f; 16:15.

[5] See e.g. Mark 2:15–17/Matt 9:10–13/Lk 5:27–30; Matt 11:19/Luke 15:1–2; 19:1–10.

[6] See e.g. Luke 14:12–24.

[7] Matt 25:31–46

[8] See e.g. Luke 8:1–3; 10:38–42; Mark 14:3–9; 15:40–41; John 3:7–38, etc.

[9] Mark 9:36,42/Matt 18:1–5/Luke 9:46–48; Mark 10:13–16/Matt 19:13–15/Luke 18:15–17.

[10] See e.g. Mark 7:24–30/Matt 15:21–28; Mark 11:17; 13:10; Matt 8:5–13/Luke 7:1–10; Matt 12:18; 21:43/Luke 20:16; Matt 28:19–20; Luke 9:51–55; John 4:7–42.

[11] Mark 4:19/Matt 13:22/Luke 8:14; Mark 10:17–31/Matt 19:16–30/Luke 18:18–30; Matt 6:21; Luke 12:16–21; 14:1–14; 16:13.

[12] Mark 14:7/Matt 26:11/John 12:8.

[13] Luke 12:15–21; 16:19; 21:1–4; Matt 11:8.

[14] Luke 10:25–37; 16:19–27.

[15] Mark 11:15–19; 12:40/Luke 20:47; Matt 23:23/Luke 11:42.

[16] Mark 11:15–18/Matt 21:12–13/Luke 19:45–46; John 2:14–22.

[17] The literature on this episode is now substantial, but see especially Herzog, Jesus Justice, 112–43, 191–99.

[18] On this see my essay “The Moral Vision of the Beatitudes: The Blessings of Revolution”, in Faith and Freedom: Christian Ethics in a Pluralist Culture (eds. D. Neville & P. Matthews; Sydney: Australian Theological Forum, 2003), 11–33.

[19] Klaus Wengst, Pax Romana and the Peace of Christ (London: SCM, 1987), 65.

[20] See e.g. Mark 10:17–30; Matt 6:2–4; Matt 7:7–11; Luke 6:35, 38; 8:1–3; 12:32–34; 19:1–10; 14:25–35; John 12:6; 13:29.

[21] Matt 6:19–34/Luke 12:22–31.

[22] Mark 6:7–13, cf. Luke 9:38; 10:4.

[23] Wright, Jesus and Victory, 295.

Prof Christopher Marshall is the Diana Unwin Chair in Restorative Justice in the School of Government at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. He specialises in New Testament theology and ethics, peace theology and practice, and restorative justice (both theory and practice), and is an expert in the study of contemporary Anabaptist theology. His books include Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime and Punishment and Compassionate Justice: An Interdisiciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice.

A Prophet of God’s Justice: Reclaiming the Political Jesus (Part 1.2)

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Chris Marshall | Monday, 1st June 2015

Read the first part of the series here.

In the first instalment of this series, Chris asserted that most Christians are "disturbingly deaf to the political dimensions of Jesus’ preaching and practice, and to its far-reaching implications for shaping an authentically Christian political witness today." He then went on to discuss reasons for this 'depoliticisation of Jesus', namely narrow concepts of "politics" amongst modern Christians, and the distorting influence of post-Enlightenment individualism on interpretations of Jesus' ministry. Here Chris discusses additional factors in the perpetuation of the depoliticisation of Jesus.

THE DEPOLICISATION OF JESUS (continued)

3. Fragmentary reading strategies: A third factor contributing to the prevalent depoliticisation of Jesus are the atomistic reading strategies employed by gospel readers and interpreters. All attention gets focused on isolated sayings of Jesus, or individual miracle stories, or the meaning of particular parables, with little consideration being given to how these individual items fit into the larger story being told by the evangelists or how they reflect the economic and socio-political realities of the first-century world in which the story is set.

