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Recovering the Politics of Jesus

Many Christians throughout history have tried to separate the Gospel as a matter of spiritual truth from the realm of earthly politics, yet there is little in what Christ said and did that does not have profound political implications for his followers. The more we understand about the world of first-century Palestine and the Roman empire into which Jesus was born, the more clear it becomes, in fact, that the New Testament was written as a subversive alternative political grammar for God’s people. Jesus tells his disciples they should be like an independent Greek city-state, like a polis on a hill (Matt 5:14). Paul’s chosen word for the church, ecclesia, did not originally mean a building of worship but a deliberative assembly, a political council-meeting concerned with the matters of community.1 “The difference between church and state or between a faithful and an unfaithful church,” John Howard Yoder writes, “is not that one is political and the other not, but that they are political in different ways.”2 Protestants since Martin Luther have often ignored or suppressed the politics of Jesus, declaring that salvation is a matter of being “born again” through a purely individual response “by faith” in Christ’s death. But we must recover the politics of Jesus as central to our understanding of the Gospel lest we fool ourselves into thinking we can be saved by faith in a Jesus whose life we have never encountered.

Life in the Occupied Territories

The world of first-century Palestine, against which the Gospel narratives are set and the meaning of Jesus’s life must finally be reckoned, was divided into two broad categories of people: the rich few and the poor many. The rich minority included: several high-priestly clans, who controlled the Temple in Jerusalem and exercised a monopoly over the economy of worship and sacrifice; the Herodians, who ruled Palestine at Rome’s behest and owned more than half of the land; and a small number of other land-owning Jewish aristocrats. These wealthy elites were bitterly resented by the rest of the population, which was comprised of some poor craftsmen, rural priests, farmers, fishermen, and others who managed a modest but tenuous existence, and a much larger number of day-laborers, subsistence farmers, and socially marginalized groups, who even in the best of times lived on the very edge of survival. It was into this broad class of poor people that Jesus, according to the Gospel of Luke, was born. At his dedication in Jerusalem, his parents could not afford to buy a lamb, the prescribed offering, and so sacrificed the poor people’s offering of two birds instead (Luke 2:24).

The poor majority—the peasant masses described as the “people of the land” in rabbinic literature—were heavily taxed by both secular and religious authorities. They were subjected to frequent exploitation and debt-bondage by state bureaucrats and wealthy creditors. They confronted a situation of increasing crime, family breakdown, environmental stress and untreatable diseases.3 And they bore the brunt of Rome’s degrading and brutal military occupation, which began in 63 BCE with Pompey desecrating the Holy of Holies and continued through 135 CE when Hadrian finally decimated Jerusalem once-and-for-all, forcing the surviving Jews into slavery or exile from which they would not regain control of Palestine until the twentieth century.4

The Romans did not normally send their legions to physically occupy conquered lands, ruling instead through efficient laws, economic pressure, and military bases strategically positioned as “deterrent forces” around the periphery of the empire.5 But in the always volatile region of Palestine, Roman legions were a constant presence in the role of foreign “peacekeepers.” Throughout Jesus’s life, Jews faced routine harassment, violence and humiliation by these Roman soldiers, including forced conscription as baggage porters, a problem Jesus directly addresses in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:41).

Especially galling for pious Jews was the way the pagan occupiers stamped the images and iconography of their imperial cult upon the Jewish landscape. The Law of Moses forbids visual representations not only of God, but of all living creatures.6 But Jewish religious sensibilities were continually being affronted by the presence of blasphemous imperial standards, votive shields, statues and other forms of artwork proclaiming Caesar’s victories and divine title: DIVI FILIUS—“son of god.” Roman imperial imagery across the Mediterranean world was often pornographically violent in nature, with conquered nations being depicted as violated women at the feet of the divine Caesar himself.7 The ultimate goal of imperial symbolism, however, was not simply to humiliate Rome’s defeated enemies but to integrate them as subjects of Roman patronage in a “civilized” world order. Jews had little choice, for example, but to use Roman coinage stamped with Caesar’s portrait and images of Roman gods and goddesses. Since possessing or even handling these coins was deeply problematic for strict commandment-keepers, devout Jews were daily forced to compromise their beliefs and collude with the pagan occupiers in order to survive.8 They were forced to barter their faith in order to participate in the marketplace of Rome’s new global economy.

