On Apolitical Christianity

On Apolitical Christianity

©2020 Thomas Calnan Sorenson. All rights reserved. The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 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.

One of the most common complaints that church members make against progressive Christian pastors is that they make the faith political, more specifically that they preach politics from the pulpit. The idea that religion and politics don’t mix is widespread across Christianity today. Most Christian churches have told their people that religion and politics are two separate realms of human activity and never the twain shall meet. Most Christian church people today don’t want to hear sermons about peace and justice because they don’t want to hear politics in church and certainly not from the pulpit. In the United States many people understand our constitutional separation of church and state as a separation of church and politics. Yet as widespread as that notion is, in Christianity at least it is simply wrong. That error is what I want to discuss here.

 To understand the origins of the common notion that Christianity is and must be apolitical we have to go way back in the history of the Christian faith, first to Jesus Christ himself and his teachings about faith and politics, then to a look at how his first followers understood him, then to the most significant event in the history of Christianity since the Resurrection, namely, the establishment of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE. When we do we find that Jesus wasn’t apolitical at all, that his earliest followers knew that he wasn’t, and that Christianity became apolitical only after it became the state religion of Rome.

To be Christian is to follow Jesus of Nazareth. The entire Christian faith centers on him. We call him our Lord and Savior. We say he is the Son of God Incarnate. We say that Rome executed him and God raised him from death to new life. During his lifetime on earth Jesus had followers. They remained his followers after his death. They spread the Gospel, the Good News Jesus had preached and that Jesus was and is. The most important question we can ask in connection with our discussion of apolitical Christianity is: Was Jesus political or apolitical? To answer that question we have to start by defining the word political.

Modern dictionary definitions of the word political focus on things relating to government or the state. Thus the Google search “define political” yields “relating to the government or the public affairs of a country.” The Google search “define politics” gives us “the activities associated with the government of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.”

It seems to me that these definitions unduly restrict the meaning of political to matters dealing with a state or government. The root of our words political and politics is the Greek word “polis.” Polis means an ancient Greek city-state. We see it in the names of some modern cities—Indianapolis, i.e., the city of Indiana, or Annapolis, the city of Anne. We call a large urban area a metropolis. Online definitions of polis define the word quite broadly as in this definition from miriam-webster.com: “A Greek city-state broadly; a state or society especially when characterized by a sense of community.” That definition certainly broadens the term political beyond the more restrictive definitions quoted above.

Then there is Aristotle’s  famous statement: “Man is by nature a political animal.”[1] This statement is often quoted simply as “Man is a political animal,” but Aristotle’s including the phrase “by nature” in his statement is significant. In good philosophical fashion he tells us what he means by “nature.” He doesn’t mean inherently or what we would understand by naturally. Aristotle defines “nature” thus: “The nature of a thing is its end. For what each thing is when fully developed, we call its nature.”[2] A thing’s nature then is its goal, that which it strives to become. When we include his phrase “by nature” in his statement and understand what he means by nature we can understand Aristotle as meaning that when humans are fully developed they are political. That is, when humans are fully developed they live in a polis, in an organized community. Thus the word political comes to refer to the ways humans live together in community when they become fully developed into their goal, their end, their ideal condition.

Now let’s consider an important distinction, the one between political and partisan. The Google search “define partisan” gives us “a strong supporter of a party, cause, or person,” and “prejudiced in favor of a particular cause.” Miriam-webster.com defines partisan as, among other things, “a firm adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person” and “feeling showing or deriving from strong and sometimes blind adherence to a particular party, faction, cause, or person….” In our current American context the references to “party” in these definitions is particularly important. We refer to “partisan politics,” meaning political activity directed by and intended to benefit a particular political party rather than the nation as a whole.

Using these definitions we can say that Jesus was political, although whether or not he was partisan is a more complex question that we will take up below. Yes, I can already hear the howls from some of you: Jesus wasn’t political! He came here so we could go to heaven when we die, and that’s not political! Well, you’re right that knowing what to do so you go to heaven when you die isn’t primarily political. It isn’t political at all if you think that all you have to do is believe in Jesus. Here’s the thing though. Jesus was hardly about getting our souls to heaven after we die at all. He was rather about how God calls us to live this life for the sake of God’s people, not for an individualistic goal of personal salvation.

There is a lot that could be said in support of the contention that Jesus is about this life not some next life, but for the sake of brevity I’ll say just a few of them. In the Gospel of Luke, after his time of temptation in the wilderness, Jesus goes home to Nazareth. On the Sabbath he goes to the synagogue. Someone hands him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he reads this:

The Spirit of the Lord is

               upon me,

     because he has anointed me

          to bring good news to the

               poor.

He has sent me to proclaim

               release to the captives

     and recovery of sight to the

               blind,

          to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s

               favor. Luke 4:18-19.

Some scholars call these lines Jesus’ “inaugural address.” They state what Jesus is all about. Notice both what they say and what they don’t say. Jesus comes to preach good news to the poor, to release the captives, to give sight to the blind, to let the oppress go free, and to proclaim something called “the year of the Lord’s favor,” that is, according to scholars, the Jubilee year from Leviticus when all property reverts back to its original owner. See Leviticus 25:8-12. All of these things focus on this world. Jesus doesn’t say a word about anybody going to heaven, or not. He’s about this world not some other hoped for world.

Then there’s the most frequently quoted verse in the Bible, John 3:16. I suspect that many Christians love quoting this verse because they think it is about how you get your soul to heaven when you die. It isn’t. In the NRSV it reads: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” There are several issues with this verse, including that the meaning of the word translated as “believe” doesn’t mean what most of us think it means. I want to focus here however on another phrase in the verse, the phrase “eternal life.”

Most people, I imagine, think that “eternal life” means life in heaven after death and would cite this verse to show that Jesus was about getting us to the next life rather than about how live this one. They’d be wrong about that. The phrase “eternal life” doesn’t mean afterlife in heaven, and John tells us quite explicitly that it doesn’t. At John17:1-3 we read:

After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

Now note this crucial thing about these words. They don’t say “this is how you get eternal life.” They say “this is eternal life.” (Emphasis added.) John’s Jesus is telling us what eternal life is, not how to get it. The eternal life that John 3:16 says we get through believing in Jesus is this life in the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ. John 3:16 supports rather than contradicts my contention that Jesus was how we are to live this life not about how we get to some other life.

I’ll give just one more example of how people misunderstand what Jesus was all about. We find it at John 18:36. There Jesus has been arrested and brought before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. Pilate asks Jesus what he has done that the chief priests have handed him over to the Romans. Jesus, in a bit of a non sequitur as is typical of him in John, says: “My kingdom is not from this world….” You may well have heard this line as “My kingdom is not of this world” rather than not “from this world.” That rendering of Jesus’ words has led people to believe that his kingdom isn’t located in this world but in heaven. The problem is that “of” is a bad translation of the Greek here. The Greek word that the King James Version and the New International Version translate as “of” is “ek.” Ek doesn’t mean of. It means from or out of. A person walks “ek” a room when she leaves it. Jesus refers here not to his kingdom’s location but to its origin and the source of its power and authority. Those things come from heaven, but the kingdom isn’t located there. It’s very much located here. So let’s be done with the mistaken notion that Jesus wasn’t political because he was about getting us to a next life rather than about living and showing us how God wants us to live this life.

So did Jesus want us to be political or apolitical in this life? Look again at his “inaugural address” in Luke quoted above. He came to preach good news to the poor. Not the poor in spirit, the materially, financially poor. Now that their souls may go to heaven when they die would be good news to the poor, but that’s surely not what Jesus meant here. In Jesus’ world almost everyone was poor. Subsistence level poor. Jesus preached against unfair practices that made them poor.

In his inaugural address he refers to “the year of the Lord’s favor.” Scholars tell us that that phrase is a reference to Leviticus 25:8-12 as I noted above. There we read that the people are to proclaim every fiftieth year and shall “proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants” and “you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family.” The text requires the people not to reap all of the food they grow so the some will be left for the poor people without land to glean. The price of property sold and purchased shall reflect where the people are with regard to the Jubilee year. See Leviticus 15:13-17. Every single thing about that fiftieth year is perfectly secular. It is about aspects of the way people are to live together in community. They are therefore political.

So are the other things Jesus mentions in that inaugural address. He says God sent him  to proclaim “release to the captives.” In his world being a captive of some foreign power or a slave owner was a very real, worldly thing. Jesus isn’t talking here about any sort of spiritual captivity that prevents souls going to heaven. He’s talking about lived realities in this life. In other words, he’s being political.

He says he was also sent to proclaim “recovery of sight to the blind.” There are several stories in the Gospels of Jesus restoring sight to blind people. See for example John 9:1-12. It’s easy enough to read these stories as metaphors for Jesus opening all of our eyes to the evils of the world and the wisdom of God, and it is perfectly legitimate to read them that way. Yet even when we read them that way they are still about things that happen in this life to benefit people in this life. They’re about the benefit of recovering sight in this life not some future life.

Jesus also says he was sent “to let the oppressed go free.” Now surely we can understand Jesus as meaning that all people are oppressed by the power of sin. He certainly can and does get people free from that oppression. In his world, however, and in ours, social and economic oppression are realities of life for an enormous number of people. People are oppressed by poverty, discrimination, lack of freedom, and far too often by actual slavery. All of these things are political realities, and Jesus came to show us how evil they are. He came to call us to overcome them, with God’s help of course. In other words he was being political.

Finally, let’s look at the terminology Jesus used in his preaching and parables. In the Gospel of John he talked about something called “eternal life,” the meaning of which we have already considered. It was about this life not a next life. In the other three Gospels he talks a lot about something called “the kingdom of God.” In Matthew he often calls it “the kingdom of heaven,” but he means the same thing as what occasionally in Matthew and throughout Mark and Luke  he calls the kingdom of God—and he doesn’t mean it’s located in heaven.

So what sort of thing is a kingdom? It is precisely a type of political structure. There is no way to make the term kingdom apolitical. Every political structure Jesus could have known about was a kingdom, so that’s how he talked about political entities. By kingdom of God he meant the way things would be if people truly acknowledged God as their sovereign rather than the kings or other rulers of the world. Language doesn’t get more political than that. There simply is no doubt that Jesus was political.

There is however another question we must address. Jesus was political in the broad sense of the word we’ve been using, but was he partisan? In the past I have found it useful to say that Jesus was political but not partisan. Does that contention hold up upon closer examination? Well, yes and no. Whether Jesus was partisan or not is a more complicated question that whether he was political. That’s because the meaning of the word partisan is a bit vague. It can mean zealously committed to a person or party. It can even indicate a blind, unthinking commitment to something. It can mean a zealous commitment to a cause. So it seems that whether a person is partisan or not depends on just what it is to which a person is committed and the nature of that commitment.

We can say without reservation that Jesus’ commitment to anything was neither blind nor unthinking. He didn’t hold onto an idea no matter what, as when he learned from the woman he’d called a dog. See Matthew 15:21-28. We can say that he was never blindly committed to any person, only to God. In these ways Jesus was not partisan at all.

In Jesus’ day there were no political parties, but we can be confident that today Jesus would not be partisan in the sense of being blindly committed to any political party. All political parties are human institutions, which means they all make mistakes. No political party ever has been, is, or will be perfectly committed to the ways of God. So Jesus would never be partisan by having any political party as a primary commitment.

Jesus was, however, partisan in his commitment to God and to God’s ways of peace and justice. About those things he was as zealous as they come. He didn’t do anything blindly, but nothing could dissuade him from preaching and living out what he knew to be the will and ways of God. He shows us that God calls us to be political and even to be partisan about the right things. Political parties are not the right things about which to be zealous. They are all fallible. God is the right reality about which to be zealous. That’s what Jesus was. It’s what he calls us to be.

The Jesus movement didn’t die with its founder and leader. His followers proclaimed that his tomb was empty. Somehow they knew that he was still with them though the Romans had most definitely executed. They knew what he had taught, for they’d heard it from him themselves. For around the first three hundred years of the Christian faith after Jesus’ death his first followers and their successors in the faith tried to live according to his teachings. At first they didn’t call themselves Christians. They called themselves followers of “the Way.” By the Way they meant the way Jesus had taught them to live. We see them doing that in at least three respects. First, their leaders were often women. Paul mentions many women as leaders of the churches. Second, they lived out his commitment to God alone. They refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods or to worship the emperor. They got away with that one as long as the Romans thought they were Jews. Once it became clear that at least most of them weren’t Jews and that Christianity had evolved into something other than a Jewish sect their refusal to do what they considered to be idolatry sometimes cost them their lives. Third, they understood Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence. They refused to serve in the Roman army. They did not fight back violently against Roman oppression and attempted suppression of their faith. They would fight neither for Rome nor against it. Christianity’s eventual rejection of Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence and its commitment to what it came to consider a Christian Roman Empire mark the beginning of the transformation of Christianity from a faith that understood the political nature of its call into one that did not.

That transformation began under Roman Emperor Constantine I, ruled 306-337 CE. Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the empire, but he converted to the faith himself (though he wasn’t baptized until he was on his death bed because he thought that getting baptized then would wash away all the sins he had committed during his reign). He removed restrictions on the faith and encouraged people to convert to it. He called and presided over the First Ecumenical Council of the church at Nicaea in 325 CE. At least some of the bishops who attended the council were powerfully impressed by the presence of the emperor and were wowed by all the imperial pomp and circumstance that accompanied him, actually a very un-Christian response to a secular ruler. Christianity was drawing closer and closer to the empire that had executed Jesus, had only recently persecuted it, and had made martyrs of at least some of its members. I’ve heard it said that Constantine has a lot to answer for. By beginning the process that led in 380 CE to the faith becoming the official state religion of the Roman Empire he may have preserved it, but he also caused it to lose much of its original character. One of the first things the faith lost was its commitment to nonviolence.

By the late fourth century CE Rome was being periodically attacked by so-called pagan peoples from the north. Roman Christians knew that Jesus had taught and lived nonviolence. They knew that killing is a bad thing. They must have known that earlier generations of Christians had refused to fight in the Roman army. But now they thought things had changed. The Roman Empire was now supposedly a Christian empire, never mind the fact that the phrase “Christian empire” is an oxymoron. Some Christians began to think that surely it must be permissible to fight to defend a Christian empire. After all, there was no such thing in Jesus’ day, so he said nothing directly about fighting or not fighting for one.

To justify using violence to defend Christian Rome they concocted something called just war theory. Classical Christian just war theory holds that a war is just and participating in it is permissible if five criteria are met.[3] Three of them deal with the cause for the war, two deal with how a war is conducted. These criteria say that to be just a war must:

1.      Be defensive only.

2.      Be declared by a legitimate state authority.

3.      Be a last resort.

4.      Use the minimal amount of violence necessary to achieve the war’s defensive objective.

5.      Avoid inflicting casualties on noncombatants.

In the late fourth and early fifth centuries CE most Christians became convinced that Christians could kill and main other human beings as long as these five criteria were met.

Notice what an extreme departure just war theory is from Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence. About violence Jesus just said no. Later Christians weren’t willing to live with that absolute no to violence. So they convinced themselves that they didn’t have to, at least not under certain circumstances. In doing so they turned their backs on a core teaching of the one they called Lord and Savior. Over the next many centuries the result of the just war theory was that the door to the use of violence, once opened just a little, blew wide open enough for whole armies, navies, and air forces to march through. The limitations of just war theory were as forgotten as Jesus’ original teachings on nonviolence had been. Christians somehow managed to convince themselves that it was permissible to participate in any war their particular nation happened to have undertaken, even one against other Christians.

In the development of just war theory we see a prime example of how establishment resulted in radical changes in the Christian faith, changes that led to the mistaken notion that Christianity is not political. Establishment produced another change that is actually even more radical that the change from Jesus’ nonviolence to established Christianity’s just war theory. It relates directly to our issue of apolitical Christianity, but its origins are a bit harder to pin down. It is the change from Christianity as a way of life to a Christianity all about how our souls get to heaven when we die.

To understand that change we must examine the differences between what Jesus taught and the ways worldly states operate. Jesus’ teachings are all about justice for all people achieved through nonviolent resistance to the evil actions of those worldly states. He lifted up the poor and condemned the unjust rich. He called us to make our ultimate concern not some political entity like the Roman Empire or a modern nation state. He called us to live God’s ways of peace, nonviolence, and justice for the poor and the oppressed. He embraced the outsider and condemned society’s established leaders. He took virtually every social, economic, religious, and cultural convention of his day, and of ours, and turned them on their heads.

Nations have no use for the teachings of Jesus. The Roman Empire didn’t in his day. The American Empire of our day, while perhaps not quite as bad as Rome, doesn’t either. Empires and nation states see the application of violence to a whole range of issues to be a primary means of attaining their chosen ends. They are almost invariably run by and for economic and social elites at the expense of most of the people. Empires in particular exploit the people and resources of foreign lands for their benefit perhaps all the while claiming to be agents of civilization, peace, and perhaps even democracy. In the world’s nations for the most part the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Jesus Christ will have none of that, and anyone who truly understands him and claims to believe in him can likewise have none of that.

Yet by the end of the fourth century CE Christianity was the state religion of the most powerful empire the western world (to use an unfortunate but useful Eurocentric term for it) had ever known. The church cozied up to empire, supporting its aims and its means. Especially in western Europe it organized itself on the model of Rome and adopted all of the trappings of Imperium. What, after all, does St. Peter’s Basilica, as artistically and historically important as it is, have to do with an itinerant first century Jewish preacher and the Galilean fisherman it honors? Not much. From the fourth century onward official Christianity transformed itself from the institution of people truly seeking to follow the teachings of Jesus into an arm of empire. In western Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere it has remained the de jure or de facto established church of nations ever since. Note for example how the monarch of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the titular head of the Church of England.

It could not and cannot be the support of the status quo that it became without changing what it is fundamentally about. That’s precisely what it did. It began to preach not social, economic, and political transformation but eternal salvation of the soul after death. It’s not that people don’t need spiritual consolation or that Christianity can’t give it. We do, and it can and should; but in accommodating itself to empire Christianity abandoned most of what Jesus has been all about. It told, and tells, people that their existential crisis is sin and salvation in the afterlife not injustice and war in this life. It came to divert the people’s attention away from the causes of suffering in this life to how to avoid eternal suffering in a next life. So the human rulers of the earth embraced Christianity with enthusiasm and joy. The established church across the world told the poor and oppressed to look not to transformation in this life but to salvation in a next life as the solution to their problems. Let me give you just a couple of examples.

In the early sixteenth century CE Martin Luther was a German Augustinian monk. In good established church fashion the Roman Catholic Church, essentially the only church there was in western Europe at the time, had drummed into this head that he was a horrible sinner faced with the prospect of an agonizing eternity in hell. He was thoroughly convinced that his existential issue was sin and the damnation he believed was its necessary consequence. His church had told him what he needed to do to avoid that horrific fate. He had to confess his sin, fast, deprive himself of all earthly pleasure, pray constantly and accept the teachings of the church. He did all that, but he could never convince himself that he had done enough to expiate his sin, whatever he thought that sin was. Then one day he reread Paul’s letter to the Romans and discovered that we are justified by God’s grace through faith not by our works. The rest, as they say, is history.

Luther was mortally concerned about the fate of his soul after death. He was also concerned about the corruption in the Roman Catholic Church, but consider for a moment what he was not concerned about. He was a horrible anti-Semite, never mind that Jesus and all of his first followers had been Jews and that Christianity is inconceivable without its Jewish roots. He was on the wrong side of a major justice issue of his time. When German peasants rebelled against their oppressive overlords he sided with the landowning elite and savaged the peasants not because they were violent but because they were resisting the existing oppressive social and economic order. He sided with the oppressors against the oppressed, something Jesus would never have done. We see the deleterious effects of the establishment of Christianity on the Christian faith. Worry about the eternal fate of your soul. Don’t look at unjust and oppressive conditions here on earth. Look up. Look beyond this life. That’s what God wants of you, never mind that it was never what Jesus wanted of you.

Here's another one. With the European conquest of Central and South America, mostly by the Catholic powers Spain and Portugal, Roman Catholicism became the established faith of the ruling powers and the faith of most of the people in those parts of the world. Most of the people were miserably poor while the wealthy elite lived in luxury at their expense. The Church said never mind. That’s not what you should be concerned about. You problem isn’t poverty and exploitation, it’s sin. Do what we tell you, don’t resist the powers, and perhaps you’ll gain a blessed afterlife as compensation for your suffering in this life. Yes, in the late nineteenth century the Roman Catholic had issued social teachings that call for justice for working people and the poor, but as they say, Roman Catholic social teaching is one of the best kept secrets in the world. The Church in Latin America taught establishment Christianity. It taught what claimed to be apolitical Christianity. (On its claiming to be rather than being apolitical see below.) The Church diverted the people’s attention from this life to the next life.

Then starting in about the 1950s some of those poor people started to read the Bible for themselves, something the established church never wanted them to do. Some parish priests worked with and supported them. When they did they made a remarkable discovery. Jesus had hardly talked about saving one’s soul for a blessed afterlife at all, but he’d talked an awful lot about caring for people like them in this life. They read “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family you did it to me” and “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” Matthew 25:40, 45. They read “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” and “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” Luke 6:20, 24. They knew he was talking about them and about the rich people who kept them down. They saw that he was talking about this life not some future life. They formed “base communities (comunidades de base), relatively autonomous religious communities where they could study the Bible themselves or with sympathetic Catholic priests. Out of that movement grew liberation theology, mostly Catholic, that returned to Jesus’ actual teachings about social and economic justice.

The established Roman Catholic Church, at first anyway, reacted entirely against the movement of the base communities and liberation theology. Those things threatened the Church’s authority, they thought. They threatened the established powers with which the Church had been in bed for ages. Eventually Rome more or less coopted the movement. Latin American Roman Catholicism in more recent times has produced great leaders who get it. Pope Francis, after all, is an Argentinian Jesuit who wants the Roman Catholic Church to be a church of and for the poor. Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated as he presided at the Eucharist because he spoke out against the atrocities of the rulers of El Salvador in favor of the people, almost all of whom were poor. Latin American Roman Catholicism produced other martyrs for justice e as well. Yet the Church’s first response was the typical response of established Christianity. Try to redirect the people’s attention back to where the powers want it, on how to get to a blessed next life not on the justice issues of this one.

Our theme here is apolitical Christianity, and one powerful way that established Christianity has worked to preserve its power and the political, social, and economic status quo is precisely to convince Christians that their faith is apolitical. When church people object to what they consider to be political preaching they are objecting to faith concerned more with this world than with the next, more with justice than with individual sin, more with the very worldly Jesus and less with a transcendent, otherworldly Christ, more with salvation in this life than salvation in some next life. They are clinging to what Christianity became when it became established as the faith of empire.

It is important to realize that while established Christianity claims to be apolitical it isn’t. Diverting the people’s attention from this life to a next life may not seem political on its face, but it has profound political effects. It props up and preserves the existing order of things. It blocks the transformation of the world that Jesus called the kingdom of God. In the presence of injustice and oppression one cannot be apolitical. If we say nothing we support the oppressor. If we say nothing about it we accept injustice. So no, my fellow Christians, our faith is not and cannot be apolitical no matter how often the church has told you that it is.

I said at the beginning of this piece that the complaint about politics in church is one church people make against progressive pastors. There are a couple of reasons why I put the matter that way. One is that I am (or was before I retired) a progressive Christian pastor, so progressive pastoring is what I know best. There is however a more important reason for that limitation that I need to address here. I freely admit that I know progressive churches much better than I know conservative ones. What I say about the conservative ones here is based mostly on how they present themselves in public, on what I have seen them doing in the public sphere.

For at least the last fifty years or so conservative Christians have not objected to their pastors preaching politics as long as they preached the right kind of politics. The right kind of politics for conservative Christians seems to come down to conservative positions on three issues, namely, abortion, gay rights, and a common identity between Christianity and the United States of America. I’ll consider them in that order.

At least since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973 which holds that women have a constitutional right to an abortion conservative Christians have loudly proclaimed that life begins at conception and that therefore all abortions constitute the murder of an unborn child no matter how early in a pregnancy the abortion is performed. Abortion is of course first of all a moral issue for the woman contemplating one. I won’t go into the morality of it here. I’ll just say that it is also a political issue among us. Many states still have statutes on the books prohibiting it. Roe v. Wade made it a legal issue, indeed a constitutional one. Conservative Christians are more likely to object if their pastors don’t preach against abortion even if the reason they don’t is that they’re trying to avoid preaching politics.

On the issue of abortion conservative Christians demand that their faith be political, that their churches speak out against it and do everything they can to get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade so that state laws against abortion can again go into effect. Although most of them claim to be “Bible-believing Christians” it seems to bother them not at all that there isn’t a word in the Bible about abortion or that there are legitimate issues around when an embryo or fetus becomes a human being. On the issue of abortion these folks’ faith is vociferously political.

Again for the last several decades at least conservative Christians have demanded that their churches be actively political against the equal rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. Like abortion same gender sexual acts are first of all a moral question. I won’t go into that issue here.[4] The cluster of issues that we can call for convenience gay rights is, however, a political issue among us. Some states and some smaller jurisdictions within states have enacted statutes and ordinances that include sexual orientation and perhaps gender identity in their broader civil rights laws. Conservative Christians worked actively against such laws. The U. S. Supreme Court made gay rights a legal, constitutional issue at the national level in its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 which holds that same gender couples have a constitutional right to marry. Conservative Christian preachers continue to insist that all same gender sexual acts are sinful, never mind that Jesus said not one word about them. If these preachers would limit their work on the issue to the morality of homosexual acts they would not be talking politics from the pulpit, but so many of them don’t limit their work in that way. They and their people have engaged in political movements against gay equality and have worked to have their political representatives oppose gay rights legislation at every turn. As a result our federal civil rights law still does not protect LGBTQ people against discrimination in housing, employment, public accommodations, or in any other area. On this issue as with abortion conservative Christians demand that their churches be political.

Then there’s the way conservative Christians equate Christianity and the United States of America. They insist that our country was founded as “a Christian nation” and should therefore favor Christianity over other faiths. They turn a blind eye to the truth that most of our nation’s founders were Deists not Christians and that they founded the country quite intentionally as a secular state. They embrace the American flag as a Christian symbol, never mind that it is no such thing. They participate enthusiastically in the American military, something Jesus would never have sanctioned. It is members of churches with more progressive pastors who object to the faith being political. On at least some issues members of more conservative churches insist that it be precisely that.

Of course people have spiritual needs. Of course people need and can find consolation and strength by turning to the love of God that we Christians know in and through Jesus Christ. In nothing I say here do I intend to deny that reality or the power and importance of Christianity as a spiritual discipline. I am after all a Christian pastor albeit a retired one. My point is only that when Christianity became the established faith of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE it changed its focus in an unfortunate way. It came to function as a bulwark of the status quo rather than as a champion of peace on earth and justice for all people. In doing that it betrayed the one it calls its Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ. It is way past time for us to return to him and to his teachings. May it be so.

---

[1] Aristotle, Politics, Book 1, Section 1253a.

[2] Id., Section 1252a.

[3] See Sorenson, Thomas C. Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Wipf and Stock, Eugene, Oregon, 2008, pp. 165-166.

[4] For a discussion of why progressive Christians support equal rights for LGBTQ persons both in the church and in society see Sorenson, Liberating Christianity, pp. 182-190.

On Turning to God

On Turning to God

Scripture: Psalm 116:1-4

We live in difficult times these days. Death and grief are always with us mere mortals, but these days are different. We are living with a coronavirus pandemic that has significantly impacted all of our lives. Many of us are in lock down, staying home except when we absolutely have to go out. Millions upon millions of Americans have lost their jobs. Many of them can’t make their rent or mortgage payments and don’t know where their next meal will come from. Many who still go to work out in the world worry every second about becoming infected. Most tragically several tens of thousands of Americans and far more than that around the world have died because of coronavirus infection. Tens of thousands, and more, grieve the unexpected deaths of loved ones. The economy is stagnant at best. Our federal government and some state governments have botched the governmental response to the pandemic, thereby making a bad situation worse. We don’t know when or perhaps even if this pandemic will end and life can get back to something at least approximating normal. Yes, we live in difficult times.

Our times are difficult, but they’re hardly unique in human history. Humans in every time and place have experienced difficult times, some of them far more difficult and tragic than our current times are. Some of the difficulties people experience are only personal, are due to circumstances particular to an individual person. Others are caused by more general circumstances like our current difficult times are. Either way, difficult times tend to have one of two effects on people with regard to their relationship with God. Some people ask “Where was God? How could God do this to me? What good is God to me if God does this or even just lets this happen? Isn’t God supposed to protect me?” Some people just live with those questions. Others, however, lose their faith altogether. Especially if they’ve been taught, as so many so tragically have, that if their faith is strong enough and they pray hard enough bad things won’t happen. Hard times really can destroy faith.

Others turn to God in their difficulties and find comfort and support there. We hear that reaction in the opening lines of Psalm 116. The psalmist says that “the snares of death encompassed” him. Saying the same thing in different words he says “the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me,” Sheol being the fate of all persons after death in ancient Judaism. He suffered “distress and anguish.” Sadly a great many people today know from personal experience what this ancient author was feeling. Death is all around us even more powerfully than usual. We feel distress at being cooped up. We feel distress when we have to go out for any reason because of the risk of infection. We feel anguish at being separated from our loved ones except electronically, which is better than nothing but really isn’t at all the same thing as person to person contact. We feel anguish when we hear the heartbreaking stories of people dying in isolation from their families. We feel the anguish of grief when someone we know, maybe even someone we love, dies of COVID-19. Yes, these days more than ever we know what Psalm 116 is talking about.

Yet Psalm 116 is ultimately a psalm of thanksgiving and even joy. The psalmist says that God “inclined his ear” to him and heard his “voice and supplications.” In his distress he called on God: “O Lord I pray, save my life!” God, it seems, did save his life, so he uses the rest of his psalm to express his thanks to God. Perhaps you have an experience something like the psalmist’s. I have. Some of you who know me may have heard or read this story before, but it fits so well here that I’m going to tell it again.

On Wednesday, July 31, 2002, my wife of thirty years, the mother of my two children, died of cancer. We had known for at least a few months that death was coming for her. I thought I was ready. I wasn’t. Her death laid me low with grief. I felt an anguish more painful than anything I could ever have imagined. The next Saturday morning I was in the shower crying in emotional anguish. I sank to my knees. I just couldn’t stand. I cried out “God, lift me up!” Immediately, so fast I had no time to think about the matter at all, some force outside of my control gently grabbed me and put me back on my feet. I didn’t do it. I couldn’t have done it in the shape I was in. Somehow I knew that God had heard my supplication and responded by doing for me what I could not do for myself. That doleful morning God was present with me holding me and loving me in my grief. It was the most powerful experience of my life.

There is one big and important difference between my story and the experience of psalmist of Psalm 116 that we must notice. In the psalm we hear that the author was faced with death, and God saved him. The life circumstance that threatened his life and caused such distress and anguish, whatever it was, was solved. In my case it wasn’t, at least not in the way most people in such grief would want. My wife didn’t come back to life. My grief didn’t go away. Time helps, but my grief hasn’t gone away today almost eighteen years later. The psalmist and I had similar if not identical feelings but had different outcomes.

Here’s the lesson, I think. God is with us always. God is with us in joy and in grief. God is with us in life and in death. God is with us, and God is for us. God loves us. God cares for us, usually in quiet, subtle ways but sometimes in loud and dramatic ones. So many of us feel God’s presence and love only rarely, but that’s out fault not God’s. In distress and anguish the psalmist of Psalm 116 turned to God, and God was there. In my grief years ago I turned to God, and God was there.

Many of us are in distress and anguish these days. We can learn a good lesson from Psalm 116. I learned a good lesson that day in the shower. Turn to God. God will be there for you. Indeed God is already there for you. God probably won’t make this pandemic and all of the limitations it puts on us go away any time soon, but God is here with us. God can lift you up. God can be your rock. God lifted me up that day. God was my rock and solace in those days nearly unbearable grief. Turn to God and receive blessings only God can give. It will get you through. Amen.

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.