Author: Chris McNeal

Chris McNeal https://themcneal.wordpress.com Take me literally, but not seriously.
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“But, Chris, the Bible Isn’t Political”: Part 6

Diana Butler Bass says it better than I could, so I’ll just let her lead off.

Hi.

I’m one of those who grew up under exactly what you just read. So, when President Trump announced the new policy of the United States to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, I knew exactly the work and the players moving behind the scenes.

(By the way, before we go any further, I’m under no illusion that President Two Corinthians Trump has any knowledge or passion for Jerusalem, let alone the nuances in the book of Revelation that we’ll be addressing today. However, what he is acutely aware of is that he is slowly losing support of the white evangelical voting base that single-handedly got him into office and got me started on this blog series.)

From a distance, this discussion to many nonreligious people seems trivial at best, and really kind of odd. But, as Bass correctly asserted, President Trump’s decision is the sad result of assenting to a very small evangelical Christian community who are absolutely terrible at reading the book of Revelation. I say that, and will not apologize for it. They are terrible.

And that’s tragic. This is a more obvious example of something that happens more often than religious and nonreligious people are usually aware: bad theology puts lives in the balance. In fact, most of the problems in our world really do start with, or at least continue because of, the terrible ideas of southern evangelical Christians.

Which is why I tell nonreligious people all the time that the real battle to make our world less violent, make our societies more just, afford opportunity to all, and protect our environment is not on the streets or in political parties but in churches. The rich and the powerful have found great use in churches, and the progressive, forward thinking, and truly compassionate have wondered why their efforts elsewhere have been so fruitless. When nonreligious people advocate for the poor, protest war, and organize for community justice, we evangelicals call their work “worldly”. On the other hand, when religious people vote and act to all but ensure that the most vulnerable among us remain so, but nevertheless get someone baptized, theirs is “kingdom” work.

(I’m angry as I write this.)

So, lets go to Revelation.

First of all, we would be better off if preachers were required to obtain a special license before they could preach from that book. In the hands of people who still operate under a simplistic and flat reading of the Bible, it is truly a dangerous book. And that is a major shame.

Revelation is a triumph of literature. Of ingenuity. Of courage.

And 21st century American Christians are apt to claim that it is the most relevant book in our time. But, the fact that I agree with them is rich in irony.

Revelation is a political book.

Yes, that’s right.

Eugene Peterson, in speaking about Revelation, says, “The gospel of Jesus Christ is more political than anyone imagines, but in a way that no one guesses.” Revelation is almost always used to talk about the afterlife and where your soul will go for eternity. But Revelation has virtually nothing to do with the afterlife and everything to do with the inevitable destruction that comes to nations that understand greatness to mean military superiority.

Know any nations like that?

I know of one.

The images you see in Revelation are not images of what Heaven looks like. In Part 6 of the Bible that Borrows, I wrote extensively on how the author of Revelation brilliantly borrowed specific and identifiable military and cultic propaganda devices from the Roman Empire. His purpose? Not to describe what Heaven looks like, but to shame them. If you never read that post, I highly recommend doing so. It’s long, but I’ve probably received more positive feedback from that post than any other.

Almost everything you read about in Revelation is either (1) a propaganda device from the Roman empire, which the author uses to mock the Roman empire, or (2) one of the wild images from the Old Testament book of Daniel that its author used to denounce the beastly, exploitative empires of his day.

If I had to summarize the book of Revelation, it is the story of the world ruled by and in the image of the Beasts (the Caesars and their military, exploitative might), but is coming to be made more in the image of the vulnerable slaughtered lamb (Jesus). John uses a lot of wild imagery to tell that story, but that’s basically the story. At the end of the persecution from the mighty, scary monsters of the Empire, the followers of the Lamb win. Not by warring back, but by following the moral arc of the universe that is being made in the image of Jesus.

There’s one word in Revelation that you need to not miss: down.

At the end of the battle, a city—the New Jerusalem—comes DOWN to earth. This is because this is the big story of the Bible. Not going up to Heaven when we die, but Heaven coming down to Earth while we live. This is the New Jerusalem, where all are invited to come, even those outside in the lake of fire—those who cling to the ways of Caesar. We see lots of people in the gospels and in Acts who left allegiance to Caesar and formed their allegiance to Jesus Christ. This is what you are reading in Acts 10.

