Curtains of Fire: Religious Identity and Emerging Conflicts
5. The Politics of Yahweh, Jesus, and the Spirit: Beyond Holy War to a Holy Peace
A survey of the scriptures of Jews, Christians and Muslims reveals that many stories and themes of those scriptures are about religio-political conflict, conquest, ethnocentric nation building and competition between deities. A history of these three religions' relationships to each other through various empires and peoples will reveal the same. Therefore, a faithful response to current religious conflict requires more of a focus on the behavior of empires (as triadic entities) than a focus on interfaith dialogue or religious beliefs. It has been shown that the aggression by, or changes in, elements of the triadic alliance of political, ethno/cultural and religious powers has generated emerging conflicts. Following is an exploration of a Christian response to the age-old role of religion in conflict and the identity of peoples.
As we explore Christian scriptures we find the power of faith transforming broken relationships through a creative disassociation from the triadic powers of empire. This faith is rooted in the alternate allegiance to the Reign of God: first called for in the people of Israel in allegiance to Yahweh; then demonstrated in Jesus Christ by the Reign of God he inaugurated; and finally lived out in the church empowered by the Holy Spirit. This position of transforming disassociation has been taken by the prophets throughout history in their willingness to speak God's truth without fear while maintaining relationships to the kings, the peoples and the religious leaders.
5.1 The Politics Of Yahweh: No Other God, No Other King, You Are My People
A very jealous God chose the people of Israel and they were repeatedly reminded of that throughout their history. Through various trials and judgements the people were called to have no other god before Yahweh, and to have Yahweh as their king (Isaiah 43:15). On these two foundations they became a chosen people, called to be a light to the nations in the history of nations. In being that light they were called to a radical monotheism and a radical allegiance to Yaweh above other kings. As noted by Millard Lind in his book Yahweh is a Warrior:
The central issue of Israel's self-understanding was Yahweh's relation to history through Torah and prophetic word, as brought into tension with Near Eastern myth where the gods were related to history through the coercive structures of kingship law and military power. This tension between 'the prophetic structure' of Israel and the 'kingship structures' of her neighbors is not only intrinsically evident in much of Israel's literature, but specifically stated in that literature (Lind, p.32).
This prophetic stance continually called for a creative disassociation from the triad of powers both within and outside the people of Israel. The prophetic call to shun idolatry therefore had both political and religious results and cannot be viewed only as a personal or spiritual matter.
Because of the power of faith in Yahweh, the people of Israel maintained an active stance of faithful engagement with "the other" from a position of creative disassociation from control by those powers. This happened even when they were defeated politically. This creative engagement with the religious, ethnic and political other is described well by John Howard Yoder:
The stories of Joseph, and Daniel and Mordecai are all stories of radical changes of social structures. By no stretching of the imagination could the Jews, with their radical rejection of the cultic unity of the pagan empire, be considered as morally supporting the existing system even after they had saved it. The ongoing presence of liberation is the counter cultural community with its radically different God and Torah (Yoder, 1989, p.82).
The prophet Elisha took this stance and walked through the curtains of fire around him to creatively engage the other. Soon after healing an enemy Syrian military commander of his leprosy, and hearing of the repentant spirit in which that commander would afterwards participate in his own state cult (II Kings 5: 18), the Israelite prophet Elisha went to Damascus to visit ailing king Ben-hadad of Aram, Israel's main enemy of the time. Speaking to Hazael, who would be the next king of Aram in Damascus, Elisha "fixed his eyes and stared at him, until he was ashamed. Then the man of God wept. Hazael asked, ´Why does my lord weep?' He answered, ´Because I know the evil that you will do the people of Israel; you will set their fortresses on fire, you will kill their young men, with the sword, dash in pieces their little ones, and rip up their pregnant women'. " (II Kings 8:11,12 NRSV).
5.2 The Politics of Jesus: The Gentle War of the Lamb
At the time of Jesus, conflicts based on the prevalent religio-political structures were the assumption of human existence. The Roman Empire and its gods were seen to be more powerful than the Jews and their God. Various Roman rulers chose to demonstrate this graphically by desecrating the temple in Jerusalem and crucifying thousands of Jewish rebels over the years of their occupation.
