American Politics

“But, Chris, the Bible Isn’t Political”: Part 7

The six posts that came before today’s post have been a very long introduction to what I have for you today. I don’t know if that’s the most effective way of writing, but anyone who knows me knows I play the long game and always have. Today I directly address what has been the title of this series. Today we get systematic and theological.

Stones

The Gospel of John c8 tells a story familiar to believers and nonbelievers alike. It takes place on the day immediately after the weeklong, boisterous, and wine-aplenty Jewish Festival of Tabernacles. It’s morning time and Rabbi Jesus is teaching in the temple court of Jerusalem when a group of Jews brought to Jesus a woman and the words: “Rabbi, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The Torah commands us to stone such a woman. Now what do you say?” Of course, you know what he said next: “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” You know this story because it is a beautiful story. A story of compassion and a daring embodiment of the sacred teaching to “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

However, a few things need to be said.

First, the Jewish leaders were good at reading the Bible, and they were correct. Deuteronomy c22 really did command what they said it did. Second, Jesus’s statement may have been nice, but it most certainly is not what the Torah says. Frankly, the most fair and sound way to read the Torah is that when Jesus didn’t like it, he simply found a way not to follow it. That’s what he did. “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone” not only isn’t in the Torah, but it effectively swallows up what is.

And that brings me to stoning, a barbaric practice and one that— as the ancient (and barbaric) ancient Hebrews first came into contact with Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—they surely assumed that God had commanded stoning all along.

But there’s something else about stoning that you need to understand to get what Jesus is saying to us today.

Stoning is an incredibly inefficient way to kill someone. We know enough about ancient people to know that they had much faster ways of killing people. But stoning was employed, nevertheless, because when a community engages in a stoning, no single individual can be said to have killed the person. Ancient people were conscientious of the moral implications of their choices just like anyone, and a stoning by a mob allowed the guilt of what would otherwise be imputed to an individual to be imputed to an impersonal, fictionalized, and separate collective body. As long as everyone in the community throws a stone, no one person could be said to have killed the offending person. As long as the guilt might be said to impute to the mob, each person who made up the mob could say, “Well, I’m not the mob.”

Keep that in mind, and let’s go back to the story of Jesus and the woman.

When the Jewish Rabbis brought to Rabbi Yeshua the woman to be stoned, they brought with them their Satanic understanding that if we just stone her as a group, then no one individual will be the cause of her death and so guilty of her death. This is the subtext required to understand the genius of what Jesus’s words, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

Folks.

This is brilliant. Subversive. Revolutionary. World changing. Jesus message to all who would ever live is this: we don’t get to circumvent what the Sermon on the Mount would prohibit individually by instead just doing it as a group. Jesus’s kingdom does not consist of doing as a group what could not be done individually.

We don’t stone people today, and I’m glad we don’t.

However, I can’t say that the reason we don’t stone people is because we’ve fully embraced Rabbi Yeshua. The real reason we don’t stone people is because instead we have stealth fighters and aircraft carriers and surface-to-air missiles and tanks and laser-guided missiles and nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles and special forces.

We have a half-trillion-dollar-a-year professional military, the work of which we rarely see up close.

And we tell ourselves that we didn’t carpet bomb Vietnam. Our military did. Our government did. Our nation did.

Jesus’s literal words would imply that you get to stone people if you’re without sin, and I’ve heard people preach this. Please stop that. The point of what Jesus said to the rabbis was not you get to stone people if you’re without sin. His point was you’re all sinful. You don’t get to stone people. All of you. Even your mobs. Even your tribal fighting men. Even your Roman legion. Even your professional military. Even your Air Force. Even your Army. Even your Navy. Even your Marines. Even when it’s done under the authority and splendor of the star-spangled flag.

And even when your stones become F-22s. 

Goats

Today’s lesson is about the individual and the collective.

We live in an individualized, self-realizing, privatized Western world. It is how we organize our residences, our communities, our political rhetoric, our free time, our economics, our popular culture, our cultural mythologies, our western movies, the state of Texas, and even our theological categories like salvation and entry into the kingdom. One of the popular talking points of politics these days is “privatization”—moving traditional public sector functions to the private sector. We make the government to be separate and apart from ourselves and mostly like a kind of leach. I’m talking about the growth in libertarianism. Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, in the same vein, our rhetoric and theology about the “kingdom of God” has trended largely along the same lines. Salvation is mostly (1) a privatized thing and (2) a thing that becomes realized mostly when we die, with little to know regard to how we arrange our society. But let’s listen to Jesus.

In the same way that groups (or nations) cannot do what individuals cannot do, the nations must do what individuals also must do.

Jesus spent most of his three-year ministry in Galilee, but in Matthew c23-25, Jesus is in his final week of his ministry and is in Jerusalem, where we confess he was coronated king on a Roman cross. In that week, he relentlessly teaches about the coming destruction of Jerusalem, and he flavors that teaching with a series of parables about what his kingdom will be like. These teachings are a single thought. They cannot be divorced from each other, but must be read together. Otherwise, you will do what most modern Christians do, and that is apply them to post-mortem concerns when they aren’t about that at all.

This includes the famous parable of the sheep and the goats.

In that parable Jesus says that when the Son of Man (more on that below) comes in his glory (more on that below), he will gather all the nations before him.

(Don’t ignore that word)

Then he will separate them to his left and right. The ones he places on his right (the sheep) will be those who provide for the poor, provide for the sick, and treat prisoners and foreigners (think immigrants) with compassion. Those are the nations who inherit from Heaven “the Kingdom that was prepared since the creation of the world.” They will live as God wanted people to live from day one in the garden and will never be destroyed.