Unsurprisingly, feelings of righteous anger, humiliation, and hatred were always boiling just beneath the surface. Under these circumstances, seemingly trivial but symbolically potent acts, such as the placement of Roman standards near the Temple in Jerusalem, could spark furious (and in the eyes of the Romans, fanatical) riots. These violent demonstrations sometimes led to pragmatic concessions from the authorities, whose official policy was one of tolerance for the Jewish religion. More often they were crushed by tactics of shock and awe—spectacles of overwhelming military might, of which public crucifixion was but one conspicuous example. Immediately after Herod the Great’s death—during Jesus’s infancy in either Egypt or Nazareth—Judean peasants rose up in a campaign of violent resistance against the Romans and their Jewish puppet regime. The result was over 2,000 insurgents being crucified outside Jerusalem.9

The idea that Jews in Jesus’s day were primarily concerned with matters of dogmatic theology, or that first-century Judaism stood for salvation by “works” as opposed to “faith,” N. T. Wright concludes, must therefore be rejected. “[T]he pressing needs of most Jews of the period had to do with liberation—from oppression, from debt, from Rome.”10 The burning question on people’s minds was: How will God act, in history, to save the Chosen People from their enemies, both within and without? One’s theological answer to this question revealed one’s political ideology, while one’s politics conversely revealed one’s theology. In first-century Palestine, the two were always and inseparably entwined. Between Herod the Great’s death in 4 BCE and the first destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Israel was convulsed by repeated religious revolts, violent messianic movements, political assassinations, insurgency and counter-insurgency warfare. In short, if we think about present-day Palestine, and the kinds of political paths that might tempt a poor but religiously devout Palestinian young man in the West Bank or Gaza Strip, we will not be far from understanding the historical reality that confronted Jesus, a young Jewish carpenter living in the occupied territories approximately two thousand years ago.

Collusion and Compromise: The Way of the Herodians

In his novel The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis imagines a Jesus whose greatest temptation is to get married, to settle down, to raise a family and experience a comfortable and conventional life into old age. There is little in the New Testament, though, to suggest that Jesus was ever strongly tempted by such a prosaic vision. What the Gospels do suggest is that Jesus was repeatedly tempted to embrace the agendas and tactics of several competing theological-political movements, each claiming to know how best to realize God’s kingdom on earth. The political significance of Jesus’s kingdom announcement emerges in sharp relief when we consider four rival kingdom programs or paths he might have chosen instead.

First, Jesus might have followed the path of pragmatism or “realism” represented by the Herodians and Sadducees. These political and religious authorities (successors to the dynastic line of Babylonian Jews known as the Hasmoneans) had no legitimate claim to rule other than having colluded with the foreign invaders. They administered Judea on Rome’s behalf and, like the Vichy government in occupied France, were viewed as traitors and collaborators by the rest of the population. Thomas Cahill describes them as a “gang of priest-pretenders” whose piety “was not so much suspect as nonexistent.”11 Yoder, however, offers a more nuanced reading. It is superficial, he argues, to dismiss the Herodians and Sadducees merely as scheming, morally bankrupt pawns of the Caesars. These were in fact intelligent planners, men who understood balances of power and the necessity of following a “responsible strategy.”12 Their moral assumption was that people needed to face up to “reality”: when you cannot achieve your ideals, you must learn to work within the realm of the possible, to form unpleasant alliances if necessary and to accept “dirty hands.” According to Josephus, the Sadducees believed in “free will,” which Wright interprets not as an abstract metaphysical claim but as the belief that God helps those who help themselves.13

In many ways, the Herodian approach to building God’s kingdom “worked.” Because of their willingness to collude with Rome, they managed to maintain the Temple in Jerusalem and to secure official recognition of the Jewish faith. It is the seeming effectiveness of the Herodian option, the way of “conscientious cooperation,” that makes it such a tempting path, in all ages, for individuals who want to act responsibly to change the world. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, Herodian “realism” was not realistic enough to save Israel from the impending cataclysm. Realism, as a secular political doctrine, asserts that humans are capable of calculating and balancing means and ends, tactics and goals, in proportional and effective ways. Biblical realism, however, declares that the pretensions of the hard-headed “realists” are in fact hopelessly naïve and idealistic; humans are unable to control or contain the outcomes of their choices, particularly when violence is involved.14 Further, by working for incremental change within the Roman system of coercion and violence, the Herodians lost their ability to challenge the system itself. They were easily co-opted as conservatives, as apologists for empire and the status quo.

