Liberating Christianity

The Inner Revolution

Rev. Dr. Thomas Calnan Sorenson

(c) Thomas Calnan Sorenson, 2020

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, (c) 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

For centuries most Christians have thought that Christianity is all about what you have to believe and do, and not believe and not do, so that your soul goes to heaven when you die. However, if we could just read the Gospels without the sacrificial atonement filters we’ve had placed over our eyes we would see that Jesus was hardly about that at all. He was mostly about how God wants us to live our lives in this world, not about what we need to do and not do to get to some other world after death. Jesus wanted to transform his world, and he wants us to transform ours. Yet he didn’t want us to begin with external things. Rather he called—and calls—us to an inner revolution, to a radically transformed way of thinking. He wanted to change the world, but he wanted to do it not through violence but through the inner transformation of human hearts one person at a time. I want to explore here just what the inner revolution is to which Jesus calls us. It is the necessary foundation for Christian faith and Christian life, so we Christians would all do well to understand it.

For Jesus the revolution begins within. We learn that truth from one of Jesus’ most important if  one of his most misunderstood and perhaps one of his most neglected parables. You’ll find the earliest version of it at Mark 5:1-13. The text does not call these verses a parable, but I find it helpful to think of them as one. This story goes like this. Jesus crosses the Sea of Galilee from the Jewish (or western) side to the Gentile (or eastern) side. He comes to the land of the Gerasenes. There a “man out of the tombs” meets him. According to the law of Leviticus tombs are unclean, and contact with them makes a person unclean. So this poor man is unclean first of all just because of where he hangs out. Then this man is unclean because he has “an unclean spirit.” That spirit made him immensely strong and uncontrollable. He could not be restrained by shackles or with chains. He’d just break them to pieces. He sees Jesus, runs up to him, and bows before him. He shouts: “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God do not torment me.” Mark 5:7b. Jesus is tormenting him because he had called the unclean spirit out of the man. Then in one of the oddest and most important parts of the parable Jesus asks the demon what its name is. We wonder why Jesus would want to know and perhaps why he didn’t already know the demon’s name. I mean, what difference does the demon’s name make? Well, it turns out that the demon’s name makes an immense difference in the meaning of this story. The demon says “My name is Legion; for we are many.” Mark 5:9b. The demon (or demons) begged Jesus not to send him (or them) out of the country. The spirits beg Jesus to let them enter a herd of swine feeding on a nearby hillside. Jesus agrees. The demons enter these innocent pigs, around two thousand of them, who immediately rush down the hill into the lake and are drowned.

The demon’s name is “Legion.” The demon says that its name is Legion because there are so many of them inside this poor man, yet surely there is more meaning in the name than that. After all, what is a legion? The word has come to mean any large number, but its origin lies in Roman military usage. In the Roman Empire of Jesus’ time a legion was a major unit of the army. At full strength it numbered around 6,000 soldiers. In its plural form, the Roman legions, it can refer to the entire Roman army. The original first century CE audience for this story would immediately have connected the demon’s name with the Roman military occupation of their country. The metaphorical meaning of the demon’s name is clear enough. This possessed man represents the entire region of and around Galilee and Judea that was occupied and oppressed by the Romans, with the Roman legions being the primary instrument of that occupation and oppression.

Jesus exorcizes the demon named Legion out of the man. That’s good news for the possessed man of course, but this story doesn’t mean much to us if that’s all its about. The story means a great deal to us if we understand that the story is a metaphor for how Jesus wants us to deal with living in a world dominated by the power of empire. This possessed man’s problem is not that Rome is out there. His problem is that Rome is in here, inside him, possessing and occupying this mind, heart, and soul. When Jesus exorcises the demon named Legion he pulls Rome out of this unfortunate fellow. Jesus cleanses the man of the internal contagion of Rome thereby presumably restoring the man to mental and spiritual health.

This reading of the story is supported by the part of it in which the demons enter a herd of swine. The possessed pigs immediately rush down the hill into the Sea of Galilee and are drowned. Metaphorically speaking unclean Rome has rushed into the sea and been drowned. Driving the Romans into the sea, or at least out of Israel, was the dream of a great many Jewish folk in Jesus’ time. Many of them thought that the long-promised Messiah would do precisely that, and do it quite literally. He would raise an army, wage war against Rome, and free the homeland of the Hebrews from the contagion of occupation by a Gentile power. In this story Rome rushes into the sea and is drowned, not literally but metaphorically. The demon named Legion enters into animals that for the Jews are unclean just as the Romans themselves are unclean. Metaphorically Rome is exorcized not just out of the possessed man but out of the whole region of Galilee.

Jesus is telling us something really important through this story. Just as the possessed man’s problem wasn’t that Rome was out there but that Rome was in here, inside him, so our problem in our relationship with the world isn’t that the world is out there. It is that the world is in here. It is that we have internalized the ways of the world. The ways of the world possess us, and they contaminate us. They fill our minds, constrict our hearts, and dominate our souls. They reconcile us to violence. They convince us that violence solves problems rather than merely creates more problems. They justify the supposed superiority of some people over other people, of men over women, of whites over Blacks, of straights over gays, and cisgendered over transgendered, native born over immiigrant. They say we’re justified in exploiting the riches of the earth in ways that don’t just deplete those riches but threaten the very existence of life on this planet. They convince us that our primary purpose in life is to accumulate material wealth and that spiritual richness just isn’t that important. The ways of the world convince us that our most important job is to “look out for number one,” that is, to care more for ourselves than we do for others. All of which adds up to the truth that the ways of the world convince us to live and to think in ways directly contrary to the ways of God that we know in and through Jesus Christ.