After all, we are told, the gates to the city are never shut.

The differences in these modern readings of this ancient book from Patmos are not small. They are the difference in whether you think investing in the well-being of this world is important. Whether the “new Earth” is actually a place in the clouds or the renewing of this Earth. Whether you believe this earth is being renewed—as Paul once said, that God would “reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven”—or whether everything on earth is simply going to be destroyed one day and who cares what happens here.

What I’m saying is that the way you read Revelation is more or less the difference in whether you are the type of Christian who makes the world better or the type of Christian who doesn’t give a literal damn about the world.

Armageddon

Few passages of the book of Revelation get so toxically abused and yet advance the point I’m trying to make than an obscure passage in chapter 16 about Armageddon. If you’ve spent much time at all in conservative Christian circles, you’ve probably been taught that before the end of time, there will first be a massive war at some place called Armageddon and all evil will be destroyed. In fact, as I was taught, Jesus cannot come until a series of global cataclysms make way for a final megawar.

“And the demonic spirits gathered all the rulers and their armies to a place with the Hebrew name Armageddon.”

Revelation c16

Then comes the “fury of God’s wrath”, which sounds pretty scary. In fact, it has provided the substance of untold numbers of bad fiction books. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth was the best-selling novel of the 1970s, and by a wide margin.

But what’s actually happening here?

Does Jesus renounce the Sermon on the Mount and go on to kill billions of people in the Middle East?

It turns out that Armageddon, like the lake of fire, is another potent image that the author uses to describe the fate of empire that I’ve been talking about in all of AD 2017. “Armageddon” is a Hebrew word that literally means “valley of Megiddo.” A UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is located in northern Israel and today is called Tel Megiddo (a “tell” is an archeological mound).

תל_מגידו

That’s where evangelicals say a war will happen.

Okay, so why is that important and why is this location an archeological mound?

Because the city has been destroyed and rebuilt twenty-six times.

You read that correctly.

Twenty.

Six.

Now do you see why the anti-empire book, Revelation, in the anti-empire collection of books, the Bible, might have found poor Megiddo as the perfect illustration of what comes when we worship the Beast?

Megiddo’s location in the land bridge between the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires to the north and the Egyptian Empire to the south made it all but inevitable that it would suffer the worst at the hands of the world’s most powerful and ambitious. It’s important that you not let your mind simply make in this number, twenty-six, just some new historical trivia to recite.

This is about people.

This is about communities.

Twenty-six communities of real people who lost everything they had because of empire and military conquest. Because of what Revelation calls the Beast. Megiddo is a brilliant and heartbreaking symbol for what the author of Revelation is trying to convey. God cares about people and the work that people put into the bonds of their communities. He cares about how we work and live and struggle and solve problems together for the common good. And yet, the ambition of the Beast always leaves the most vulnerable and hard-working communities to suffer the fate of Megiddo.

That brings us to today.

You won’t hear any of this in your typical church service. What we’re about is positioning ourselves to leave this world—to belittle and snicker at those who have “too much” concern with rebuilding the Megiddos as just “obsessed with worldly concerns”. When the author of Revelation wrote that the rulers and their armies would meet in a place called Armageddon, of course what he had in mind was the fate of Rome. But don’t assume that prophetic message from exile in Patmos doesn’t apply today. Don’t assume that our United States of America turns out to be the New Jerusalem in the end.

We might instead be aligned with the Beast in the story. And our fate might be with those on the outside, thirsty from their proximity to the lake of fire. Fortunately, we hear those on the inside who have aligned themselves with the Gospel of Peace calling out to us:

Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life.

Revelation c22

 

Part 7

“But, Chris, the Bible Isn’t Political”: Part 5

I remember publishing “The Bible That Borrows” earlier this year and everyone freaking out when my whole series hinged on Moses not writing the first books of the Old Testament, nor giving the Torah. “But, Chris, Jesus said the law came from Moses! Do you claim to know more than Jesus?”—I remember reading over and over again. Of course, by the time I got to the part of the series when I explained everything, most people had moved on.