But Jesus was not a defender of the status quo. Nor was Jesus co-opted by empire. In the story of his confrontation with Satan in the wilderness at the start of his public ministry—which, whether read literally or allegorically, clearly reveals the early Christian view of political power—Jesus rejects the path of political compromise, the way of collusion with the kingdoms and governments of this world. In the Lukan version of the story, Satan shows Christ “all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time” and tells him that “all this domain and its glory” “has been handed over to me, and I give it to whomever I wish” (Luke 4:5–6). Jesus, amazingly, does not dispute Satan’s claim. The subversive implication, Jacques Ellul suggests, is that the devil is speaking the truth.15 All human systems of power and control, without exception, are seen as falling under the domain of the enemy. But Jesus, quoting from the book of Deuteronomy (4:8), declares that humans were made to serve God alone. The only escape from the imperialist-nationalist trap is for believers to pledge a radically different allegiance.

Sons of Light: The Way of the Essenes

The fact that disciples are called to a radically different allegiance than that of state, party, “civilization,” or empire has tempted many believers down another perilous path, a path that was also fully open to Jesus in first-century Palestine. At the opposite end of the political spectrum from Herodian pragmatism lies the path of quietism or sectarian withdrawal represented by the group known as the Essenes, whose stringent way of life came to light in 1947 when a Bedouin shepherd boy stumbled upon a library of papyrus scrolls in the caves of Qumran near the Dead Sea south of Jericho.

This sect of ultra-orthodox Jews sought to live totally apart from the entanglements of the world by forming isolated, self-supporting communities in the Judean desert. They developed an apocalyptic and remnant theology according to which they alone were the chosen “sons of light” called to resist the “sons of darkness” in fulfillment of Isa 40:3: “Clear the way for the Lord in the wilderness. Make smooth in the desert a highway for our God.” The Essenes saw themselves as the true heirs of historic Judaism and thus strove to maintain the Sabbath, and the dietary and purity laws of Moses in the face of what they perceived as rampant backsliding. God had providentially called their movement into existence, they believed, as the first phase in the restoration of Israel. They eagerly waited for the day when God’s two Messiahs (both a priestly Messiah and a Davidic King) would arrive to conquer Rome and punish all those lax Jews who had failed to keep the commandments properly.16

The Essenes thus held no love for the Roman occupiers, or for the politically and theologically compromised Herodians. Yet precisely because of the strong future orientation of their eschatology, the Essenes during Jesus’s lifetime did not participate in armed revolts or political agitation against the authorities; Herod was sufficiently pleased with their brand of sectarian withdrawal to grant them a special exemption from the oath of loyalty to himself.17 What shrewd politician, after all, would seriously mind a community like that of the Essenes? Instead of revolutionary action in the name of divine justice, here was a group of people marked by their punctilious Bible study in remote caves, their strange but harmless calculations from prophecy of when the Messiahs would appear and by the fact that they held common meals together. The Essenes’ withdrawal from social and political concerns in the name of religious purity was, ironically, its own brand of collusion with the political establishment. Silence and withdrawal, we find, are themselves highly political acts, often with devastating consequences for others.18

While the Essenes excluded all non-members—all those “sons of darkness”—from their table fellowship, Jesus, however, provoked scandal by freely associating with sinners and hosting meals for tax collectors. Jesus’s path was not the path of retreat into the desert in the name of maintaining personal or communal purity—a choice that would have allowed the principalities and powers in Jerusalem to continue on with business as usual. Instead, Yoder writes, Jesus “set out quite openly and consciously for the city and the conflict which was sure to encounter him there.”19 Central to Jesus’s kingdom announcement—which must be seen in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets who condemned the injustices and violence of Israel’s rulers, and who suffered ridicule and martyrdom as a result—was the message that God does not desire ritual piety or scrupulous law-keeping but a people committed to acts of justice and mercy (Matt 9:13).

