Jesus initiates a radical paradigm shift for humanity when he teaches and gives witness to the Community of God, sometimes translated as the Kingdom of God. Jesus’ Kingdom of God shifts humanity to communion, love, and creative healing power thus transforming the kingdom of Caesar’s domination, suffering, and violence. Unfortunately, institutional christianity hinders that transformation. For example, it prioritizes a personal need to be saved – which Jesus never taught, while it ignores the social need to transform – which Jesus routinely taught in the kingdom of God. There is one time Jesus’ teaching on the Kingdom of God is not ignored by institutional christianity. It happens this Sunday when Jesus is speaking face to face with a member of the kingdom of Caesar, Pilate, and says to Pilate, “My kingdom does not belong to this world.”
Self-titled christians who support the kingdom of Caesar, sometimes murderously so, pay select attention to this sentence on the Kingdom of God. They think the sentence, when isolated and misinterpreted, provides them an excuse to support Caesar’s murderous kingdom because, they claim, Jesus’ “kingdom does not belong to this world.” They claim Jesus’ kingdom is a heavenly entity available to us only after we die. But the claim proves their ignorance of Jesus’ full teaching on the kingdom of God. Jesus is always teaching that his kingdom is an earthly entity, present now, in the world; a mustard seed, leaven, a treasure, a net, within you,… Jesus continues with that decidedly earthly meaning with Pilate. He begins by telling Pilate, “If my kingdom did belong to this world, my attendants would be fighting.” “this world” means Caesar’s murderous world, Pilate’s murderous world. It is their fighting world that is, in that very moment, in the process of murdering Jesus. Jesus is telling the fighting and murderous Pilate in their face to face encounter that his disciples reject Pilate’s murderous kingdom. Jesus specifically says his disciples are not to fight. A willfully ignorant interpretation ignores Jesus’ teaching against fighting. It ignores the fact that Jesus is speaking as a political prisoner held by the emperor’s underling who is in the process of carrying out the empire’s execution of him. Thus, when Jesus says, “My Kingdom does not belong to this world,” he is speaking of Militarism’s violent world. He was not denying the Community of God’s earthly existence as a powerful peacemaking world. That Jesus’ disciples do not “fight” as Caesar’s followers do exemplifies the difference between murderous kingdoms of Caesar here on earth and Jesus’ peaceful Community of God here on earth.
Jesus did not fight and kill people – that Gospel truth cannot be willfully ignored. Jesus routinely healed people – that Gospel truth also cannot be willfully ignored. To be Christian / Christ-like is to be a peacemaker. When self-titled Christians, especially U.S. politicians, promote fighting enemies like ISIS while they deny healing opportunities for refugees, like Syrian refugees fleeing ISIS, they prove they are not Christ-like. They prove they are Militarists, willfully fighting while willfully ignoring healing. The healing that is needed will not be easy. It will put us face to face with Militarists enforcing a murderous kingdom of Caesar.
Prayer: Spirit of Peace, may we be healing peacemakers when we engage with militarists.
Question: How have I feigned ignorance about Jesus’ nonviolence?
November 22, 2015 Gospel John 18:33b-37 Christ the King