I find myself in this series in a familiar position. I spent the first four parts talking about how the story of Jesus was first written down as a reaction to the devastation of Rome’s war with Israel. When you read it that way, the stories really jump out. Details in the stories that didn’t seem important before really start to pop. Jesus’s teachings are carefully hewn to the language and motifs of second-temple Judaism, but in substance are a scathing prophetic witness against the war machine of Rome and the Hell-bent rebellious imagination of the Israelites.

And here we are again.

“You certainly have a great imagination, Chris, but what I have is the Bible. You’re doing what all liberals do: editing out what the Bible says about the wrath of God.” You may think interesting my writing on Jesus as the divine anti-war, anti-empire prophet, but your theology has no space or categories for that.

Meanwhile, your theological space for the angry, retributive, wrathful God is crammed full.

After all, if Jesus is so anti-war, what was God doing in the Old Testament when he was commanding his people to exterminate the Canaanites? What about God’s vengeance and wrath we read so much about?

Fair questions. Let’s go there today.

Jesus Edits the Bible

Christians generally affirm that Jesus’s ministry began when he completed his forty-day testing in the wilderness and returned to Nazareth. If you want to understand Jesus well and read the Bible well, you need to pay close attention to the first thing he did when he began there.

In Luke’s telling of the story, it was the Sabbath and Jesus went to the synagogue where he began to teach. We’ve already talked at length in this series about the distinctly earthy Messianic expectations found in the book of the prophet Isaiah, and, not surprisingly, he began by opening the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.

He turned to what we today call chapter 61, and he began to read. Here’s what it says:

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
    and the day of vengeance of our God.

This is the beginning of his ministry. This is the introduction to him. This is what he wants you to know he is about. And, so, Jesus reads:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free.

(I will interrupt here to point out that this is all the kind of stuff I’ve been talking about for the last several installments.) But then Jesus continues:

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and . . . . . . . he rolled up the scroll and sat down.

Okay.

Did you catch that?

(re-read it if you didn’t)

What Jesus did is the key to his whole project. The key to literally everything that happens next in his ministry. Jesus edited the book of Isaiah. He cut Isaiah off mid sentence. The text of Isaiah describes a messiah, which is a Jewish synonym for “king.” This messiah is supposed to bring in the year of Jubilee (the “year of the Lord’s favor”) and the “day of vengeance.”

Jesus gets to that language, that “day of vengeance”, but instead of reading it, he just rolls up the scroll.

And it wasn’t an accident. Wasn’t unimportant. Notice what happens next. Jesus doubles down.

“Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”

Jesus entered an oppressed community whose imagination was saturated in the early images of God that depicted anger, wrath, retribution, and violence. And the Israelites would have been happy to see that retribution dished out at its neighbors, the Sidonians and the Syrians.

But Jesus is calling into question how we read our Bibles. The Old Testament depictions of God are not the full revelation of God.

Jesus is.

The Bible is the diary of the people of God as they came to a clearer and clearer revelation of God. It begins with the illuminated Moses who went on Mount Sinai but could only see the back of God. But when Peter, James, and John saw the illuminated Jesus on Mount Tabor, they saw the face of God. Peter, who understood the revelation of God from Moses the law giver and Elijah the prophet as equal to the revelation of God in Jesus, announced that he would build a tent for each of them. He could not imagine Jesus contradicting the law and prophets.

But God announces, “This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him.”

The story tells us that the disciples wake up, and all that remains is Jesus. The message here is unmistakeable: The Bible’s depictions of God from beginning to end are not meant to carry equal weight. The Bible is not flat. The law, the prophets, and Jesus are not equals. Certainly, the law and the prophets point us to Jesus, but they are not the perfect revelation of God.

And because the inspired Bible tells you that they are not the perfect revelation of God, sometimes they need to be edited. As Brian Zahnd says, “God is exactly like Jesus. There’s never been a time when God wasn’t exactly like Jesus. We haven’t always known this. But now we do.”