The Ghetto or the Sword: The Ways of the Pharisees

Somewhere between the sheer pragmatism of the Herodians and the sectarian withdrawal of the Essenes we find the ways of the Pharisees. The broad agenda of the Pharisees was close in many ways to that of the Essenes. They too despised the religious-political compromisers, as much if not more than their pagan overlords, and they struggled to preserve Jewish identity in the face of imperial pressure. But while the Essenes proclaimed, in effect, “Just wait: God will bring about Israel’s liberation in his own time,” the Pharisees, like the Herodians, were prepared to take a more active and urban role as political agents of God’s will.20 When God finally did intervene to restore Israel, the Pharisees maintained, he would restore the nation as a whole, not merely a sectarian elite sequestered in the Judean hinterlands.

The Pharisees divided into two major schools of political thought. The first, following the teachings of the Rabbi Hillel, sought to avoid direct confrontation with Rome, emphasizing instead the importance of Torah study, religious purity and political prudence. These Pharisees sought to strengthen Jewish piety with a view to resisting Roman oppression, but only when absolute essentials of the faith, “religious liberty issues,” were at stake. In the eyes of these guardians of “proper” religion, Jesus was a threat who needed to be eliminated not only because he played fast and loose with Sabbath, purity and dietary laws (Mark 2:23–28; 7:1–19), but because his band had all the hallmarks of a radical political movement that would soon attract the heavy hand of Rome (Luke 13:31). Better, they decided in council with the Sadducees (normally their bitter foes) on the Sanhedrin, Israel’s highest political body, that “one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish” (John 11:50).

Other Pharisees, however, did not shy so quickly from the prospect of a “clash of civilizations” between Israel and Rome. These individuals, drawing their inspiration from the teachings of the Rabbi Shammai, urged immediate and violent revolt against Rome in the pattern of Judas Maccabaeus, who had led a seemingly miraculous guerrilla uprising against the Syrian megalomaniac Antiochus Epiphanes in 164 BCE (the event still celebrated by Jews during the festival of Hannakuh). Where the Hillelites represented the way of respectable or proper Judaism—the way of Mishnah and ghetto—these latter Shammaite Pharisees stood for revolutionary zeal, the way of the sword. The Apostle Paul, before his conversion, appears to have been one such Shammaite, fully prepared to use violence to rid Israel of apostates and traitors.21

The revolutionary zeal of the Shammaites was especially appealing to marginalized Jews living outside of the major centers of power—rural people in “underdeveloped regions” like Galilee, who fueled the economic dynamism of the empire by providing cheap labor and raw goods for export.22 Fully half of Jesus’s disciples may have had strong zealot leanings, if not outright zealot commitments.23 Beyond what may be inferred from the disciples’ social backgrounds, there are clues scattered throughout the Gospels. James and John urge Jesus to rain destruction on a group of offending Samaritans (Luke 9:51–56). Peter, along with James and John, is prepared to violently resist Jesus’s arrest in Gethsemane (Luke 22:49). One or more of these three is armed with a sword and wounds a slave of the high priest (Matt 26:51–52). Simon is directly identified as a zealot (Mark 3:18). Some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that Judas Iscariot’s name contains a veiled allusion to the Sicarii, a band of urban intellectuals turned terrorist-assassins with dynastic links to Judas the Galilean, the failed messianic leader executed for sedition against Rome in 6 CE, whose sons were also crucified for their politics in the 40s.24

The fact that Jesus attracted individuals such as these, who harbored violent insurrectionist dreams, and who probably hoped that alignment with Jesus would help to realize them, as well as the fact that Jesus’s opponents could plausibly accuse him before Pilate of sedition against Rome, the legal charge on which he was finally crucified, points to the revolutionary nature of Jesus’s character and kingdom announcement. But while Jesus is repeatedly tempted in the Gospels to take up the sword—to launch a campaign of “just war” that will vindicate the Jewish faith once and for all—he steadfastly refuses the path of coercive power, the way of violence to establish God’s kingdom on earth (Matt 5:9, 38–48; 26:51–53; Luke 6:27; 22:50–53).25 Precisely because he is so deeply sympathetic with the insurgents, the religious freedom fighters, he is also in many ways most critically opposed to them.