This fragmentary approach is commonplace in both popular and scholarly approaches to the gospels. At a popular level, most preaching and devotional reading of the gospels concentrates on small tracts of text separated off from the larger narrative setting. Similarly church lectionaries, although a very ancient and helpful tool for engaging the full witness of Scripture, still do make a virtue out of breaking the gospel accounts down into very small units and distributing them throughout the year. More concerning however is what many gospel critics do. In the name of sound historical method, critical scholars apply “scientific” tests of authenticity to the Jesus-tradition in order to siphon off material that can be considered to be historically reliable. The limited amount of data extracted by this method is usually predominantly sayings-material—things Jesus said more than things Jesus did—since it is much harder to validate the historicity of third-person narratives which are full of fantastic features and clearly serve as Christian propaganda. The resulting collection of “authentic” sayings and parables are then treated as repositories of meaning in their own right, independent of the literary or historical context in which they occur in the gospel tradition.

The problems with this approach are manifold, not the least being that it inevitably reduces Jesus to a dehistoricised “talking head”, someone who hovers serenely above the mundane circumstances of ordinary life and communicates moral or spiritual insights in the form of decontextualised aphorisms, proverbs and parables, or by the occasional striking deed. But no real human being ever communicates that way. No one limits their speech to short sentences or brief sound bites unrelated to specific situations and disconnected from ongoing human relationships, or unhooked from the shared traditions, experiences and meanings of their audience. To try to understand the significance of Jesus’ words and deeds without reference to the concrete social and political circumstances of actual Jewish communities under Roman rule is like trying to understand the sermons and speeches of Martin Luther King without reference to the bitter legacy of American slavery, the injustices of segregation, and the struggles of the civil rights movement.[1]

The only way, then, to do justice to the individual words and deeds of Jesus is always to view them within the context of the larger gospel narrative of his life and mission, rooted as it is, and as Jesus himself historically was, is in the real life world of colonial Palestine, where prophetic and messianic movements of liberation were constantly springing up.

4. Jesus the prophet: Several times I have referred to Jesus as a Jewish prophet. There can be little doubt that the gospel writers present Jesus in such terms,[2] and in a good number of his own sayings Jesus refers to himself as a prophet.[3] His repeated warnings of impending judgment on the nation and its rulers are also evidence of Jesus’ prophetic persona.[4] It is precisely in his guise as a prophet that Jesus exercises such a politically-charged role. Much the same could be said for his messianic identity. It is extremely likely that Jesus saw himself as Israel’s awaited messiah, even if he was decidedly chary about employing the title itself, and he was indisputably executed by Pilate as a messianic pretender.[5] To claim messiahship was to assert a political function, since the most common expectation of the coming messiah is that he would be a princely warrior who would defeat God’s enemies, restore the throne of David, and lead Israel to universal sovereignty over the nations.

Yet there has been a curious reluctance among Christian interpreters to take seriously Jesus’ prophetic and messianic significance. This reluctance again has both popular and scholarly expressions. At a popular theological level, it is Jesus’ divinity that usually squeezes out his prophetic credentials. Jesus was not just a prophet, Christian apologists (rightly) insist, he was the incarnate Son of God, a divine being, not just a human being. Jews and Muslims may honour Jesus as a prophet, but, they (rightly) urge, we Christians know him as God’s only begotten son.

At a scholarly level, it is Jesus’ messianic self-consciousness that is more disputed. Many gospel critics are unconvinced that Jesus saw himself as a messiah, and while they may allow him the label of prophet in lieu, even that identity is stripped of much political content. There is even one strand of American scholarship that has now demoted Jesus further from the status of prophet to that of peasant sage or wisdom teacher or Cynic-like philosopher. These scholars, reacting negatively to the apocalyptic fantasies of American fundamentalism, strip Jesus’ preaching of all traces of apocalyptic judgment, leaving behind a harmless wandering bard who travelled around the countryside “teaching an alternative hippie-like lifestyle to a bunch of rootless nobodies”.[6] Why anyone, least of all Pilate, would want to crucify such a person is difficult to fathom.