The revolution in the ways of the world to which Jesus calls us will never happen unless we first exorcise Rome out of our hearts, minds, and souls. That is what Jesus is telling us in his parable of the demon named Legion. The world is the way it is because almost everyone in it has internalized those demonic ways of the world. The powers of the world that benefit from those ways retain their grasp on the world because far too many people don’t see anything wrong with them. Jesus did, and he calls us to see how wrong they are too.

So just what does the inner revolution to which Jesus calls us look like? One good way to visualize it is to take all of world’s values and turn them on their heads. Jesus really was that revolutionary. Here I want to consider the turning the world’s values on their heads to which Jesus calls in a few particular areas. I will discuss Jesus’ call to us to adopt creating, assertive, but always nonviolent ways of resisting the world, Jesus’ call to us to love and unlovable and associate with the outcast, and Jesus teaching of absolutely unconditional forgiveness and acceptance of one who has gone astray. I’ll start with Jesus’ teaching of radical nonviolence.

One of the principal characteristics of the ways of the world is the belief that violence solves problems. The world consistently resorts to violence as a first rather than a last means of resolving issues. The world is constantly at war. There has probably never been a time since the rise of humanity’s first civilizations in the great river valleys of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China when there was no war anywhere in the world. Nations great and small wage war simply as a common and universally accepted means of accomplishing some desired end. In modern times at least some non-state organizations also resort to violence as a means of expressing frustration, despair, and anger. They adopt extremist ideologies that arise out of and express their frustration, despair, and anger. Think for example of al-Qaeda’s murderous attack on the United States on September 11, 2001. That attack arose in large part out of anger at the US for stationing military forces in Saudi Arabia, the home of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest sites in Islam. Governments large and small equip and train police forces for the use of violence against real or suspected wrongdoers. Indeed today some urban polices forces in the US look more like fully armed military units than like traditional police forces. Far too often individual people resort to violence too, or perhaps better they act out in violence against innocent targets. Mass shootings have become so common among us that we hardly notice them anymore except perhaps in passing. Domestic violence is a silent epidemic among us. The world is continually awash in violence, and far too few people see any alternative to it as a means of solving problems and even as a way of bringing peace.

Jesus was one person who did see an alternative to violence, and he knew that that alternative was God’s way. In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus says:

You have heard that it was said ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile….

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven…. Matthew 5:38-45a.

These verses from the Sermon on the Mount aren’t the only places in the four canonical gospels where Jesus teaches and lives out nonviolence, but they are the clearest, most complete, and best known of his teachings on nonviolence as the way of God.

We turn now to the lines that come before “love your enemies” in the Sermon on the Mount. Christians and many other people have heard these lines over and over. The phrase “turn the other cheek” is a cliché among us for how to respond when attacked. Yet for all their familiarity these words of Jesus have been almost universally misunderstood. Walter Wink, on whose work we will heavily rely in what follows, puts this misunderstanding this way:

Many otherwise devout Christians simply dismiss Jesus’ teachings about nonviolence out of hand as impractical idealism. And with good reason. ‘Turn the other cheek’ has come to imply a passive, doormatlike (sic) quality that has made the Christian way seem cowardly and complicit in the face of injustice. ‘Resist not evil’ seems to break the back of all opposition to evil and to counsel submission. ‘Going the second mile’ has become a platitude meaning nothing more than ‘extend yourself’ and appears to encourage collaboration with the oppressor.[1]

This interpretation of Jesus’ teaching has been accepted not only by people whose understanding of Jesus’ words leads them to reject the teaching outright but also by some who have accepted it and tried to live by their reading of it. Wink puts the matter this way: “Curiously enough some pacifists have also bought the nonresistance interpretation, and therefore have rejected nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience as coersive and in violation of the law of Christ.”[2] We have come to call Christ’s teaching on nonviolence “pacifism,” and some have practiced it as precisely that, as a passive, inert, inactive attitude in the presence of evil.

For years this reading of Jesus’ words has troubled me. I have long been concerned for victims of domestic violence. Over the long course of the Christian tradition these victims, usually but not always women, have turned to their Christian pastors for advice and refuge. These pastors, operating from this common understanding, have said: “My child, Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek. He tells us not to resist an evildoer. So, my dear, go back. Turn the other cheek when he hits you. Do not resist. Do not fight back, but pray for your abuser that he might mend his ways.” Untold numbers of these victims have done precisely that, and an untold number of them have suffered and even died as a result. For years I struggled to understand that dynamic. Surely, I thought, Jesus never wanted those women to suffer and be killed. That can’t be what he meant when he said do not resist an evildoer but turn the other cheek and go the second mile. I struggled to understand, but I couldn’t get beyond what seemed to be the obvious and necessary meaning of Jesus’ words. I was prepared to reject them outright.

Then I discovered Walter Wink, who I just quoted above. The late, great theologian Walter Wink is best known for his trilogy on what he calls “the Powers.”[3] These three volumes consist of highly sophisticated academic theology. They are a bit heavy for the common reader. Fortunately Wink also published a more popular version of this theology of the Powers with the title The Powers That Be.[4] In these works Wink gives us a brilliant new exegesis of the lines do not resist an evildoer, turn the other cheek, give your cloak also, and go the second mile. Wink unlocks Jesus’ true meaning in these words. He shows that Jesus did not intend to preach passivity at all. Rather, he preached creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to evil. It will be well worth our time to explore and understand Wink’s revolutionary explanation of these words of Jesus.

