Love your enemies part IV

Hopefully this will be the last installment in this series I started without thinking about it…

One of the things I learned most deeply from NT Wright (who does not see Jesus as a pacifist) was about the actual historical environment of Jesus and Paul.  I’ll quote him extensively here to try to convey the historical picture that I’ve learned to interpret Jesus in. The following is from The New Testament and the People of God

After the Hasmonean regime came to power, “Some opposed it bitterly and, as we shall see, set up alternative communites. Some stuck it out, but grumbled and tried to reform from within. Others played the power game to win. Most Jews–the ones who wrote no literature, led no marches, had no voice–struggled to maintain their livelihood and their loyalty and their allegiance to national and cultural symbols, as best they could, always under the social pressurs of warring theologies. It was this pluriform response to the ambiguities of the second century BC that created the pluriform Judaism known by Jesus and Paul. 159

[The Romans] managed to make matters still worse by ruling (so it seemed to most Jews) with an insensitive arrogance that constantly bordered on provocation to rebellion.

The rigorists saw the new Temple as thoroughly ambiguous, and never accepted any of Herod’s successors as the genuine heaven-sent leader for whom some of them persisted in waiting. This rejection of Herod and his ways found various expressions, which we shall study presently. A mood of revolt was not far below the surface, and emerge particularly upon Herod’s death in 4 BC.

Revolution remained in the air during the early years of the new century, after the revolt led by Judas the Galilean in AD 6, Rome deemed it safer to make Judea a province in its own right. 160

By the middle of the first century BC the problem of brigandage had become so acute, helped no doubt by the power vacuum while Rome was occupied with civil war and the threat from PArthia, that it was a major achievement to bring it under some sort of control, albeit temporary.

But it was between the death of Herod the Great and the destruction of Jerusalem (4 BC to AD 70) that movements of revolts came to a head, creating problems for governments at the time and headaches for scholars two millenia later. That there was widespread disaffection and readiness to revolt in this period is not in question. 171

The flurry of rebellions in 4BC was clearly occasioned by the proximity, and then the fact, of Herod’s death, which allowed the persistent hope for a new order of things to come to the surface. This illustrates one main principle of Jewish revolt: the seething unrest which was normally held down tightly by repressive government and brute force could boil over when a power vacuum appeared. It is, in addition, significant for the whole story that several such movements often took place specifically at times of festival, when Jews were thronging Jerusalem to celebrate their [God]-given status as free people.

Another main principle, which of course overlaps with this, was that under certain circumstances provocation by those in power could become so acute that revolt would follow, whether or not it appeared to have a chance of success. 173

Further outlining of Jesus’ context comes from John Howard Yoder, in The Original Revolution:

Time has not changed as much as some think. In any situation of social conflict and oppression there are a limited number of possible strategies. Born a displaced person in a country under foreign occupation and puppet governments, Jesus faced the same logical options faced in 1778 by a Pennsylvanian, or in 1958 by an Algerian, or today by a Vietnamese or a Guatemalan… .

One way to begin, which was open to Jesus as it is today, was that of realism; to begin by accepting the situation as it really was…. . A brand new start is not an available option; we must save what we can by aiming at what is possible. This was in Jesus’ age the strategy of the Herodians and the Sadducees. These were not, as a superficial reading of the Gospel might make one think, nasty and scheming people; they were intelligent leaders following a responsible strategy. Their concern was to do the best one could do in the situation… . They were working for justice and change, and not at all without effect… . But of course, in order to change it, they accepted and directly sanctioned the social system of Roman occupation under which they lived, and from which they profited.

But for Jesus, the strategy of “infiltrating the establishment” was not a temptation at all. Of the four available options, it was the only one which never could have come to His mind. This party was against Him from the beginning; in fact, from the time of His birth.

The clearest alternative to the establishment path was that of righteous revolutionary violence. It was presented in Jesus’ time by the underground political and military group called the Zealots, men in the heritage of Joshua and the Maccabees, for whom the “zeal of the Lord” was to express itself in holy warfare against the infidel Romans.