But the evidence that Jesus considered himself to be a prophet, and was regarded by his contemporaries as such, is overwhelming. It is true that his closest followers soon came to regard him as much more than a prophet,[7] but they never saw him as less, and it was in the basic mould of a prophet that Jesus made his most decisive political impact. “Prophet” was a fluid category in Jesus’ day, embracing a wide diversity of functions and emphases.[8] Some prophets were clerical and establishment figures, others were more scholarly types; some were lone wolfs delivering oracles of judgment or deliverance, others were popular leaders of mass movements who modelled themselves on the great prophetic figures of the past, like Moses, Joshua and Elijah, and who proclaimed God’s imminent intervention to bring deliverance from Roman servitude and idolatry. Jesus fits best into this latter category of a popular prophet leading a proletarian movement of liberation and renewal, centred on a distinctive understanding of God’s kingdom and its implications. Distinctive it certainly was, especially in its foreswearing of hatred and violence toward the enemy, but it was not apolitical, for, as Wright observes, “anyone who was announcing God’s kingdom … was engaging in political activity. The question is, rather, what sort of politics were they undertaking, and with what end in view”.[9]

5. A kingdom not of this world: The four factors I have discussed so far that have served to depoliticise Jesus—the spurious separation of religion and politics, the distorting grid of Western individualism, the fragmenting of the gospel story into isolated bits and pieces, and the discomfort with Jesus’ prophetic or messianic office—all come to roost in the actual exposition of the text. Those who not only miss but positively resist the idea of a politically engaged Jesus cite two texts in particular as proof that Jesus wasn’t much concerned with political affairs. The first is Jesus’ response to Pilate’s question about whether he considered himself to be the king of the Jews

Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” … Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” (John 18:35–38)

This text more than any other has been used by conservative interpreters to encourage Christian quietism and disengagement from political or social justice issues, since the kingdom which Jesus proclaims “is not of this world….it is not from here”. It is a heavenly, not an earthly, kingdom. The second text comes from the so-called Tribute Question passage, where Jesus is asked directly about whether it is acceptable to support Caesar’s regime through paying taxes.

Then they sent to him some Pharisees and some Herodians to trap him in what he said. And they came and said to him, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality, but teach the way of God in accordance with truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?” But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, “Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me see it.” And they brought one. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answered, “Caesar’s.” Jesus said to them, “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” And they were utterly amazed at him (Mark 12:13–17).

Upon this text a thorough-going, and thoroughly baleful, “two kingdoms” theology has been constructed, according to which the State is deemed to have rightful charge of social and political affairs, while the church has control of spiritual and religious matters.[10] Christians must therefore be good, obedient citizens in society in recognition of Caesar’s legitimate authority, but they should concentrate most of their energies in developing their relationship to God and serving the church, and leave worldly affairs to those whom God has appointed to rule. It would be no exaggeration to say that without this reading of Jesus’ famous words “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”, reinforced by Paul’s call to Christian submission to ruling authorities in Romans 13:1–6, the Nazi holocaust might never have happened.Quote Block Marshall3There is no time to exegete either of these two passages in detail here.[11] Suffice it to say that the familiar readings of both texts are dangerously misguided. Even in the context of John’s Gospel—the most “spiritual” of all the gospels—Jesus’ saying “my kingdom is not of this world” cannot be taken as an affirmation that God’s kingdom is a purely spiritual reality unrelated to worldly realities. After all it was out of love for this world that God sent Christ into the world in the first place, in order that “through him the world might be saved” (John 3:16–17). The term “kingdom” here, as always in biblical tradition, has the active force of “rule” or “kingship” or “power” more than place or territory or realm, so that what Jesus is really saying is that his style of exercising kingly authority is unlike that of other kings. His kingship conforms, not to brutal coercive rule of Herod or Caesar or Caiaphas, but to the compassionate, healing rule of God. It does not rest on violent coercion but on loving persuasion.

That is why in the second part of the verse, which is hardly ever quoted by conservative apologists, Jesus explains that “if my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews”. The thing that most differentiates Jesus’ kingship from worldly forms of kingship is its non-violence. His authority is “not from here”—it is not molded by realpolitik considerations. If it were, his followers would have launched a violent campaign to seize Jerusalem and install him on throne. Instead God’s kingdom exerts its power by peaceful means. It is still a political reality (it is still about power), but it embodies the politics of peace, not the politics of conquest.