We’ll start where Wink starts, with the meaning of the Greek word usually translated as “resist” in the phrase “Do not resist an evildoer.” That word is antistenai. It literally means to stand (stenai) against (anti). Wink says that in the Greek version of the Old Testament that was scripture for the New Testament authors the word is usually used as a technical term for warfare.[5] The word, he says, “describes the way opposing armies would march toward each other until their ranks met.”[6] The word conveys an image of “soldiers standing their ground, refusing to flee.”[7] Wink concludes: “In short, antistenai means more here than simply to ‘resist’ evil. It means to resist violently, to revolt or rebel, to engage in an armed insurrection.”[8] Wink attributes the translation of antistenai merely as “resist” to the desire of the translators of the King James Version of the Bible to placate the desires of King James to convince his subjects to resist neither him nor any other tyrant. Be that as it may, Wink’s main point is that antistenai is a military term, one associated with violence in resistance to evil.

Wink’s conclusion to this part of his discussion is powerful and telling. He writes:

Jesus is not telling us to submit to evil, but to refuse to oppose it on its own terms. We are not to let the opponent dictate the methods of our opposition. He is urging us to transcend both passivity and violence by finding a third way, one that is at once assertive and nonviolent.[9]

Wink then addresses the three sayings that come right after his call to us not to resist evil by force, namely, turn the other cheek, give the cloak as well, and go the second mile. These sayings, Wink says, so far from counseling passivity, are examples of the kind of assertive, creative, nonviolent resistance to evil to which Jesus actually calls us. We will consider them in the order in which Jesus gives them.

Turn the other cheek. The crucial thing to note here is that Jesus specifically says if anyone strikes you on the right  cheek.[10] Wink then points out that the assumption here is that the blow on a person’s right cheek is made with the right hand. Not by either of the assailant’s hands. Certainly not by the assailant’s left hand. Quite specifically by the assailant’s right hand. The reason for this assumption is that Jews used the left hand only for “unclean” things, which hitting someone apparently was not. Wink says that in the very rigidly Jewish community of Qumran “to gesture with the left hand meant exclusion from the meeting and penance for ten days.”[11] Not all Jews were as rigid as was the community at Qumran, but never mind. The right hand it is that is striking the blow here.

Now, how can you hit a person on her right cheek with your right hand? The only way you can do it is to strike your victim with the back of your hand. Go ahead and try it as Wink suggests, but of course don’t actually hit anyone. Clearly Jesus has in mind not a blow with a fist but a slap across a person’s face with the back of the hand. Wink then says this about such a backhanded blow:

The backhand was not a blow to injure, but to insult, humiliate, degrade. It was not administered to an equal, but to an inferior. Masters backhanded slaves; husbands wives; parents children; Romans Jews. The whole point of the blow was to force someone who was out of line back into place.[12]

So Jesus here wasn’t addressing any old physical assault. He was addressing a situation of dominance and subordination, of power and humiliation.

Wink next points out that Jesus’ audience for these remarks, the “you” of “if anyone strikes you,” were people who were used to being humiliated and put back in their subordinate place by people with power over them. So when he says to them turn the other cheek he is saying don’t accept this kind of humiliating treatment any more. Assuming an encounter between a master and a servant Wink explains:

By turning the other cheek, the servant makes it impossible for the master to use the backhand again….The left cheek now offers a perfect target for a blow with the right fist, but only equals fought with fists…, and the last thing the master wishes to do is to establish this underling’s equality. This act of defiance renders the master incapable of asserting his dominance in this relationship. He can have the slave beaten, but he can no longer cow him….

In that world of honor and shaming, the ‘superior’ has been rendered impotent to instill shame in a subordinate. He has been stripped of his power to dehumanize the other.[13]

Wink brilliantly gives us a very different understanding of Jesus’ meaning than most people have had for a very long time. Jesus is by no means counseling passivity here. He is counseling creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to evil. That resistance may have dire consequences for the one asserting it. The master may have the servant whipped, or worse. Even then the servant has asserted his or her humanity and human dignity in a world that denied those things to mere servants. She has opposed the evil being inflicted upon her, but she has not been reduced to using the violent means of the oppressor to do it.

Give the cloak as well. “When someone sues you to take your coat…,” Jesus says. Say what? What sense does it make for one person to sue another just to take the person’s coat? In our world it doesn’t make any sense at all. No lawyer would take the case on a contingent fee, and at a lawyer’s hourly rate you’d blow past the value of most coats in less than an hour. So why does Jesus use someone suing you to take your coat as his second example of creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to evil?

He’s doing it because this lawsuit made a whole lot more sense in Jesus’ world than it does in ours. In this example Jesus mentions two articles of clothing, called in the translation we’re using a coat and a cloak. In Jesus’ world people wore these two pieces of clothing one over the other. The coat is the outer garment, the cloak is the undergarment. It was common for a poor person to use his outer garment, here the coat, as collateral for a loan. That pledge of collateral however didn’t work then the way collateral works today. Wink points out that Deuteronomy 24:10-13 allows a creditor to take possession of a person’s outer garment as collateral, but he had to return it to the debtor every evening so that the debtor would have something at least a little bit warm to sleep in.[14] The creditor could take the garment permanently only if the debtor defaulted on the loan, which poor people did all the time. In that case the creditor could take the debtor to court for an order making the debtor forfeit that garment to satisfy the unpaid loan.