This Zealot option represented a real possibility, in fact, a real temptation for Jesus. It was this possibility to which He was particularly drawn in His debate with the tempter in the desert at His baptism, and again at His last trial in Gethsemane… . He was perceived by some of His followers, and by the Herodians and Sadducees, as the nearest thing to a Zealot, and executed by the Romans on the grounds that He was one. He used their language, took sides with the poor as they did, condemned the same evils they did, created a disciplined community of committed followers as they did, prepared as they did to die for the divine cause.

A third logical possibility available to Jesus was the desert. He could withdraw from the tension and the conflicts of the urban center where government and commerce constantly polluted even the most well-intentioned son of the law, seeking to find a place where He could be pure and perfectly faithful.

But Jesus, although His home was a village, found no hearing there, and left village there behind Him. He forsook His own handicraft and called His disciples away from their nets and their plows. He set out quite openly and consciously for the city and the conflict which was sure to encounter Him there.

There is yet a fourth possibility which, like the first, lay close on the path of Jesus. This was the option of “proper religion,” represented in His society by the Pharisees. The Pharisees lived in the middle of urban society, yet they sought, like the desert sects, to keep themselves pure and separate… .

So it is in our day; there are many who feel that it is both possible and desirable to distinguish by a clear line the “spiritual” or the “moral” issues, to which religion properly speaks, from “social” and “political” issues, which are not the business of religion. The theme of “revolution” in our society is the prime example of what is no the Christian’s concern.

But the separation is really not that clean. To avoid revolution means to take the side of the establishment… . So it comes as no surprised to be reminded that in the cause of Jesus, the Pharisees as well, although deep moral and theological differences separated them from the Herodians and the Sadducees, finally did make common cause with them in the crucifixion because Jesus threatened their position of non-involvement.

But what is Jesus to do if He rejects at the same time the established order of the Herodians and the holy, violent revolution with which the Zealots sought to change that order: both the outward emigration of the Essenes and the inward emigration of the Pharisees?

This is the original revolution; the creation of a distinct community with its own deviant set of values and its coherent way of incarnating them. Today it might be called and underground movement, or a political party, or an infiltration team, or a cell movement. The sociologists would call it an intentional community.

At the heart of all this novelty… is what Jesus did about the fundamental human temptation: power… . Jesus not only thought of Himself as doing somehow the work of [Isaiah's] chosen “Servant”; He also saw this as His disciples’ way.

Jesus did not bring to faithful Israel any corrected ritual or any new theories about the being of God. He brought them a new peoplehood and a new way of living together. 18-31

In this context, when Jesus says to Israel that she is a nation called to be a light to the nations, that she should love her enemies, that she should not resist evil persons (like those Roman soldiers who demand they carry loads), that she is not to be like the Gentile magistrates (called “Benefactors”) who dominate their subjects but instead are to serve one another, and that when she condemned him she enacted the fact that she did not know “the things which make for peace” (Luke 19:42), inclines me to think that Jesus was not just presenting an interpersonal ethic. Jesus was presenting a different political ethic, an ethic where violent judgment was turned upside down into non-violent service; Jesus was creating a new nation, a new society, a new human race even, that lived differently, not simply changing some things in an otherwise structurally unchanged society ( with “church,” “family,” and the “state”). And furthermore, he called his disciples to bring all people into this new nation (Matt. 28); all people were now called to live they way of Christ, and stood condemned if they refused (John 3).

So, it seems to me, the historical context of Christ’s words, far from providing the needed qualification to avoid the pacifist reading of the Sermon the Mount, strongly rules it out.

Post Script:

Another point which I think comes out more clearly in light of the historical context of Jesus’ ethic is that what Jesus is primarily prohibiting is killing one’s enemies and what he is primarily commending is a lifestyle of generosity towards those who hate us. I think for this reason that while killing is always prohibited, some forms of force are perhaps not; Jesus was not envisioning, in his context, “violence” such as spanking children, pushing a rapist off of a victim in the act of rape, or perhaps even non-murderous self-defense in the event of a mugging (there would need to be careful qualifications about this…), for example. At least, I don’t think one can establish from Jesus’ commands, or his context, that he would have intended such a prohibition. The primary context of these commands is the temptation to violent political action, i.e. to kill people in the name of political justice, and they must be interpreted in that light and not forced to go beyond it.