The very name, the Lord Jesus Christ, reflects a threefold identity: Lord was a royal title, Jesus was the name Joshua and means "God saves his people," and Christ means "the anointed one," which was a conferral of religious blessing.
In the gospel of Matthew, the baptismal blessing of Jesus by God, "You are my Son the beloved; with you I am well pleased," (Matthew 3:17) intentionally merges the themes of enthronement of a king (Psalms 2:7) and suffering servanthood (Isaiah 42:1b) to indicate the coming of a new kind of king. Immediately following his baptism, Jesus faced a threefold temptation. The temptations tested him with: (1) an easy way to get a people to follow him by being offered the power to turn stones into bread; (2) an easy way to get political power by being offered all the kingdoms of the world through idolatry; and (3) an easy way to get religious authority by performing a miracle at the temple (Yoder, Politics of Jesus, p.30).
Just as the triad of these powers met at Jesus' temptation, they also met at his cross. The same powers that tempted him were the powers that crucified him:
- The people cried out against Jesus, "crucify him, crucify him!" when he proved not to be the military messiah they thought they had triumphantly welcomed into Jerusalem the week before. They could have been any people impatient for a revolution to save themselves.
- Roman imperial forces just did whatever they needed to keep the order that would maintain their occupying presence, and agreed without much reflection to execute Jesus. Pontius Pilate could have been any political leader saving the stability and peace of his rule.
- The religious leaders of Jerusalem accused him of blasphemy, and acting in their own interests were willing to sacrifice this one for the peace of their whole community when they met to judge him. They could have been the leaders of any religious community saving their religious structures and positions by sacrificing the truth in another.
The awareness that any of us could have been any of these persons is the confession that all of us have sinned. Our primal instinct is to save ourselves by saving our people, saving our politically or militarily arranged peace, and saving our religious structures. The message of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is that God saves us. We cannot save ourselves. Truly, Christ is our peace. Faith calls us away from the sin of associating our salvation with our own efforts. Transforming disassociation is being free in faith from the fears that would bind us to the triadic powers of empire, free to reconcile with and know the other as also created in the image of God.
Followers of Jesus Christ must continually realize that the motive power for a life of transforming disassociation and witness comes through a love flowing from forgiveness. We cannot by our own efforts overcome the fear generated by the other, whether they are a political enemy, ethnically different or of another religion. In the words of Stanley Hauerwas:
This love that is characteristic of God's kingdom is possible only for a forgiven people -- a people who have learned not to fear one another. For love is the nonviolent apprehension of the other as other. But to see the other as other is frightening, because to the extent others are other they challenge my way of being. Only when my self -- my character -- has been formed by God's love, do I know I have no reason to fear the other (Hauerwas, p. 91).
It is only from a "nonviolent apprehension of the other" that we can begin to engage the religious other in a non-threatening way. This position creates space between us, welcoming a dialogue that becomes the truest witness to the Spirit of Christ. Such a dialogue becomes witness as we encounter the other in a way that makes space for justice, peace, mercy and truth to meet (see Lederach, p.12 ff.).
5.3 The Politics of the Spirit: Expanding the Circle of Love
The book of Acts is a geographical and theological reversal and transformation through redemptive suffering of the triadic structures of its day. The reversal was geographical, as the Spirit's movement of salvation and transformation went from the religious center of Jerusalem, to the various ethnic groups beyond the Jews, and finally to the political heart of the empire, Rome. It was theological, as the Reign of God inaugurated in Jesus Christ's redemptive suffering was replicated in lives of individuals redeemed from the old way to join the new way, in relations between peoples as dividing walls of hostility were broken down, and in the constant proclamation of the Lordship of Jesus Christ that incessantly relativized the authority of all other political powers. The necessary loyalty to the claims of religious authority, ethnicity and empire was then relativized by the claims of Jesus Christ.
In these three movements the idolatries of the unrepentant self (Acts 2), exclusive ethnicity (Acts 10) and an oppressive, imperial politic (Acts 28) were challenged in the power of the Spirit:
- In Acts 2, the first Spirit-filled apostles were found preaching in the temple in Jerusalem. Though they were persecuted by the religious leaders, thousands believed as the first church was established.
- In Acts 10 and following, the apostles then went to the peoples of the world in love, walking through the dividing walls of hostility Christ had already broken down. The apostles were also persecuted by the leaders of these peoples for challenging their gods and the "peace of their cities."