Now add two more facts that would have been obvious to Jesus and his audience that aren’t at all obvious to us. The two pieces of clothing to which Jesus refers were all the clothing that most poor people owned. Our debtor would be wearing only these two things when he came to court, or perhaps if the creditor had possession of the coat the debtor would be wearing only the cloak. Also, as Wink says, “Nakedness was taboo in Judaism, and the shame fell less on the naked party than on the person viewing or causing the nakedness (Gen. 9:20-27).”[15] The Genesis passage to which Wink refers is the story of Noah’s son Ham seeing his father naked, an event that results in Ham, the one who saw Noah’s nakedness, being cursed, not the naked Noah.[16]

So what would happen when a poor man is hauled into court, ordered to give his coat to his creditor, then gives the creditor his other garment, his cloak, as well? The poor debtor would be standing in the courtroom naked. By stripping naked our poor debtor has turned the tables on his creditor. This poor man “has transcended this attempt to humble him.” He has “registered a stunning protest against the system that created his debt.”[17]

Wink points out that the system that created our poor man’s debt was profoundly unjust and oppressive. He says of the debtor stripping naked in court: “This is guerilla theater! The entire system by which debtors are oppressed has been publicly unmasked.”[18] What Jesus’ debtor had done is anything but passive. He has creatively, assertively, and nonviolently exposed the systemic injustice that has forced him into debt and caused him to lose a good part of the very little that he owned. Once again Jesus is not counseling passive submission here. He is calling us to find creative but nonviolent ways to resist evil.

Go the second mile. Jesus says if someone forces you to go one mile go a second mile also. What in heaven’s name can that possibly mean? Who ever forces a person to go one mile? Does Jesus intend going one mile and then a second mile as metaphor? People have long thought of this image as a metaphor for doing more for another person than you have to. That’s a legitimate lesson to take from these lines, but Wink asserts that there is a quite literal meaning of going one mile and then a second one that gives the saying a very different meaning.

Wink tells us that Jesus’ lines about going a second mile are actually another example of creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to evil. This example, he says, is “drawn from the relatively enlightened practice of limiting to a single mile the amount of forced or impressed labor that Roman soldiers could levy on subject peoples.”[19] It was common practice for Roman soldiers to force civilians to carry their heavy packs for them when their unit was on the move, but a soldier could force a civilian to carry his pack only one mile. (It’s actually one stadium, a common Roman unit of distance, but of course that doesn’t really matter for our purposes.) According to Wink “carrying the pack a second mile is an infraction of military code.”[20] If a soldier made a civilian carry the soldier’s pack a second mile his commanding officer would punish the soldier with a fine, flogging, or some other form of punishment.

We are perhaps apt to think that a civilian doing a service for a Roman soldier would hardly be grounds for a commanding officer to punish the soldier. Wink says that that was not at all the case in Jesus’ day. He says that when the impressed civilian offered to carry the pack a second mile the soldier wouldn’t know what to make of the offer or how to respond to it. “Is this a provocation? Is he insulting the legionnaire’s strength? Being kind? Trying to get him disciplined for seeming to violate the rules of impressment? Will this civilian file a complaint? Cause trouble?”[21] Wink tells us that the question in this example is the same as in the other two, namely, how “the oppressed can recover the initiative and assert their human dignity in a situation that cannot for the time being be changed.”[22] Wink then says:

From a situation of servile impressment, the oppressed have once more seized the initiative. They have taken back the power of choice. They have thrown the soldier off balance by depriving him of the predictability of his victim’s response….Imagine a Roman infantryman pleading with a Jew to give his pack back! The humor of this scene may escape us, but it can hardly have been lost on Jesus’ hearers, who must have been delighted at the prospect of thus discomfiting their oppressors.[23]

Wink sums up his interpretation of Jesus’ three examples of assertive, creative, nonviolent resistance to oppression this way:

To an oppressed people Jesus is saying, Do not continue to acquiesce in your oppression by the Powers; but do not react violently to it either. Rather, find a third way, a way that is neither submission nor assault, fight nor flight, a way that can secure your human dignity and begin to change the power equation….[24]

Jesus, Wink says, “abhors both passivity and violence.”[25]

What then are we to say about Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence? Untold numbers of Christians engage in violence without qualms. Christian soldiers fight wars. Christian prison officials kill prisoners some court has condemned to death. Christian police officers fire their weapons at other humans in the line of duty. Most Christians have no problem with the use of violence as long as it is ordered by some state agency. In addition, Christians assert that violent self-defense is morally permissible. Christians say that nonviolence doesn’t “work” and that therefore resort to violence is both necessary and moral. Arguments of practicality and social and cultural pressures get Christians engaging in violence all the time.

Yet Jesus’ teaching on violence cannot be gainsaid. Don’t do it, he said. Resist evil, but do it nonviolently. Don’t be passively submissive to oppression, but don’t resist it violently. Jesus wouldn’t even let his disciples use violence to try to save his life. See Matthew 26:51-52. The temptation to violence is strong. Surely Jesus knew that, but he knew a couple of other things too. First, in his day violent opposition to Roman occupation was not only useless, it would inevitably lead to lethal retaliation by the Romans. That had happened before Jesus, and it would happen again with disastrous consequences for the Jews after Jesus. More importantly, Jesus taught and lived nonviolence because he knew that God is nonviolent. He said: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” Matthew 5:44-45. In other words, God does not inflict suffering even on the evil and unrighteous, so we are not to inflict evil even on those who persecute us.