But those nations on the left (the goats) don’t provide for the poor, don’t provide for the sick, don’t treat prisoners with compassion, and make life miserable for the immigrant. They are the ones who scoff at the poor. Who say “in America there is no excuse to be poor”. Who say, “they just don’t work hard enough.” Who buy into every scary idea of brown people from across the border. Who embrace in churches the teachings of the atheist, Ayn Rand. They are consigned for what Jesus calls the “eternal fire.”

You need to not miss that Jesus spends the final week of his life talking about the nations.

When Jesus teaches this parable, he had just talked in great detail about the inevitable destruction of Jerusalem. He had just finished explaining how Jerusalem had not embraced the way of the kingdom he had described. And he tells them sternly, “How will you escape being condemned to Gehenna?” (Gehenna is a valley to the south of Jerusalem. We translate that word “Hell.”)

But what about the timing of all of this? When will this happen? Jesus said that it would happen when the Son of Man “comes in his glory.” When is that? Unfortunately, most moderns understand this to mean sometime in the future when Jesus comes back to the earth. That is not what he meant. In fact, “the Son of Man coming in his glory” has already happened, specifically about two thousand year ago.

I know this because Jesus plainly said so. In the very next chapter of Matthew, we read this:

Then the high priest said to him, “I put you under oath before the living God, tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God.”

Jesus said to him, “You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

Matthew c26

So when are the sheep being separated from the goats? Right then. Literally right in front of Caiaphas! Not way off in the future. Not when we all die and float up into the clouds or something (I hate writing crap like that). But right there in front of the Sanhedrin.

And wouldn’t you know it? Within one generation it happened exactly as Rabbi Yeshua had predicted. Jerusalem persisted in everything Jesus had warned and against and in AD 70 was burned in the “eternal fire” and its dead were burned up in the valley Gehenna (“Hell”).

And Rome came to an end too.

So what does this mean? The parable of the sheep and the goats isn’t about what happens to your soul for eternity. It’s about the world—the whole world—being made in the image of Jesus. Further, with regard to the things that don’t look like Jesus, they end and always will.

The Son of Man

And my point just keeps going.

The “Son of Man” was by far Jesus’s favorite self designation. He identifies himself that way more than eighty times, of course the most dramatic of them occurring during his trial in front of the High Priest Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin. The phrase “the Son of Man” (“ben-adam“) first appears in the Old Testament prophetic books of Daniel and Ezekiel.

It’s a loaded political phrase.

So when Jesus uses it, he is channeling political thoughts. In other words, in those words you learn (or should learn) quite a lot about his intentions for the world. Let me explain.

In the Old Testament book of Daniel, we read that Daniel has a series of wild dreams (the writer of Revelation borrows the images of these dreams to talk about the beastly Roman empire).

In the dream Daniel sees a succession of animals that each represent one of the successive world empires. Each of these empire enforce their will upon the peoples of the earth, to the suffering of all. Then, after the animal is a something that’s not even really an animal but is really just a freakish “beast”, really the summation of all the empires. These are the Babylonians, the Medes, the Persians, the Greeks, and ultimately the most beastly of all—the Roman Empire. The image of a beast is used because the characteristics of these empires are not humane. They are the antithesis of human flourishing and wellbeing.

Then Daniel sees “one like a Son of Man.”

(oh yes, you know who this is)

He is brought up from the earth before the throne of God and given authority over all the kingdoms of the world.

I saw one like a Son of Man
coming with the clouds of heaven.
And he came to God
and was presented before him.
To him was given dominion
and glory and kingship,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
that shall not pass away,
and his kingship is one
that shall never be destroyed.

This is the literary tradition that Jesus is channeling in his final week in Jerusalem as he pleads with the city to abandon its hellbent march to destruction. This is what’s behind the parable of the sheep and the goats. This is what’s happening in front of Caiaphas. This is what’s happening on the cross.

Jesus is becoming king of things. All the governments are to serve Jesus now. They are to be like him.

One of the more popular ideas in the modern American Christian imagination is the idea that taking care of the poor is the work of churches and individuals but is not the work of the government.

But notice what’s really happening in this rhetoric. Think how happy Caesar would be with this. It’s the same thing we’ve been talking about this whole time. The American theology of “individual responsibility” is a kind of theology in which Jesus’s teaching effectively applies to what we do individually but not to how we collectively organize the resources of nation.

In the American theology of “individual responsibility”, Jesus is the Son of Man over our soul but not over anything else.

(not surprisingly, the American Evangelical South is where you will find the highest rates of poverty, the worst health, the highest rates of teen pregnancy, the highest abortion rates, the most racism, the most illiteracy, the least progress, the most high school drop outs, and so )

Am I abdicating individual responsibility?

No.

Christ is King over me.

But Christ is not just King over my soul and Christ is not just the Secretary of Afterlife Affairs.

Christ is King over all.

All things are subject to Christ the King. We will be judged for what we do individually and our nation will be judged for what our nation does as a nation.

Whether our nation flourishes as the Kingdom of Jesus will depend on four things:

How did we treat the poor?

How did we treat the sick?

How did we treat the prisoner?

How did we treat the immigrant?

I’m bound by the Sermon on the Mount, my church is bound by the Sermon on the Mount, my nation is bound by the Sermon on the Mount, and my government is bound by the Sermon on the Mount.

It’s not one or the other.

It’s not either the church is to take care of the poor or the government is to take care of the poor. It’s not the church is subject to Christ but the government and our national economy is not.

Everything is subject to Christ.

When you tell me that Christ is king of our souls but not over the way we arrange the resources of our society, I have to ask you WHAT PART OF “CHRIST IS KING OVER ALL” DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?

“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 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