But what path did Jesus take to build God’s kingdom? If not the way of the Herodians (calculation and compromise), the way of the Essenes (retreat into the desert), the way of the Hillelite Pharisees (Torah study and respectable religion), or the way of the zealots (violent revolution or “just war”), what other possible way? We have already begun to formulate a picture of Jesus’s politics by way of negation and contrast as: 1) demanding a radically different allegiance than that of nation, state, party or empire; 2) engaging rather than retreating from concerns of social justice; and 3) refusing the path of political violence and coercive power. But what made the Way of Jesus—the word used by the earliest Christians to describe their faith—a compelling message of good news for people living in a situation of crushing poverty and foreign military occupation?

The Politics of the Kingdom

Centuries before Jesus’s birth, Jewish apocalyptic writers struggled to understand the theological meaning of Israel’s exile in Babylon. They concluded, with paradoxical audacity, that pagan oppression was the result not of YHWH’s weakness but of his justice and strength: Israel was being punished by the Creator God for its failure to keep the covenant.26 Things would grow progressively worse, Jewish eschatology predicted, until a final, decisive moment when God would at last send a warrior-prince to restore his Chosen People to their rightful place among the nations. Jewish apocalyptic literature used cosmic and fantastic images to describe this future event, but Jewish hopes were firmly rooted in the realm of concrete, earthly politics. When God’s kingdom arrived, it would be plain for all to see by three material facts: 1) the Davidic monarchy would be restored in Jerusalem with unparalleled justice and prosperity; 2) the Temple would be rebuilt with unsurpassed splendor; and 3) the downtrodden Jews would emerge a triumphant superpower with their pagan enemies humiliated and defeated beneath them.

Jesus shared many of the basic assumptions of this traditional Jewish eschatology. He declared that oppression would increase before finally being overcome by God’s saving activity (Mark 13:7–13). He urged his disciples to be steadfast and courageous in the face of evil (Matt 10:16–42). And he taught them to pray not for a “spiritual” kingdom somewhere in the sky but for God’s kingdom to come “on earth as it is in heaven” (6:10). When Jesus talked about the kingdom, though, he did not talk about it in the future tense. Israel was still suffering under foreign oppression, economic injustice and religious corruption. But when Jesus talked about the kingdom he talked about it like it was going on then and there. He talked about it like it had already arrived. Even more shocking, the Gospel writers record, Jesus talked and acted like the kingdom was happening in him and through him. “But if I cast out demons by the finger of God,” Jesus said, “then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Luke 11:20).

Jesus’s kingdom announcement implied that conventional Jewish eschatology, with its vision of two successive historical ages, was either deeply flawed or had been gravely misread. Hebrew apocalyptic literature had depicted the coming of YHWH’s kingdom as a dramatic, earth-shattering event that would radically divide the old aeon from the new. But Jesus declared, against all of the seeming evidence, that the kingdom of God was an already present, in-breaking reality, manifest in his own life and program of miraculous healings, and best grasped through metaphors of secrecy, simplicity and subversion. The kingdom, Jesus said, is not like a conquering army but like a mustard seed that inexorably consumes the garden (Luke 13:19). It is like the yeast or leaven that invisibly causes bread to rise (Matt 13:38). It is like a pearl of great price hidden in a field so that only the passionate seeker will find it (Matt 13:46).

In first-century Palestine, anyone talking about “the kingdom” was, by this fact alone, treading on perilous political ground. Caesar Augustus had already staked out Rome’s exclusive claim to kingdom vocabulary, and the cult of the emperor brooked no rivals. Caesar was, according to one public inscription, “the beginning of all things”; “god manifest”; the “savior” of the world who “has fulfilled all the hopes of earlier times”; the one whose birthday “has been for the whole world the beginning of the good news (euangelion).”27 We should not be surprised, then, that Jesus encoded his kingdom politics in parables, metaphors, riddles, and cryptic sayings that did not explicitly defy Roman rule. But for those who had ears to hear, mustard seeds and pearls of great price were the rhetoric of a revolution. Jesus—the true Savior of the world—was calling for his followers to embody YHWH’s actual kingdom of compassion and justice as over and against Lord Caesar’s blasphemous parody. He was telling them to incarnate God’s reign in history by building a new kind of community—a countercultural “polis on a hill” (Matt 5:14)—that would stand in nonviolent but subversive opposition to all those forces responsible for grinding down the poor, the weak, the ritually unclean and sinners of every kind.