Violence is the way of the world, but Jesus said that his kingdom is radically different from the kingdoms of the world. He told Pilate “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.” John 18:36-37.[26] Because Jesus’ kingdom has it beginning and its foundation in God rather than in the world, it is nonviolent. Jesus calls us to be nonviolent too. Not meekly passive. Not resignedly accepting of injustice and oppression. Not at all. Yet not violent in our activity, in our opposition to injustice and oppression. We can of course ignore Jesus’ teaching. Christians do it all the time. We know that God is a God of grace and forgiveness and will not punish us for violating this or any other teaching of Jesus. Yet our call is to respond to God’s grace by living as best as we are able according to Jesus’ teaching and example. Jesus’ teaching and example tell us to be nonviolent. Being nonviolent is possible only if we first change our thinking about violence. We must change our attitude toward violence. We must stop thinking of it as acceptable and start thinking of it as morally impermissible. Transforming our thinking about violence is a prime example of the kind of inner revolution to which Jesus calls

Here's another one. Jesus loved the unlovable, and he calls us to do the same. The world doesn’t love the unlovable. That is perhaps a simplistically obvious statement. After all, that’s why we call the unlovable the unlovable. Who are they? People we used to call “the great unwashed,” i.e., immigrants who don’t look like what we think Americans should look like. Dirty people. Disabled people. Homeless people. Sick people, especially mentally ill people. Imprisoned people. Sadly still for too many Americans gay people and lesbian people. Very elderly people. People we think are our enemies. People we just don’t like. There are all kinds of people the world considers unlovable today.

In Jesus’ time and place there were even more people the world considered unlovable. Anyone considered a “sinner” was unlovable, and nearly everyone was considered a sinner. For example, you were a sinner if you didn’t pay your temple tax, and most poor people couldn’t afford to pay it. Since almost everyone was poor, almost everyone was a sinner. Jews found Samaritans unlovable. They found people who collaborated with the Romans unlovable. Anyone considered unclean under the holiness code of Leviticus was unlovable. This included women during their menstrual period at least until their bleeding had stopped and they had done a cleansing ritual. Jesus’ world was full of people the world considered unlovable. Jesus didn’t consider anyone to be unlovable. He practically went out of his way to show love to those the world most decidedly didn’t love. We will look at some examples of this radically countercultural behavior of his to make the point that Jesus and God call us to love the unlovable.

Jesus was always being criticized for hanging out with people the established authorities and the culture called sinners. We see a good example of this dynamic and of how Jesus responded to it at Matthew 9:10-17. In those verses Jesus sits (or rather reclines, for that’s how they did it) at dinner with “many tax collectors and sinners.” (See below about tax collectors.) Some Pharisees, that is, Jews who insisted on strict adherence to Torah law, see what’s going on. They say to Jesus’ disciples: “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” They ask that question because to them and to all the Jewish leaders of the time eating with tax collectors and sinners is something an observant Jew just didn’t do. Tax collectors and sinners (actually other sinners, for tax collectors were certainly sinners themselves) were social outcasts. Observant Jews were not supposed to and for the most part didn’t associate with them. Jesus here is violating that religious and cultural norm. The Pharisees of the story say they want to know why. Actually their question is more of an accusation than a request for information, for nothing Jesus’ disciples could say in reply would satisfy these zealots for the law that what Jesus was doing was permissible.

The disciples don’t answer the Pharisees. Jesus does. He says: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” Here we see Jesus’ basic attitude toward people called sinners and the way he calls us to relate to them as well. Jesus doesn’t deny that the people he is dining with are sinners. He implicitly concedes that they are, yet he rejects the idea that because they are sinners he should not associate with them, and he certainly shouldn’t eat with them, for that was particularly egregious violation of social and religious expectations and demands. Instead he says that they are precisely the people he came to call. They are the ones in need of a “physician.” They are the ones in need of salvation, and Jesus says he is the one come to bring it to them. That’s why he eats with them.[27]

There is, however, more buried in Jesus response to the Pharisees here, a lot more. We find it in Jesus’ statement “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” In that statement Jesus echoes the theology of the great 8^th century BCE Hebrew prophets. He has rediscovered and lifted up a Jewish voice that was already ancient in Jesus’ day but which the religious leaders of his time had either forgotten or suppressed in favor of an exclusive emphasis on the Torah law, especially the holiness code of the book of Leviticus.

Jesus words that theology a bit differently here than prophets like Isaiah, Amos, and Micah did, but he’s making the same point. They thundered that God wants justice not sacrifice. Hear, for example, the powerful voice of Amos. Conveying the words of God he says:

I hate, I despise your festivals;

            And I take no delight in your

                        solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer me your

            Burnt offerings and grain

                        offerings,

            I will not accept them;

and the offering of well-being of

                        your fatted animals

            I will not look upon.

Take away from me the noise of

                        your songs;

            I will not listen to the melody

                        of your harps,

But let justice roll down like

                        waters,

            and righteousness like an

                        ever-flowing stream. Amos 5:21-24

This ancient Jewish voice loudly contends that God doesn’t want our worship or at least that God doesn’t want our worship unless we’re also doing what he calls justice and righteousness. Because those two words in this passage are part of a poetic couplet we know that that Amos intended them to mean the same thing. To understand them we need to know what Amos meant by justice. Shortly before the passage quoted above Amos tells us what he means by justice. He says:

Hear this word, you cows

          of Bashan

     who are on Mount Samaria,

                 who oppress the poor, who crush

          the needy,

     who say to their husbands,

           ‘Bring me something to drink!’

The Lord God has sworn by

          his holiness;

     The time is surely coming

                      upon you,

when they will take you away

          with hooks…. Amos 4:1-2.

For Amos, and for Jesus, justice wasn’t due process of law. After all, if the law is unjust the results of due process of law will be unjust. Justice for them was not oppressing the poor and crushing the needy. It was rather precisely caring for them.

