The Radicality of God
I’ve been reading John
Dominic Crossan’s book How to Read the Bible and Still Be Christian. In
that book he sets forth one primary thesis. There is in the Bible, he says, a
pattern of the radicality of God being countered by the normalcy of
civilization. His primary example of this dynamic, at least the primary example
in the opening pages of the book, is the way the normalcy of a violent Christ
in Revelation counters the radicality of sacred nonviolence in the Gospels.
Jesus says “Love your enemies.” Matthew 5:44. In Revelation Christ, called in a
passage Crossan focuses on King of kings and Lord of lords, rides forth on a
white horse “with which to strike down the nations.” Revelation 19:15.
There are numerous other
examples of this dynamic in the Bible. A passage from the lectionary readings
for May 24, 2020, reminded me of one of them, namely, Psalm 68:2c: “Let the
wicked perish before God.” This line reminded me of this passage from the
Sermon on the Mount: “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, for he
makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous
and the unrighteous.” Matthew 5:44-45. The Psalm gives us at least a desire
that the wicked perish. Jesus gives us a God who treats the good and the evil
equally.
There is no doubt that in
the Old Testament God sometimes appears as violent and sometimes demands that
God’s people be violent. At I Samuel 15:1-3, for example, we read:
Samuel said to Saul: ‘The Lord sent me to anoint you king over the
people of Israel; now therefore listen to the words of the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I will punish the
Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out
of Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do
not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep,
camel and donkey.’
I’ve heard of people who have lost
their faith in God altogether over this passage because they couldn’t deal with
the Bible making God that vicious, petty, and violent.
I get that, but this isn’t
the only image of God in the Old Testament. Not by a long shot. Most of us know
Psalm 23: “The Lord is my
shepherd, I shall not want.” “Even though I walk through the darkest valley
[traditionally the valley of the shadow of death] I fear no evil, for you are
with me; your rod and your staff—they comfort me.” “Surely goodness and mercy
shall follow me all the days of my life.” Or consider this passage from Isaiah:
Ho, everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters,
and you that have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and
without
price….Isaiah
55:1
Or these words from the great eighth century BCE prophet
Micah:
He has told you, O mortal, what
is good;
and what does the Lord
require of
you
but to do justice, and to love
kindness,
and to walk humbly
with your God? Micah 6:8.
And again from Micah:
He shall judge between many
peoples
and shall arbitrate
between
strong
nations far away;
They shall beat their swords into
plowshares,
and their spears
into pruning
hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword
against
nation,
neither shall they
learn war
any more,
but they shall sit
under their
own vines and
under their
own fig
trees,
and no one shall
make
them afraid,
for the mouth of
the Lord of
hosts has
spoken. Micah 4:3-4.
Examples like these prove Crossan’s
point. The Bible frequently give us the radicality of God. God is a God of
goodness and mercy, of justice, of nonviolent abundance for all people. But the
Bible is a human document, and we humans have rarely been able to hold to the
radicality of God for long without the violent norms of human civilization
pushing their way into the narrative.
Crossan asks the obvious
question: How are we to choose between these two voices in the Bible, the
radical justice and nonviolence of God on one hand and the violent, unjust
norms of human civilization on the other? Crossan gives the obvious answer to
his question, obvious to us Christians at least: Jesus. That’s how we decide.
That’s how we choose. But of course that answer raises as many questions as it
answers. There are after all at least two images of Jesu in the New Testament.
There are actually a lot more images of him than that in the New Testament, but
for our purposes here the two that matter are the nonviolent Jesus of the Sermon
on the Mount and the violent Jesus of Revelation. How do we choose between
them?
I think we choose between
them by asking just why God would come to us in human form as we Christians
confess God did in Jesus. Would God come to us that way just to affirm the ways
of the world, the ways of empire, the ways of violence and oppression? Or would
God come to us as one of us to show us a better way, to show us God’s way, a
way so radically different from the ways of the world? The answer seems
obvious, doesn’t it? We don’t need God to teach us the ways we already follow.
We’ve got those ways down cold on our own. We need God to show us a better way,
a way that makes life better for everyone, that ends the suffering that violence
brings, that ends the suffering that unequal and unfair distribution of the
earth’s resources brings. When we see Jesus doing that in the New Testament we
know we are hearing the voice of God. When we see him acting according to the
ways of the world like he does in Revelation we know that we are hearing the
voice of the world.
There is of course a
basic assumption behind that answer. I’ve already mentioned it. It is that the
Bible is a human document. If we cling to the hoary notion that the Bible comes
from God in all of its content we have somehow to reconcile all of its
different voices. Yet if we’re honest we have to admit that that’s impossible. If
we recognize that the Bible has human handprints all over it we’re free to
accept some of it and reject some of it. Everyone who looks to the Bible as
sacred scripture does that anyway, but when we recognize the human origins of
the Bible’s many different texts we can be honest about it. We can see that
some of the biblical texts reflect the ungodly ways of the world, and we can
see that some of those texts give us a radical new vision of the world the way
God wants it to be. We can see that it gives us both God’s radical vision of a
transformed world and a refutation of that vision in the terms of the world as
it already is. May we be wise enough to tell the difference and brave enough to
follow the radical ways of God.
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