Don’t believe me? That’s fine, but neither then do you believe the Bible, which is screaming this at you.

Jesus gave them this answer: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.”

“I and the Father are one.”

Then Jesus cried out, “Whoever believes in me does not believe in me only, but in the one who sent me. The one who looks at me is seeing the one who sent me.”

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”

Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.

All this renouncing of divine violence, of course, is not how the Jews saw God depicted in the law and prophets. Time and time again, the Gospel writers place Jesus in nearly identical situations as those when the Old Testament depicted the anger, wrath, retribution, and violence of Yahweh. And the people were primed to see Jesus pay them back.

Certainly the Bible comes to see the mercy of God more clearly as you advance in the Old Testament. But a flat reading of the Bible requires us to equate the teachings of Jesus with the wrath and tribalism in the Old Testament. And we love wrath directed at our enemies. We love hellfire and brimstone when it falls on them. Today, we call it “karma.”

Or the war on terror.

But, notice what happens next in the story of Jesus in the synagogue.

And all they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath.

You want wrath? Luke says there it is. Not in God, of course, but in you. So, when the story says that they next tried to throw Jesus off of a cliff, it says that Jesus “passed right through their midst.”

If you open the Bible and all you can see is a God of wrath, it’s not because of God’s wrath.

It’s because of yours.

If you want a God of wrath, he will pass right through your midst.

 

Part 6

“But, Chris, the Bible Isn’t Political”: Part 4

It was nine in the morning when they crucified him. The written charge against him read: “The King of the Jews.”

Mark c15 v25-26

We’re entering the Christmas season—the colossus of capitalism and the American way. The season of calories, Fox News, and the Bumpuses’s hounds. Sweaters and iPads, bows and ribbons, socks and pink bunny pajamas . . . all, of course, for Jesus. Surely no time of year provides more steam to power the locomotive of your heaviest cynicism.

Nevertheless, this year I want you to plunge into the Christmas songs. Go all in. Specifically, I want you to notice how many time the word “king” gets used.

Joy to the Earth, the Lord has come; let Earth receive her King.

Hark! The Herald Angels sing, glory to the newborn King. 

Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, born is the King of Israel. 

Come and behold Him, born the King of Angels.

You get the idea.

Today, we’re going to talk about that sign they nailed above Jesus. Its inclusion in the Gospel stories was not sentimental. Not poetic. Not metaphor. You’ll find a lot of that in the Bible, but not here. However, this specific verbiage, “King of the Jews”, can seem a bit random without some historical context. Why would Pontius Pilate insist on hanging that sign above Jesus? Why not instead simply write the Jesus claimed to be the King of the Jews, as the Jews protested? 

Let’s talk about Herod the Great.

Herod’s father, Antipater, supported Julius Caesar in his civil war against the Roman Senate to become Emperor of Rome, and, when Julius ultimately consolidated power, Antipater was appointed Prime Minister of Judea. Antipater’s son, Herod, was subsequently appointed governor of Galilee.

Very early in Herod’s appointment, Herod demonstrated such an inclination to brutality that he was summoned for trial before the Jewish Sanhedrin. The events of this trial proved formative in Governor Herod’s young psyche. He became obsessed by fear of the Jewish people and Judaism’s institutions.

This fear of the Jewish sages drove him to seek the cloak of protection from Italy.

Josephus records that Herod traveled to Rome and, convinced Mark Antony and Octavian to make him the supreme leader of Judaea. Apparently, he made such a great presentation, that Antony personally appealed to the Roman Senate to ratify their decision. When the Senate gave its approval, they gave Herod this title: “King of the Jews.”

Heard that?

Josephus then records Antony and Herod leaving the Senate for a Roman temple, where Herod offered a sacrifice to the Roman gods, Jupiter and Mars. Once he returned to Jerusalem, he undertook massive building and infrastructure projects, while simultaneously maintaining an unswerving loyalty to Rome. This is the subtext of what you are reading when you read about the sign they hung above Jesus: the battle between two competing kings of the Jews.