The prophet the scholars call First Isaiah, also from the eighth century BCE, defines justice similarly. He says:

cease to do evil

                 learn to do good,

seek justice,

                   rescue the oppressed,

          defend the orphan,

                   plead for the widow. Isaiah 1:16c-17.

Again an ancient Jewish prophet sees justice not as due process but as caring for people in need here identified as the oppressed, the orphan, and the widow.

This is the ancient Jewish voice that Jesus rediscovered. In our passage from Matthew he uses the term mercy rather than justice, but he means the same thing by mercy as the ancient prophets mean by justice. Care for people in need. Don’t press them down but lift them up. Don’t exploit them by taking the little they have. Make sure they have enough to live on. Don’t abandon them to fickle fate. Defend them from harm.

Amos and Isaiah spoke of people’s physical needs. Jesus applies the same idea the prophets had about physical needs to people’s spiritual needs as well. You feed the hungry because they need food. You forgive the sinners because they need forgiveness. You preach God’s word to the spiritually lost because they need God’s word. Are some (or all) of these people sinners? Certainly. Jesus doesn’t care. He associates with and serves them anyway, or rather he associates with them and serves them precisely because they are sinners. Do your faith tradition and your culture say these people are unlovable? Certainly. Jesus doesn’t care. He associates with and serves them anyway, or rather, he associates with them and serves them precisely because his faith tradition and his culture say they are unlovable. Jesus loved the unlovable. He calls us to do the same.

The Gospels contain many other examples of Jesus loving the unlovable. One of them comes right before the passage from Matthew we just considered. At Matthew 9:9 we read: “As Jesus walked along he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him.” It may not be apparent to us that this is an example of Jesus loving the unlovable, but it is. In this pericope Matthew is sitting at something the text calls “the tax booth.” We are to understand that he is sitting at the tax booth because he is a tax collector. Jesus calls a Jewish tax collector to be one of his disciples, and the tax collector follows him.

Now, we may not much like paying taxes, but we probably don’t think of all IRS agents as necessarily evil people just because they are IRS agents. Such was not the case with tax collectors in Jesus’ day. The taxes in question are Roman taxes, Roman taxes being the only true taxes there were in that time and place. Those taxes were onerous to begin with. Paying them left many people destitute. Paying them forced many people into debt, and the consequence of going into debt for many was loss of their land. People hated the Romans, and one of the main reasons they hated the Romans was Roman taxes. The way the Romans collected those taxes made matters even worse. They hired people, usually Jews, to collect the taxes for them. Working for the Romans made you a collaborator with the hated Gentile occupier and oppressor. Jewish people hated Roman collaborators including the tax collectors.

How those tax collectors worked made matters worse. There was a certain amount of tax that had to be collected. People who signed on to be tax collectors paid those taxes to the Romans in advance. Then they had to collect that amount plus something for themselves from the people of the area for which they had contracted. They used any means they could to collect that money—threats, coercion, violence, whatever. They could be brutal, and they cared not at all about what hardship they were creating for the people from whom they took the money. The Jewish people of Jesus’ time hated tax collectors, and with good reason. It may well have been true that some Jewish people became Roman tax collectors only out of dire economic necessity. That reality made no difference to most people. Tax collectors were inherently and necessarily evil and unlovable no matter why they became tax collectors.

Then along comes Jesus and calls one of them to follow him. Matthew the Jewish collector of Roman taxes becomes a member of the inner circle of Jesus’ disciples. People must have been shocked. Angered, outraged even. Surely Jesus knew how people would react to his calling a tax collector as a disciple. He knew, and he didn’t care. He came to call sinners. He came to love the unlovable. He came to show us that no one is beyond redemption. That nothing we do or don’t do can separate us from God’s love. Love the unlovable. That’s what Jesus did. He calls us to do the same.

 Another way of seeing what the inner aspect of the Jesus revolution is about is to understand how and why Jesus associated with and accepted outcasts. His associating with and accepting outcasts is of one piece with his loving the unlovable, but it may not seem like an aspect of an inner revolution. After all, associating with someone is an external activity. We don’t just think about it. We spend time with people. We talk with them. We do things with them. What, we might ask, does all that have to do with an inner revolution?

Well, it has everything to do with an inner revolution. Everything we do in our external life is grounded in our inner life. That’s why the notion that actions are more important than thoughts is based on a false distinction. Thoughts that do not result in actions may not mean much to anyone but the person thinking the thoughts. Yet actions not grounded in coherent thought are rash, irresponsible, and potentially harmful. Of course actions thoroughly grounded in thought can be immensely harmful too. Think of the Holocaust or Stalin’s  intentional starvation of the Soviet peasantry to force collectivization of agriculture for example. The Holocaust was grounded in the Nazi’s virulently anti-Semitic thought. Stalin’s brutalization of the Soviet people was grounded in the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. Yet the truth that actions grounded in coherent (if evil) thought can be destructive simply proves my point. Thought and actions go together. That’s why looking at the way Jesus associated with and accepted outcasts belongs in a discussion of the inner Jesus revolution.

We have already considered one example of Jesus accepting and associating with the outcast when we considered his calling Matthew the tax collector as a disciple. Here’s another one, Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. You’ll find it at John 4:1-30. In that story Jesus is walking from Jerusalem back to Galilee. He’s tired and thirsty. He stops by a well where he meets a Samaritan woman. Now, according to the cultural standards of his time and place he should have had nothing to do with her. First of all she’s a woman, and women weren’t supposed to interact in public with men to whom they were not related. More importantly for our purposes she’s a Samaritan. To the Jews Samaritans were outcasts. Jews avoided associating with them. They weren’t allowed in the temple in Jerusalem. When traveling between Judea (Jerusalem) and Galilee Jews often went out of their way to avoid going through Samaria. In this story Jesus doesn’t do that. He takes the direct route, which goes through Samaria. He wasn’t avoiding the despised Samaritans. Then when he encounters a Samaritan woman at the well he doesn’t shun, avoid, or ignore her. He asks her for a drink. He talks with her about his being “living water.” He tells her about her marital status. In doing those things he violates the standards and norms of his time and place. He accepts and associates with someone he should have treated as a social outcast.

Yet there’s more to this story about accepting and associating with outcasts than that. The woman Jesus meets at the well is probably an outcast in her own community. The practice of that community would have been for the women to come to the well together early in the morning to fetch water for the needs of the day. This woman came to the well alone in the heat of the day. She almost certainly did that because the other women of the community wouldn’t associate with her. She was after all living with a man to whom she was not married, a major taboo in every ancient culture in that part of the world. She was then an outcast both from the perspective of the Jews and from the perspective of her own people. By both the religious and the cultural standards of his day Jesus should have had nothing to do with her.

Yet he accepted and associated with her as a person worth speaking with. Why? Why would Jesus behave in such a radically countercultural way? The answer, it seems to me, has to be that Jesus’ behavior was grounded in a revolutionary new way of thinking. To the world this woman was unworthy. To Jesus no one was unworthy. To him God’s love encompassed everyone. Those whom the world respected and honored could perhaps easily believe that God loves them. Believing that God loves them is a lot harder for those whom the world scorns and casts out. It was precisely to them that Jesus came and said you are worthy. God loves you. I am here to show you that love.

Let’s look at one more telling example of Jesus accepting the outcast. It is the story of the women taken in adultery. You’ll find it at John 7:53-8:11.[28] In this story Jesus is teaching in the temple in Jerusalem. People described as scribes and Pharisees bring a woman before him who they say was caught in the act of adultery. They say that the law of Moses, i.e., the Torah law, about which they were quite zealous, tells them to stone her.[29] They ask Jesus what he says about the matter. After a bit of delay in which he inexplicably writes on the ground Jesus says: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” The scribes and Pharisees who were prepared to stone the woman to death all walk away. Jesus says to the woman: “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She replies “No one, sir.” Jesus responds “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”

This woman is so much of a social outcast that people were prepared to stone her to death. It is remarkable that Jesus dealt with the situation by making the would-be stoners see the hypocrisy of what they were about to do. For our purposes, however, what Jesus says to the woman after he has saved her from stoning is more significant. He says “Neither do I condemn you.” Note that he doesn’t say he doesn’t condemn her just because no one else has. Neither does he forgive her because she has repented. As far as we know she hasn’t. His statement is broader than that. I suppose we could think that because Jesus was the only person ever without sin he would be fully justified by his own standard in condemning the women, but he doesn’t. He says I do not condemn you. We hear the voice of a God of limitless forgiveness. We hear Jesus’ voice of acceptance of the outcast. By almost any moral standard other than God’s he would be right to condemn the woman taken in adultery. Jesus however lived by and taught God’s moral standard not any human standard. That standard is one of forgiveness not condemnation, of acceptance not exclusion. Jesus accepted even people so outcast that the world wants to kill them. He calls us to accept them too. That’s how revolutionary Jesus is.

Finally let us consider a prime example of the kind of transformed thinking to which Jesus calls us. We see it in the famous Parable of the Prodigal Son, Luke 15:11-32. In that famous story a man has two sons. The younger son asks his father to give him what would be his share of his father’s estate in advance. The father agrees, gives his younger son an unspecified but presumably large amount of money, and the son leaves home with it. He goes to a foreign land where he squanders all the money in what the text calls “dissolute living.” People often assume that this dissolute living involved prostitutes. It may well have, but Luke doesn’t actually tell us that it did. The son is presumably broke when a famine strikes the foreign land he has gone to. He has to take work feeding pigs. He’s hit rock bottom.

Then he has a brainstorm. He figures that his father’s hired hands have it better than he does, so he decides to go home, confess his sin to his father, and ask his father to take him on as a hired hand. He rehearses a little speech of confession that he intends to give:  “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.” We really don’t know how genuine this expression of contrition is, but having rehearsed and memorized it the younger son heads home.

As he approaches home his father sees him coming. This is where this famous story really shows us the kind of inner revolution to which Jesus calls us. Luke’s text says: “But while he was still far off his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” Now notice the most important point here. The father is filled with compassion and welcomes his son home with expressions of love before the son has said a word to his father. He hasn’t given any of his little speech of confession or otherwise expressed any contrition. He hasn’t said a word about what he has done during his time away. He hasn’t said a word about squandering all of the money his father gave him. He has said nothing about why he has come home. His father welcomes him home with love without knowing any of those things. The son does then start to recite his little speech, but his father ignores him. He tells his people to put the best robe on him and to prepare a feast of welcome. He calls for celebration “for this son of mine was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found.” It’s enough to make you want to start singing Amazing Grace—I once was lost but now am found.

In the Parable of the Prodigal Son the father thinks first and then acts in precisely the way to which Jesus calls us. His welcome to his son is unconditional. He knows nothing except that his son has come back, and he doesn’t need to know more than that. He doesn’t care about more than that. All he cares about is that his son has returned. Yes, the father in this parable acts, but his acts of welcome and celebration are grounded in a transformed way of thinking. The father never judges the son. He never demands an explanation from the son. All he does is act out of love. Love for the one who had been lost. Love for a son who had disappeared and now has reappeared. In this parable the father, who we can assume Jesus intended to represent God, has overcome the world’s way of thinking, the way of judgment and condemnation, the way of superiority and moral indignation. He has replaced those things with an ethic of love. Period. Just love, nothing else. That is the inner revolution to which Jesus calls all of us.