Jesus’ reply to the question about tribute points in the same direction. Jesus’ enemies seek to trap him with a Catch-22 question: “Is it lawful for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” Both Jesus’ questioners and Jesus himself knew full well that, according to God’s law, it was unlawful to offer homage to a pagan ruler who blasphemously claimed universal sovereignty for himself. In recent memory Jewish radicals had gone to horrifying deaths for their refusal to pay tribute to Caesar in the name of the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me”. But both parties also knew full well that, according to Roman law, it was obligatory to pay taxes and tribute to the imperium. So Jesus was trapped. If he endorsed taxation, he was in open breach of the Torah, at least in the eyes of the faithful. If he opposed taxation, he was in defiance of Rome and could well have to pay for it with his life.

In a brilliant riposte, Jesus evades the trap by snaring his opponents in their own petard. First he asks his interrogators to show him a denarius, the Roman coin used for tribute payment. The very fact that they can so quickly produce a coin exposes the insincerity of their inquiry. For their very possession of foreign currency confirmed that his questioners had themselves already opted for subservience to Rome, even while provoking Jesus to declare his Torah-based opposition to it. Jesus then asks them to verbalise whose image (eikon) and whose title the coin bore. In doing this he was both deliberately underscoring the blasphemous nature of the inscription on the coin, which ascribed deity to the emperor (“Tiberius Caesar, Augustus, Son of the Divine Augustus”), and reminding his hearers of who God’s true image bearers in the world really are, namely God’s own people (cf. Gen 1:27). Only then does Jesus make his climactic declaration about rendering to Caesar what is his due and to God what is his.

Given that Jesus had first intentionally highlighted the idolatrous nature of Caesar’s coinage, it is unthinkable that his final pronouncement was intended to be a straightforward endorsement of his listeners’ obligation to pay their taxes, though this is how it is often interpreted.[12] If his words amounted to an unambiguous affirmation of Rome’s right to levy tribute, it is hard to see how his enemies could construe them as sedition and report him to Pilate for “perverting our nation and forbidding us to pay taxes to Caesar” (Luke 23:2). If anything, Jesus’ statement is more naturally taken as a bold declaration of independence from Rome’s tribute-generating machine. But Jesus stops short of explicitly forbidding payment of tribute. Instead he draws attention to the fundamental principle at issue: One must first be clear on what rightfully belongs to Caesar and what rightfully belongs to God, then decide on the specifics of tribute. Of course every Jew knew the “earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” (Psalm 24:1), and that their political allegiance was owed exclusively to Yahweh alone. That meant that nothing belonged of right to Caesar, least of all the God-given land of Israel and its produce (cf. Lev 25:23).

It does not follow from this, however, that Jesus was encouraging outright tax refusal by his Jewish compatriots, which would have been catastrophic. Instead he was inviting them to reframe the meaning of the payment they must make by turning it from a symbol of subservience into a symbol of resistance. Since Israel’s God is lord of all, Caesar could legitimately claim ownership to nothing—except one thing, the despicable coins minted in his own honour. So in returning these idolatrous coins to their pagan owner, albeit in the form of coercive taxes, Jesus’ hearers could understand themselves to be symbolically ridding God’s land of the symbols of imperial domination and reasserting their own vocation as God’s true image bearers on earth.[13]Quote Block Marshall2To sum up thus far: Once we cast off the modern blinkers we bring to the gospel story, it becomes clear that Jesus’ message of the dawning kingdom of God had significant political implications. His announcement that God’s long awaited reign was now asserting itself in the world, and his consequent summons for people to rally to the flag, had, as Wright observes “far more in common with the founding of a revolutionary party than with what we now think of as either ‘evangelism’ or ‘ethical teaching’”.[14] It is a drastic impoverishment of Jesus’ message and a blunting of its radical edge to suggest that Jesus was only concerned with the spiritual needs and personal conduct of individuals. The most fatal objection to this familiar portrait of Jesus is that it fails utterly to meet the criterion of crucifiability. As William Herzog observes:

If [Jesus] had been the kind of teacher popularly portrayed in the North American church, a master of the inner life, teaching the importance of spirituality and a private relationship with God, he would have been supported by the Romans as part of their rural pacification program. That was exactly the kind of religion the Romans wanted peasants to have. Any belief that he encouraged … withdrawal from the world of politics and economics into a spiritual or inner realm would have met with official approval.[15]

But that is not what happened. Instead Jesus and his movement were perceived by the imperial and colonial authorities to be a political time bomb that urgently needed defusing, and for very good reason. To understand why, it is important to recognize the methodology Jesus used to make political comment and work for social change, since the political options open to Jesus were quite unlike those open to us in liberal democratic societies.

Read the next instalment in this series here. This article originally appeared in On The Road 32.

[1] I borrow this helpful analogy from Horsley, Jesus and Empire, 13.

[2] Matt 13:57/Mark 6:4, cf. Luke 4:24; Matt 8:28; Matt 16:14/Luke 9:19; Matt 21:11, 26; Mark 6:14–16/ Matt 14:1–2/Luke 9:7–9; Luke 7:16, 39–50; 13:33; John 1:21; 4:19; 6:14; 7:40, 52; Mark 14:65/Matt 26:68; Luke 22:64; 24:19; Acts 3:22; 7:37.

[3] Mark 6:4/Matt 13:57; Luke 4:24/GTh 31; John 4:44; Luke 13:31-33. Jesus also regarded John the Baptist as a prophet: Luke 7:26/Matt 11:9; cf. John 1:22; Mark 11:27–33.

[4] For perhaps the most thorough recent analysis of judgment in Jesus’ preaching, see Marius Resier, Jesus and Judgment: The Eschatological Proclamation in its Jewish Context (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997). See also Dale C. Allison, Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and its Interpreters (New York: T & T Clark, 2005), 56–110.

[5] Mark 15:1–38; Matt 27:11–32; Luke 23:1–46; John 18:28–19:38.

[6] Horsley, Jesus and Empire, 7.

[7] See Mark 8:27–30, cf. 6:14–16. To be sure, Jesus deems John the Baptist to be “more than a prophet” (Luke 7:26/Matt 11:9). But significantly, Jesus is only once referred to as a prophet outside gospels (Acts 3:22). His significance transcended established prophetic categories.

[8] On different types of prophet in the first century, see Wright, Jesus and Victory, 153–55; Herzog, Jesus Justice, 51–60. See also Morna D. Hooker, The Signs of a Prophet: The Prophetic Actions of Jesus (London: SCM, 1997) and David R. Kaylor, Jesus the Prophet: His Vision of the Kingdom on Earth (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994).

[9] Wright, Jesus and Victory, 203.

[10] See my fuller discussion in Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime and Punishment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 16–30.

[11] On the tribute passage, see Wright, Jesus and Victory, 502–07; Herzog, Jesus Justice, 219–32; Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 307–17.

[12] Contra Oscar Cullman, The State in the New Testament (London: SCM, 1957), 34–38; W.D. Davies, “Ethics in the New Testament”, Interpreters’ Dictionary of the Bible II:171.

[13] So Herzog, Jesus Justice, 231–32.

[14] Wright, Jesus and Victory, 301. This interpretation fits well with the way Walter Wink, and others, understand the strategy underlying Jesus’ injunctions in Matthew 5:21–48. For a brief account, see Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium (New York: Doubleday, 1998), esp. 98–111.

[15] Quoted by Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jesus Against Christianity: Reclaiming the Missing Jesus (Harrisburg: Trinity, 2001), 236–36.

Prof Christopher Marshall is the Diana Unwin Chair in Restorative Justice in the School of Government at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. He specialises in New Testament theology and ethics, peace theology and practice, and restorative justice (both theory and practice), and is an expert in the study of contemporary Anabaptist theology. His books include Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime and Punishment and Compassionate Justice: An Interdisiciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice.