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