The Jesus revolution is grounded in inner transformation. Jesus knew full well that we are all creatures of our environment, of our culture. Though they may be influenced in various ways by religious teachings or spiritual values, human cultures are fundamentally secular. They are of the world. They function in the world and inform how we people act in the world. Despite whatever religious influences there may be in them they conform themselves to what are essentially universal secular values. They always accept violence as a normal, necessary, and morally justifiable aspect of life. They create, justify, and respect social and economic hierarchies that benefit some people at the expense of others; and those hierarchies invariably benefit a small number of people at the expense of most of the people. They convince the disadvantaged that their lot in life is just how things are and must be. Human cultures typically normalize certain kinds of people and dehumanize people who do not conform to the cultural norm. In these and many other ways human cultures create and accept values and institutions that simply are not how God wants the world to be.

Jesus lived in a time before the advent of modern sociological and economic analysis. He had no personal experience of any culture other than his own. That culture however was so typical of human cultures generally, and Jesus was so observant of and insightful into that culture, that he knew all of the injustice and immorality of all human cultures. He knew the brutality of the Roman Empire, which is a stark example of the brutality of all empire ancient or modern. He knew how religious legalism puts abstract notions of right and wrong above the actual welfare of real people. He knew all that. Filled with divine knowledge and indignation he reacted against it.

His reaction against it began with calling all people to an inner revolution. He called—and calls—all of us to a new way of thinking, a way that frees our minds from worldly values and puts divine values in their place. He calls us to stop thinking that violence is normal and acceptable human behavior and to think instead of creative nonviolent ways of addressing both issues in our personal lives and issues of oppression, exploitation, and injustice in the life of the world. He called—and calls—us to love the unlovable and to accept those the world calls unacceptable. Jesus wanted to remake the world, but he knew that remaking the world must begin with transforming how people think about the world. He knew the world needs an inner revolution before any outer revolution could have any chance of overcoming the sinful ways of the world rather than adopting and using them. That is the task to which he called—and calls—all of us.

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[1] Wink, Walter, The Powers That Be, Theology for a New Millennium, Galilee Doubleday, 1998, p. 98.

[2] Id., page 99.

[3] Naming the Powers, The Language of Power in the New Testament, Fortress Press, 1984; Unmasking the Powers, The Invisible Forces that Determine Human Existence, Fortress Press, 1986; and Engaging the Powers, Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, Fortress Press, 1992.

[4] Wink, Walter, The Powers That Be, Theology for a New Millennium, Galilee Doubleday, 1998.

[5] Id., p. 100.

[6] Id.

[7] Id.

[8] Id.

[9] Id., pp. 100-101.

[10] The Gospel of Luke attempts to restate this illustration of what Jesus means but gets it wrong. At Luke 6:29 Jesus says: “If anyone strikes you on the cheek….” The author of the Gospel of Luke was certainly Greek not Jewish. He may not have understood Jesus’ reference to the right cheek the way the very Jewish author of the Gospel of Matthew did.

[11] Id., p. 101.

[12] Id.

[13] Id., p. 102.

[14] Id., p. 103.

[15] Id., p. 104.

[16] Actually, and to us oddly, it’s not Ham who is cursed but Ham’s son Canaan, something that makes no sense to us but may have made some sense in the world of the text in which the punishment for the sins of the parent could fall on the parent’s child. See Exodus 20:4-6.

[17] Id., pp. 104-105.

[18] Id., p. 105

[19] Id., p. 106.

[20] Id.

[21] Id., p. 107.

[22] Id.

[23] Id., p. 108.

[24] Id., p. 110.

[25] Id., p. 111.

[26] Notice: My kingdom is not “from” this world not my kingdom is not “of” this world. The NRSV’s translation of the Greek word ek as from rather than as of is a much better translation that the King James Version’s of. Unfortunately the New International Version, the most widely purchased English translation, retains of here. It shouldn’t. John Dominic Crossan considers these verses to be the clearest expression of Jesus commitment to nonviolence in the Gospels.

[27] Jesus of course recognized that the people who considered themselves “righteous” because they lived as best they could according to Torah law were also sinners. Everyone’s a sinner, and self-righteousness is itself a sin. Matthew doesn’t explore that truth here, probably because he doesn’t need to in order to convey Jesus’ point.

[28] This story was almost certainly not in the original version of John. Modern translations often indicate the story’s questionable status with translators’ notes or even by putting the story in brackets. The translators’ note in the New International Version reads “The earliest and most reliable manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53-8:11.” The New Revised Standard Version puts the story in brackets and has a translators’ note that says: “The most ancient authorities lack 7:53-8:11; other authorities add the passage here [after John 7:52] or after [John] 7:36 or after 21:25 or after Luke 21:38; with variations of texts; some mark the passage as doubtful.” So in all likelihood this story is a later insertion into John (or Luke) and not part of the original text of either Gospel. Still, it’s a really good story. It rings true of Jesus, so I’ll go ahead and consider it here.

[29] Leviticus 20:10 and Deuteronomy 22:22 both say that in a case of adultery both parties to the act are to be stoned to death. Adultery in those two passages doesn’t quite mean what the word means to us today, but never mind. You can look up those two texts to see more exactly what they say.