- In Acts 28, the apostle Paul -- who was a Jew of Jews, born among "the nations" in Tarsus and a Roman citizen -- was joyfully taken captive and led to witness in the heart of imperial Rome. The message was the foolish word that Jesus, this crucified would-be messiah, was the messiah and is Lord. (I Cor. 1:18-31) He lived in Rome "two whole years at his own expense and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance" (Acts 28:30,31).
The Spirit created a new people not bound to the triadic structures of their day, but free to move through those structures with a life giving and reconciling message. All this was done in the peaceful way of Christ by the power of the Spirit. This politics of the Spirit is still called for by contemporary leaders of the church of Antioch--where people of the Way were first called Christians. Metropolitan Georges Khodr of the Greek Orthodox Church in Mount Lebanon calls on the Western church to learn from his church's life with Islam:
An infinite patience, that internal liberty which the Fathers called paptheia, is therefore called for in order to prevent the present resurgence of Islam traumatizing us to the point where we begin to covet a new kind of Crusade. All Crusades, whatever their expression, cannot but resurrect the spirit of Frankish Christianity with its fundamental theology which is certainly a rupture with ancient Christianity. Resurrection comes about only in the suffering face of Christ. There is no other theophany than that of the Cross. For this reason, the Promethean, arrogant and aggressive Christian is unable to help the Christians who live in the lands of Islam. ... Evangelical meekness is a source of freedom, even though it may lead to death. Yet it is the type of armor the Lord wants us to put on (Khodr, p.20).
Have Judaism and Islam met any Christians encountering them in "evangelical meekness?" The Byzantine Empire, the Crusaders, the Russian imperial armies and the Western colonial powers all met Islam as religio-political and military entities and formed lasting and revolting images. Judaism met the Inquisition, Protestant Europe's Anti-Semitism, the pogroms of Europe and finally the Nazi holocaust as agents of their extinction. All these faces of the imperial, mostly-Christian world were attempts by religio-political powers to save themselves or project their power.
The writer Nikos Kazantzakis was persona non-grata to his own Greek Orthodox Church for his critiques of the excesses of imperial Christianity captured in these words of a character in his book The Fratricides:
You asked me who I am: I'll tell you everything in a little while; I'm anxious to get to the point. I was a deacon to a bishop; I was educated, aiming for a bishopric myself. But I saw too many things--my mind opened, I understood. The word of Christ has been degraded, His message upon earth has faded; we only follow the footprints that Satan's feet leave on the mud--Christ's words have been reversed:
Blessed are the deceivers in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the violent, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after injustice.
Blessed are the unmerciful.
Blessed are the impure of heart.
Blessed are the warmakers
(Kazantzakis, quoted in Calian p. 89)
Here a dissenter from ´symphonia' sees that a whole people's religious identity has been corrupted into the lie of redemptive violence. For redemptive violence kills the other to save something of interest to ourselves, our empire or our faith. But, redemptive living and suffering follows the true way of the Beatitudes and creates a community that requires no idolatry to hold it together.
The first eucharistic meal in human history was after a battle when the priest-king Melchizedek brought out bread and wine and blessed Abram with the first blessing in scriptures. This blessing focuses on God's saving action:
"Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth; And blessed be God Most High, who delivered your enemies into your hand" (Gen. 14:19,20 NRSV).
The longest continuously commemorated eucharistic meal -- the Jewish Passover Seder -- commemorates Yahweh's salvation of the people of Israel from their slavery in the empire of Egypt. The meal focuses on the actions of Yahweh, not on the efforts of the people.
The most remembered eucharistic meal was led by one who was expected to be a military messiah. But, during the Passover meal he declared that his body would be spent being broken like the bread and poured out for others like the wine, rather than spent in breaking others' bodies in moving toward some worldly victory. He would die for the sins of humanity rather than participating in them. This meal continues to be held in memory of Jesus' sacrifice.
The common message of these eucharistic meals is that God saves, God delivers salvation. The history of the eucharistic meal is a celebration of God's power to save us. The original space of reconciliation is at the altar of the eucharist where we see that only God can save us from our sins, from each other, and from our hatred and fears--there creating a new humanity. There is the place where the lamb who was slain continues to reign in the struggle to love.