The fact that Jesus calls for his followers to incarnate or embody God’s kingdom as a social reality in the present does not contradict but defines and animates Christian hope in the Parousia as a future event in space-time. According to John Dominic Crossan, Jesus proclaimed a sapiential as opposed to apocalyptic eschatology. Sapientia is the Latin word for “wisdom,” and according to Crossan Jesus offered human beings “the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God’s power, rule, and dominion are evidently present . . . rather than a hope of life for the future” (my emphasis).28 But the Jesus of the New Testament—the only Jesus we know29—offers his disciples both a Way of living that manifests God’s kingdom in the midst of the present reality and a hope for the future that invests this Way with its power and meaning. It is precisely because of their confidence in the Parousia that believers are free to live out the dangerous and demanding politics of the Gospel. Conversely, it is only the social witness of believers that manifests Jesus’s life and lordship over history to a watching world. Absent such a witness, Martin Luther King Jr. saw, there can be no authentic Advent hope. “Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.”30

“The Favorable Year of the Lord”: Economic Justice

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus’s first action at the start of his public ministry is to enter the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth and read from the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor . . . to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord” (Luke 4:18–19). Only real debt-cancellation would have come as real good news for real poor people, Ched Meyers points out.31 When Jesus claims the “favorable year of the Lord” as central to his vocation he is therefore not assuming a “spiritual” as opposed to a political messianic role. He is, rather, directly alluding to a powerful vision of social justice contained in the Law of Moses that had been systematically suppressed and evaded by Israel’s ruling elites for hundred of years, an economic ethic that would have come as welcome news indeed to the impoverished and exploited peasant masses of Galilee and Judea.

The “favorable year of the Lord” in Luke-Isaiah, Andre Trocmé and John Yoder show, is the Sabbath year or year of Jubilee commanded by God in the Hebrew Bible (particularly in Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 15).32 Every seventh year, according to the Covenant, Israel was to enact a program of radical debt forgiveness, and in the fiftieth year land redistribution to benefit the poor. Among God’s people, there was to be a systematic leveling of wealth on a regular basis and dismantling of what we would today describe as oppressive financial and banking institutions designed to maximize profits for creditors. Jesus does not attempt to instate these Jubilee commandments in a rigid or programmatic way, but he does reclaim the basic principles, metaphors and imagery of the Sabbath Jubilee for his followers.33 He has more to say in the Gospels about issues of wealth and poverty than any other topic—and his message remains as challenging for those of us who live in affluent countries today as it was for the wealthy Herodians and Sadducees in first-century Palestine.

Against the assumptions of laissez-faire capitalism—which posits a world of unlimited human needs, individualism, and competitive rivalry for scarce resources—Jesus declares that we are stewards rather than owners of property, that God’s creation is abundant and our earthly needs limited, and that God’s liberation of Israel from slavery is normative for how we should treat the poor among us. His warnings against capital accumulation and “Lord Mammon” are unrelentingly severe (Matt 6:16–24; Mark 10:23–25). He tells his followers to live lives of dangerous generosity, giving and expecting nothing in return (Luke 6:30). He tells them to forgive each other’s debts (Matt 6:12), to not worry about their own material needs but to live out a lifestyle of trust and simplicity (6:25–34; 10:9–10). And he instructs them to actively pursue justice (23:23). Material care for the poor, the oppressed and the hungry, Jesus declares, is the primary mark of discipleship—and the only question at the final judgment (25:31–40).

Jesus’s radical economic teachings were epitomized among his early followers in the practice of “breaking bread,” which was not originally merely a rite of sacral liturgy or mystical symbolism but an actual meal embodying Jesus’s ethic of sharing in ordinary day-to-day existence.34 When the Holy Spirit is poured out at Pentecost in the book of Acts, the practical result is that believers voluntarily redistribute their property. “And all those who believed were together, and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need . . . breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart” (Acts 2:44–46). The Apostle Paul also emphasizes the socio-political nature of the Lord’s meal, delivering a blistering rebuke to those upper-class Corinthians who excluded poor believers from their table fellowship and sated their own stomachs while other members of the community went hungry (1 Cor 11:18–22).

