Here's another excerpt from my book, Reframing a Relevant Faith. This portion is another part of the chapter on Jesus. You can purchase the book from the publisher at http://direct.energion.co/reframing-a-relevant-faith or through Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Reframing-Relevant-Faith-Drew-Smith/dp/1631991213/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1418159944&sr=1-1&keywords=reframing+a+relevant+faith. A Kindle version is also available at http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=reframing%20a%20relevant%20faith%20kindle.
I recall growing up in church and always seeing various portraits of Jesus hanging on the walls. As a child, I assumed that Jesus was a white man with flowing locks of hair, who always wore a white robe and always had a look of calm on his face. More often than not, Jesus would be pictured with little children and young animals around him in a representation of peace and tranquility. A confrontational Jesus would never have crossed my mind.
But over the
years that I have spent reading the Gospels, I have come to the conclusion that
Jesus was a confrontational person, who was vastly concerned with the social
injustices of his day. Jesus was not
simply a teacher of spirituality as we like to make him out to be. Nor was he some divine figure who went about
Galilee healing people. He was certainly
both of these, but Jesus was also a political figure, whose words and deeds
challenged the unjust political powers of his time.
This is not
to suggest that Jesus was a politician in the way we think about politics
today, nor is it to suggest that Jesus advocated a religious form of
government. Such already existed in the
ancient world as no known civilization existed apart from religion having an
indivisible relationship with the state.
Nor should we think of Jesus as seeking to involve himself in any
political power system, whether the secular power of Rome or the religious
power of the temple leadership. Indeed,
we know very well that Jesus worked outside and in opposition to the standing
power of both Roman authorities and the religious leadership of Jerusalem.
What I mean
by saying that Jesus was a political figure is that his message and his mission
confronted the social structures of his day with the politics of God. In other words, when we talk about Jesus, we
need to take very seriously that Jesus’ message was fraught with challenges to
the politics of his day; his was a subversive politics. While eventually crucified in an act of cooperation
between the two power centers he confronted, Jesus’ teachings were not
primarily about sin and salvation, heaven and hell. His central message was a new politic, a new
way of existing in human society. His politics were the politics of compassion and
justice, and central to his political message was his belief and his
proclamation that God’s kingdom was coming into the world; a kingdom that was a
subversive revolutionary resistance to the Roman Empire and the religious
ruling elite of Judaism.
Thus, instead
of seeking worldly political power through violence, domination, and
oppression, which Jesus and others witnessed first- hand from the Roman
Imperial power, and instead of acquiescing with the practice of violence,
domination, and oppression as the religious leaders of Israel did as a way of
satisfying Rome enough to keep their places of religious power, Jesus called for a new politic, one that was
shaped by the character and presence of God’s rule and one that was manifested
in the radical living of his disciples.[1]
While most
scholars do agree that the central theme of Jesus’ teaching was the rule of
God, there is much disagreement about what Jesus meant by this term. Again, the scholarly debates on this issue
are too complex for my purposes here.
But, before we seek an answer to the question about what Jesus meant by
the phrase “kingdom of God”, it might be helpful first to dismiss assumptions
we might have about the character of God’s kingdom. In other words, these are
the understandings we commonly have about the kingdom that are uninformed and
incorrect.
First, the
kingdom of God is not primarily a spiritual realm. It is spiritual in that it
comes from God, but it is not heaven, as we might often think, and getting to
some place called heaven is not the purpose of following Christ. Second, the kingdom of God is not primarily
about personal spirituality. God’s coming kingdom does transform us personally
and in our Christian living we live as individuals who are in a personal
relationship to God, but the kingdom of God cannot be reduced merely to
personal spirituality.
What we need
to understand about the meaning of the phrase, as Jesus used it, is that the
term itself is politically charged. Jesus did not randomly pick this metaphor;
he chose it as a challenge to the Roman imperial power that carried out
injustice. He viewed the rule of God as coming into the word as the dynamic
presence of God’s love, compassion and justice.
In calling people to enter the kingdom of God and follow him, Jesus was
calling people to join an alternative empire, the Empire of God, over which God
ruled and in which there was an alternative way of living in community with
others.
What Jesus
was doing through his ministry was calling people out of an existence that
focused on the power of this world into a community over which God ruled as
king. And he was calling them to offer
their allegiance to God and not Caesar.
This was the significance of confessing Jesus as Lord in the Roman
Empire. Such a confession in the Roman world signified that one was no longer
giving loyalty to Caesar or to the Roman system of domination, oppression,
violence, and injustice. Confession of Jesus as Lord was not just a conversion
experience in the way that we think of today as an individualized spiritual
transformation; it was much more. Confessing Jesus as Lord was a transformation
of the person from allegiance to one way living to another way of living. It was an act of insubordination against the
so-called supremacy of the world’s strongest power and an embrace of the call
of Jesus to take up the cross and follow him. Joining the Jesus movement meant
standing in opposition to worldly powers that carried out oppression, violence,
and injustice.
Yet, the
alternative kingdom Jesus was ushering into the world could not, in reality,
face up to the power of Rome. Jesus and his followers were never significant
challengers of Rome’s military power, and Christians in the empire remained
outsiders for centuries, and were, at various points, persecuted by the Roman
authorities. In fact, joining the Jesus movement could quite possibly lead a
person to death. From a worldly perspective, then, this Jesus movement, and
Jesus’ message about God’s kingdom, would be seen as an inevitable failure.
After all, was not the movement’s leader put to death on a Roman cross? So how does the rule of God, which Jesus
proclaimed as near, continue to come into the world, since the bearer of God’s
rule was put to death? God’s kingdom
continues to manifest itself in the world through the followers of Jesus who
seek a different way of living and relating to others, both neighbors and
enemies.
[1]
The classic text on the politics of Jesus is John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus. Various other scholars have approached Jesus as a political figure, including John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg.
The classic text on the politics of Jesus is John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus. Various other scholars have approached Jesus as a political figure, including John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg.
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