Here’s a tip. When the early Christian texts strikingly borrow words and phrases that originated in the Roman Empire, it’s because they are mocking the Roman Empire. It’s their way of saying if you want to know what this thing is, let’s start by saying it is not like that thing. If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you should be seeing that by now.

Before the savior of the world had been alive more than a few days, Matthew tells us that Herod felt so threatened by this baby—A BABY!—that he ordered the death of every child younger than two years old in and around Bethlehem. What do you think the gospel writers want you to conclude about supreme military power from the fact that King Herod was threatened by a baby? Do they bless our fear of everyone we as Americans deem threatening? Do they not speak to the tendency of those in power to descend into paranoia? To obsess over threats to our power?

This, by the way, is the Old Testament story of King Solomon. The “wisest” man in the Bible became became so powerful that his reign as king was inflicted with paranoia and treachery.

There has only been one War on Christmas in all of history. It had nothing to do with Starbucks or Target. It had everything to do with competing kingdoms.

King Herod’s War on Christmas reflects the moral arc of the gospels. The gospel writers want you to know that that the King of the Jews who received the blessing of Rome and the King of the Jews who hung on a Roman cross were on a collision course. They weren’t merely coinciding historical figures. Herod capitulated to the Roman military superpower, and the Roman Senate coronated him king. Jesus preached the gospel of peace, and the Roman cross and a crown of thorns coronated him king.

But about that sign…

The Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, never took seriously Jesus’s claim to being a king. That is why he tried to use Jesus as a bargaining chip to not have to release Barabbas, a violent revolutionary. However, when it became clear that the release of Jesus would not satisfy the violent Messianic ambitions of the Jewish leaders, Pilate wanted impress upon them that the full weight of Rome would stamp out any serious challenge to the superiority of Rome. That is why, despite the Jewish leader’s protests, Pilate hung the title “King of the Jews” atop the cross, Rome’s most famous symbol of intimidation.

Please tell me you’re beginning to see Mark’s ingenious ways of depicting Jesus as the alternative to the Superpower of Rome and the violent revolution of Israel.

In our day, we should not assume that the mighty United State of America isn’t Rome in this story. Nor should we assume that the church hasn’t become Herod the Great, sacrificing on the alter to Jupiter and Mars. Rome chose as its King of the Jews the one who would be loyal to Rome.

At one point, Pilate asked the Jewish leaders, “Shall I crucify your king?”

When we as Christians give our allegiance to and put our trust in the ways of Jupiter and Mars, as Herod did, we echo what was said in reply: “We have no king but Caesar.”

 

Part 5

“But, Chris, the Bible Is Not Political”: Part 3

“I am Richard II, know ye not that?”

This was Queen Elizabeth’s famous remark about William Shakespeare’s Richard II as she clearly observed many of her popular stereotypes humorously reflected in the play’s title character. Importantly, her observation spoke to a truth common to many if not all of Shakespeare’s histories. Their power is most richly experienced when viewed beyond just “history” and more as commentary on his present day. That is to say, Shakespeare was less interested in “accurately” depicting his subject characters and more in crafting stories tailored to his observations of 16th and 17th century England and the house of Tudor.

The iconic Queen Elizabeth was both successful as the monarch of England and yet frequently criticized for lacking decisiveness. So, Richard II was depicted strikingly with similar indecisiveness. Sometimes the complicated political nature of Elizabeth’s day required making concessions that arguably lacked principal. This too was how Richard II was depicted. Elizabeth was accused of murdering Amy Dudley, the wife of Lord Robert Dudley, but never ended up marrying him, despite their courtship. Correspondingly, Richard II’s indecisiveness made him look guilty in the death that is the central problem within the plot.

Of course, criticizing Elizabeth I for excessive caution was wildly unfair. Elizabeth I was the product of both a complicated political climate and quiet years observing the hasty mistakes of her Tudor predecessors. Mary was completely decisive, but lead England into religious, economic, and military disaster. On the other had, Elizabeth I made caution work for her. By the end of her reign, England was the dominant political and military force of a fractured European continent. So, when she was accused of being indecisive—usually on account of her sex—the Bard of Avon whipped up a play that depicted a man with exaggerated versions of her supposed flaws without—unlike Elizabeth I—any accomplishments to show for it. Fun stuff.

I tell you this because Bible history and Shakespeare history have a lot in common.

The Old Testament history you find in Genesis and Exodus is less videotaped history as it is commentary on life in Israel after war with Babylon. The book of Daniel, the last-written book of the Old Testament, is less the “true” story of Daniel in Babylon and more commentary on life in Israel in the 2nd century under the abuses under Antiochus IV that ultimately lead to the Maccabean Revolt. You could say I’ve written about this at length.

But this creative use of “history” doesn’t end with the Old Testament.

The story of Jesus was not told in written form until immediately after the destruction of Jerusalem. Not surprisingly then, it reflects and speaks to the most important things that people were thinking after losing everything in that war. Jesus’s story and stories are tailored to speak to its time and agony. This means that our cultural and temporal distance from the Bible require us to retrain how we read it.

The Bible is mostly the product of war.

War is the subtext of virtually its every subversive word.

Including the angry Gospel of Mark.

In the fifth chapter of Mark, Jesus encounters a man said to be possessed by demons—so many that they would later enter two thousand pigs—and these demons apparently gave him great strength and made him terrorizing in the countryside. In fact, the story tells us that “no one was strong enough to subdue him.” However, when Jesus encounters him in the region of Gadara (modern-day Jordan), this all-powerful man immediately kneels down before Jesus.

We make this a spiritual story.

But, to those who lived through the terror of Rome’s War on Terror, the message was far less a spiritual one, but a tangible one. They had just experienced the relentless power of the Roman legion, a force that no one on Earth was strong enough to subdue. No one had the audacity to claim they were greater than the Roman military. But this story not only depicts this all-powerful being kneeling before Jesus, but begging—yes begging—to enter a herd of Judaism’s most famously unclean animal, pigs, and descend down a lake to their death.

Oh.

And—did I mention?—the man’s name is “Legion”.

Haha.

Guys.

That one is a dead giveaway.

Last, but not least, Gadara (or the “region of the Gerasenes”) was where a diplomatic mission was sent to the Roman general, Vespasian, as he was destroying the countryside around Jerusalem before his later siege. The details aren’t clear, but, apparently, they made some show of allegiance to the empire in order to protect their investment.

Josephus tells us in The Wars of the Jews as follows:

However, [Vespasian] was obliged first to overthrow what remained elsewhere, and to leave nothing outside of Jerusalem behind him that might interrupt him in that siege. Accordingly, he marched against Gadara, the metropolis of Perea, which was a place of strength, and entered that city on the fourth day of the month of Dystros for the men of power had sent an embassy to him, without the knowledge of the seditious, to treat for conditions of surrender; which they did out of the desire they had of peace, and for saving their effects, because many of the citizens of Gadara were rich men.

Just in case the reader might think this story about anything other than Rome, Mark tells us in his story that when the men of the region lost their huge investment, they pleaded with Jesus to leave their region.

What do you think Mark saying about those who pledge allegiance to the empire?

Does he think you can pledge allegiance to the empire and to Jesus?

Does he think war-making and “fire and fury” makes the world safer?

I simply cannot accept that Mark—after the bitter destruction Israel had experienced at the hands of Rome—told this story with any other motivation than to say that the way of Rome was dying to the way of Jesus. That Jesus was greater than Caesar. That war destroys those it conquers as well as the conquerers.

Again, we fundamentalists spiritualize everything in the Bible, and we do so to the benefit of only one man, Caesar. This is unfortunate. The “miracle of the swine” is a dangerous story about quite visible empire, not a fun story about some amorphous devil.

Which brings me back to Shakespeare. I can imagine the powerful Romans—whose understanding of the world was tethered to the might and security of their Empire—listening to the story about Legion and asking themselves:

I am Legion, know ye not that?

 

Part 4

“But, Chris, the Bible Isn’t Political”: Part 2

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end.

Isaiah c9

We American Evangelical Christians have problems with the Bible. They remind me of our problems last year with #BlackLivesMatter and this weekend with #TakeTheKnee.

Every time we hear those words, what we really hear is “only black lives matter.” With an assist from Breitbart (which still features a section on its website entitled “Black Crime”) and from Fox News (which capably blows up the television screens of white America every night with every black person it can find whom it can use to fit its narrative), we proudly and arrogantly understand those movements to mean that black people don’t want to work hard or follow the rules like white people do. We puff ourselves up and imagine them hating us and essentially wanting to burn down our way of life. We imagine the same things that Christian slave owners imagined a hundred and sixty years ago and that Christian parents of children in desegregated schools imagined sixty years ago.

However, every other person in the universe hears something that is nowhere to be found in the wildest imaginations of white people. They see blacks incarcerated at stunningly higher rates than whites. They see blacks consistently charged more harshly than whites for the same crimes. They see qualified blacks less likely to get job interviews. They see hard-working blacks struggle to escape poverty. They see hard work reward mostly whites and poor choices punish mostly blacks.

And it is out of that struggle and injustice that they clearly hear the cry that “black lives matter too.” What everyone but white people soberly observes is that the American system treats black lives as if they don’t matter.

This—by the way—is the vacuousness and irrelevance of white, suburban America every time it thinks itself so enlightened when it angrily shouts “All Lives Matter.” No, duh.

And this is being out-of-touch. This is life on top.

At number one.

Privilege.

This is the people of Rome as they sneered at the Israelites whom they conquered in war. If you listen, you can hear the citizens of Rome complaining that “they should have just followed the law.”

And it’s exactly how we read the Bible in 2017.

When we read the Bible we have to make choices about what it means. When we in White America make our choices, we have to realize that our interests are aligned with Pharaoh, with Nebuchadnezzar, and with Caesar. We have the materials. The resources. The access. We are at the top of the system. Hard work more consistently rewards us than it does others. And there are some ways of reading the Bible that ask us to risk, if not sometimes give up, those things.

So we spiritualize everything in the Bible.

We interpret everything in a way that circumvents God’s deep care for the systems of earth that work to the detriment of its most oppressed and vulnerable. We miss everything it says about social justice. About peace. About poverty.

And that includes politics.

If you ask a modern evangelical Christian to articulate Jesus’s role as the “Messiah”, they would state roughly as follows: People’s sins separate them from God. Jesus came to die on a cross as a sacrifice for people’s sins so they can be pure enough to enter Heaven with God when they die.

If you ask what the purpose of life on Earth is, it is to do whatever—according to their denomination’s interpretation—is necessary to receive the benefits of that sacrifice. Otherwise, the Earth and what happens on it to its most vulnerable people isn’t really that important. At some point, it will simply go away.

I am a white evangelical Christian, and evangelical Christianity has devastated my soul this year.

(I say this not ignorant of the few reasons for my black readers having any sympathy for my “plight”)

Every time our government has used some vulnerable minority group—Muslims, young immigrants, blacks, transsexuals, gays, lesbians, or whomever else—as a political pawn, the church has been absolutely nowhere.

Absolutely. Nowhere.

“Jesus wasn’t concerned with fixing all the problems of his day,” I’ve heard in more sermons than I can count. “After all, this world is going to go away and what really matters is where your soul goes on Judgment Day.”

And I watch as the church of America says “Amen.”

Let me repeat. Caesar would have loved this theology. Nebuchadnezzar would have loved it. Pharaoh would have loved it. A faith that is only concerned for “my” salvation has no space for “group sin” as is articulated so often throughout the Bible.

It’s a faith with no concern for systems.

For social justice.

For peace.

For the environment.

For politics.

And it is completely foreign to the way of Jesus, the Messiah.

(though it was quite convenient for slave owners during the Civil War and segregationists a hundred years later in Little Rock, Arkansas)

As non-white Americans face greater discrimination and segregation, as the world edges closer to nuclear war, as our polar ice caps melt beyond repair, we sing gnostic songs like “This World Is Not My Home” and “I’ll Fly Away” because we’ve embraced the Gospel of Caesar—a gospel that is oblivious and unconcerned with justice and peace in this world. Our Gospel is a comfort to the powerful and little help for the oppressed.

We’ve ignored what the prophets of the vulnerable nation of Israel were concerned with when they envisioned the “Meshiakh”—a liberating figure on whom would rest the government. Guys, the freaking government. Isaiah actually uses that word!!

Not some invisible place in the sky.

But, now.

Here.

In this world.

Among these people.

With our problems.

With our systems.

With our economics.

With our government.

A judge who would make things right where they are wrong. Real things.

Suffering.

War.

Discrimination.

Nationalism.

Starvation.

Empire.

Poverty.

This is what Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem:

In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established
as the highest of the mountains;
it will be exalted above the hills,
and all nations will stream to it.
Many peoples will come and say,

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the temple of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion,
the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He will judge between the nations
    and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
    and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
    nor will they train for war anymore.

Isaiah c2

 

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—
the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and of might,
the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—
and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.
He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes,
or decide by what he hears with his ears;
but with righteousness he will judge the needy,
    with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.
He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth;
with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.
Righteousness will be his belt
and faithfulness the sash around his waist.
The wolf will live with the lamb,
  the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
    and a little child will lead them.
The cow will feed with the bear,
    their young will lie down together,
    and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The infant will play near the cobra’s den,
    and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.
They will neither harm nor destroy
    on all my holy mountain,
for the EARTH will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord
    as the waters cover the sea.

Isaiah c9

These statements of hope from the Hebrew prophets are universally known and embraced by everyone in the world (even among non-Christians)—but white Evangelical Christians. Frankly, these statements aren’t relevant to our spiritual theology of being saved so we can leave this world and not burn for eternity in fire wherever we end up.

Listen to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and you’ll find a man who was fluent in the Hebrew prophets. I wonder why.

In one scene, Jesus comes to Jerusalem—a place fomenting with violent, rebellious imagination—and this is what we read.

As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls.They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.”

When Jesus talks about “what would bring you peace”, he’s not talking about the “Sweet By and By”. He’s talking about war. Jesus knew that Jerusalem’s belief in peace through violence and warfare would be its undoing. As our nation edges closer to atomic war, if we want to hear the message of Rabbi Yeshua, we need to place ourselves in the shoes of the poor Yitzhak ben Abba, whose story I told you in the last installment.

He brings me to the book of Mark, one sentence of which I quoted in that installment. Mark was the first time the story of Jesus, the Messiah, was written, which is amazing considering that Jesus had died forty years earlier. That said, I find it no accident that whoever wrote that book found it most relevant to tell the story of Jesus right after Israel’s devastating war with Rome—while the Roman military propaganda machine was announcing “gospels” of Israel’s destruction throughout the empire.

Mark uses the word “gospel” way more times than any other book of the Bible, but it doesn’t talk very much at all about the afterlife. What it does talk about is a valley outside of Jerusalem, called “Gehenna”, where thousands of dead Israelite bodies were buried and burned up after their devastating war.

However, in keeping with our reflex to spiritualize everything in the Bible, we usually translate the name of this valley “Hell.”

You and I confess that Jesus is the son of God—God in the flesh. Among the people to whom Jesus came to Earth and identified, the Jews, the statements of hope we just read in Isaiah and the other prophets were their sacred expectations of the Messiah. These were Jesus’s prophets. These were his texts of the Messiah.

And nowhere in the book of Mark are these Messianic expectations disturbed.

Nowhere does any book of the Bible take away from the Messiah’s work in making the world—this world—better.

Where Mark defies Hebrew (and Roman) expectations is its loud and radical statement that the world will not be made better through war and violence. Jesus was the Prince of Peace. Not peace from Hell.

Peace from Gehenna.

Notice how Mark uses the symbols of peace from Rome and Israel in his opening statement.

“The beginning of the Gospel about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet.”

In so making this statement, the Gospels take aim in no uncertain terms at both sides of the conflict—the Empire of Rome and the rebels of Israel. Unfortunately, our modern-day lives of comfort prevent us from hearing the political messages of the Bible—literally from its first page until its final page. Please understand how crazily political and subversive this statement was.

When the early church said “Jesus is Lord” the message they heard was “and Caesar is not.”

 

Part 3