“You Are All One in Christ”: Equality in the Body of Believers

We can begin to see, then, why Jesus’s message had such an electrifying effect on the impoverished and socially marginalized peasants of first-century Palestine who flocked to hear him speak—and why he so frightened and angered those guardians of public “order” for whom divisions of wealth and class were a useful rather than an oppressive reality. But Jesus challenged not only structures of economic injustice and inequality in first-century Palestine. He challenged patterns of social inequality, hierarchy and domination of every kind. In his treatment of women, of children, of Romans, of the ritually unclean and sinners of every stripe, Jesus repeatedly and provocatively overturned deeply ingrained cultural and religious assumptions about who was “first” and “last,” “above” and “below” in the eyes of God.

There is no place in God’s in-breaking kingdom, it turns out, for “great men” or “rulers” who “lord it over” others through the exercise of political or religious authority. Such, Jesus tells his disciples, is the way of the “Gentiles,” i.e., the pagan unbelievers and Romans occupiers. But among his followers, Jesus declares, “whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave” (Matt 20:25–28; Mark 10:43). Jesus goes so far as to command his followers to avoid using honorific titles of any kind, including the title of “leader.” The only title Jesus permits is an address of familial equality and solidarity: “brother” (Matt 23:6–10). In the polis of Jesus, the New Testament suggests, there simply are no individuals in positions of status or hierarchical control.

Instead of offices, the earliest Christian communities appear to have been ordered along quasi-familial lines and according to the idea of spiritual gifts, including gifts of teaching, preaching, and stewardship. Spiritual gifts are charismatic, functional, provisional, and divinely rather than humanly bestowed. They are not restricted to special classes, genders, or tribes; for “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ” (Gal 3:28).35 The most prominent functionaries in the early church, the “elders” or presbyteroi who helped to preside over the households where the early Christians gathered, were to lead by humble example rather than by “lording it over” the younger believers (1 Pet 5:1–3). The title of “priest” or hiereus (the root from which the English word “hierarchy” derives) is not applied to any particular Christian in the Gospels or Pauline corpus (although in Acts 6:7 we read that “a great many of the priests” in Jerusalem became “obedient to the faith,” and in Rom 15:16 Paul describes himself by way of metaphor as a minister who works “as a priest” presenting God with “my offering of the Gentiles”).36 Jesus is the only person who is described (in the book of Hebrews) as a priest for the church; but he is the final priest who makes all priesthood obsolete—not merely the performance of ritual sacrifice, but the office, pomp and circumstance of priestly authority and hierarchy itself. Instead of deferring to any caste of religious hierarchs, followers of the Way are thus now summoned to collectively be a “royal priesthood,” a “chosen race” or “holy nation” built not upon offices of any kind but upon transferred allegiance to God’s in-breaking “kingdom” (1 Pet 2:9; Rev 1:6).

“Do Not Resist an Evil Person”: Nonviolent Enemy Love

It was the fatal error of many Latin American liberation theologians to conclude from Jesus’s concern for economic justice and his summons to radical, non-hierarchical community formation that the Way of Jesus may be harmonized with the way of violent revolt against oppressive social, economic and political structures. But Jesus of Nazareth, unlike Judas the Galilean, taught his disciples to turn the other cheek, to put away their swords and to love their enemies as themselves. Perhaps the most important hallmark of the politics of Jesus lies in his teaching and example of nonviolent enemy love.

Jesus’s ethic of nonviolence finds its fullest statement in the Sermon on the Mount, which is presented in Matthew’s Gospel in a programmatic fashion as the new Torah, a definitive moral charter to guide the community of believers.37 Jesus does not seek to negate or overturn the Law of Moses with his own novel teaching but to reclaim the deepest meaning of the Law by intensifying and internalizing its demands. The Law forbids murder, Jesus forbids even anger. The Law forbids adultery, Jesus forbids even lust. When it comes to the matter of violence, though, Jesus may actually overturn the teaching of the Hebrew Bible. It is possible to read the Law of Moses as seeking to limit retribution, which would make Jesus’s absolute prohibition on revenge also an intensification of the earlier commandment. It is equally possible to read Jesus’s words as a decisive alteration, on this point and this point alone, of an earlier Jewish understanding.

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 evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also . . . 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 sons of your Father who is in heaven. (Matt 5:38–45)

As I wrote in chapter 1 of this volume: “The lex talionis—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—is spelled out in several passages in the Hebrew Bible but particularly in Deuteronomy 19. If in a criminal trial a witness gives a false testimony, the Law declares, that person must be severely punished in order to preserve the social order. ‘Thus you shall not show pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot’ (19:21). Political stability is the goal and fear is the mechanism by which it will be achieved. Jesus shatters this strict geometry, however, with a startling injunction: ‘Do not resist an evil person.’ This does not imply passive capitulation to violent people but physical non-retaliation as a dynamic and creative force in human relationships. By exemplifying the courage and forgiveness of the Beatitudes, the believer confounds and shames the aggressor, creating an opportunity for the hostile person to be reconciled with God. By absorbing undeserved suffering and not retaliating in kind, the disciple destroys the evil inherent in the logic of force. Instead of an endless cycle of bloodshed, fear and recrimination, there is shalom, there is peace.”

There is nothing sentimental, naïve, meek or mild about Jesus’s Way of dealing with enemies. When we recall the concrete historical realities of Roman occupation in first-century Palestine, the shocking and scandalous political implications of Jesus’s teaching of nonviolence immediately becomes clear. To grasp the forces now arrayed against Jesus and his fledgling kingdom movement we have only to imagine the fate that would befall a charismatic young man from a rural village in present day Iraq should he travel to Baghdad with a band of followers and begin publicly announcing that God, through him, was about to free the land from the yoke of foreign occupation—and that prominent imams and respected government officials were vipers and hypocrites—and that the insurgents should lay down their weapons and love their enemies as themselves. Subversive? Disturbing? Dangerous? Clearly. Yet this was precisely the path that Jesus followed in his perilous journey from Nazareth to Jerusalem.

Whether Jesus’s Way of nonviolent enemy love leads to an ethic of strict pacifism, as Yoder convincingly argues, or whether it allows for Christians to engage in what Glen Stassen calls “just peace-making” (preventive or “policing” actions that involve use of force in exceptional cases but remain sociologically and morally distinct from the calculus of war-making38), the presumption of the New Testament is therefore overwhelmingly against believers killing their fellow human beings for a “just cause,” whether as social revolutionaries (on the “Left”) or “just warriors” (on the “Right”). There is not one word in the New Testament to support Linda Damico’s claim that Jesus’s concern for the liberation of the poor led him to embrace “the violence of the oppressed.”39 We must ponder whether disciples can even legitimately serve as military chaplains insofar as chaplains are not allowed to fully proclaim Jesus’s teaching and example to soldiers but must, by the very terms of their entry into the military, ensure that “all efforts . . . maximize a positive impact on the military mission” and “enhance operational readiness and combat effectiveness.”40

The Things that Are Caesar’s

Against the above reading of Jesus’s kingdom announcement—as essentially subversive of political authority, involving concern for matters of economic justice and social equality and giving rise to a community of nonviolent nonconformity with power—some scholars have quoted Jesus’s aphorism, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17). According to Geza Vermes, the saying indicates that Jesus was not concerned with the burning political matters of his day but remained a wandering, apolitical sage who only accidentally and somewhat naïvely stumbled into conflict with the Jerusalem authorities.41 Did not Jesus also say “My kingdom is not of this world”?

Vermes’s reading of Jesus as apolitical rustic rabbi fails, however, to account for the historical and narrative contexts for Jesus’s words and actions in the Gospels. When Jesus says his kingdom is not of this world he does not mean that his kingdom has nothing to do with this world; he means that his kingdom does not derive its tactics, platform or goals from any of the competing political movements of his day, and particularly from the zealots: “If my kingdom were of this world my servants would fight . . . but my kingdom is not from here” (John 18:36 NKJV, emphasis mine). Nor is “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” an abstract teaching about the separation of political and religious matters. The aphorism is Jesus’s answer to a specific, historically-inscribed trap devised by a group of Pharisees and Herodians, whose goal is to force Jesus into one of their rival camps.