The First Christmas

I read Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan's latest book "The First Christmas" a couple of months ago. If you want to get a good feel for its important message, you can read this interview with Crossan about the book. Thanks to Mystical Seeker for posting the link on his blog.

I'm not a huge Christmas fan. The season largely misses the point. However, this Christmas was less commercial and less busy than usual. I didn't buy one single gift at a store. My wife and I gave Kiva.org gift certificates as presents to all our friends. I'm excited to see them put into action. I can only imagine the difference those micro-loans will make.

After a trip out of town to visit family, we were home for a quite Christmas. It was a good day for reflection, meditation, and a change of perspective.

The Great Divine Cleanup

What happens when an ancient group of people:

• believe God is all powerful
• believe God is just
• believe God favors them above others
• Live under the oppression of an empire and have no power to change the situation themselves

The answer is easy. These people would have to develop a theology about the divine correction of the injustice by God in what John Dominic Crossan calls “The Great Divine Cleanup of the World”. In his book “God and Empire”, Crossan details a clear and articulate picture of how 1st century Israel (including John the Baptist and Jesus) would have imagined and hoped for God’s plan of justice. I can't imagine any other scenario for these people. They had to believe this or else they had to imagine a different God.

This was not a new idea formed by either John or Jesus. Using different techniques, they both taught an already common understanding of the needed solution. This is NOT what the fundamentalist talk about today when they create those crazy books and video games about the dramatic end of the world. The original meaning of the great divine cleanup was a political shift in power that would leave the world in a better status for those oppressed people. One example of this common outlook is this excerpt from the Sibylline Oracles which was a document dating back to around or just prior to the time of Jesus’ birth:

“The earth will belong equally to all, undivided by walls or fences. It will then bear more abundant fruits spontaneously. Lives will be in common and wealth will have no division. For there will be no poor man there, no rich, and no tyrant, no slave. Further, no one will be either great or small anymore. No kings, no leaders. All will be on a par together" (Sibylline Oracles 2:319-24).

This isn’t a departure from the origins of Judaism. In fact it echoes the formation of Judaism as a community without a king because kings always become tyrants, with a commitment to the forgiveness of debt, and also included the rejection of the dominance created through generational wealth (50th year Jubilee). Israel was formed as a society in contrast to Egypt and its oppressive pharaoh. Throughout the Torah, the Great Prophets, and the NT, Israel desired a return to those first principles of a community of peace and justice.

“Jesus' Kingdom program was not just about politics or economics as distinct from theology. It combined religion, politics, and economics; it was about divine distributive justice; it was about the ownership of this world; it was about a theology of creation.” God and Empire - Crossan.

The value of this story lies in its meaning of justice. This is a contrast to our common view of retributive justice that seeks retribution for wrongs. Justice in God’s kingdom is distributive justice which means distributing resources to all as needed in a just manner. The model for distributive justice in their minds was the Jewish patriarchal view of fathers providing justly (not necessarily evenly) for their wife (or wives) and children.

Too often people look at these stories as if they were magical predictions of the future, but I think that is dangerous and often clouds the real meaning. Instead, we should let the story's truth shape our own vision for how the world could work and become motivated to fulfill our responsibility. The Kingdom of God is a present experience because as Jesus said, it is "inside us" which means it exists as a vision in our minds already. Instead of trying to guess when and where it may magically happen, we should be cultivating the collective vision and developing a plan to make the vision a physical reality. This means that anyone interesting in the Kingdom of God must also be interested in politics. Politics is the process of making our values public realities.

God and Empire

John Dominic Crossan has created a wonderful new book "God and Empire: Jesus against Rome, then and now". I was fortunate enough to hear Crossan speak in person for the first time in January and he gave a lecture that turned out to be a synopsis of this book. Crossan points out that a major shift in the study of New Testament theology is well underway thanks to the our more developed understanding of the Roman Imperial theology common in the first century. Crossan goes into detail about the archeological findings supporting the Roman mythological claims that Caesar Augustus was the son of god, lord, savior of the world, god of gods and bringer of peace. To claim that Jesus was any of these things was high treason and explains the brutal persecution of early Christians throughout the Empire.

In addition to setting Christianity as an opposing force to the Roman Empire, Crossan makes the case that the bible from start to finish is a radical political statement against the normalcy of civilization. In his eyes, civilization is not art, music, literature, and cuisine. Instead, the normalcy of civilization is imperialism, which can be translated as the use of force to extort and oppress others. It is hard to argue against Crossan. Everything we know about history supports this view of civilization and everything we've learned about Jesus tells us that he didn't buy into this violent approach.

The basic premise of the book is not that Rome was against peace. Instead, Rome was in favor of peace but their roadmap to peace was through war and sustained through oppressive taxation and violence. Augustus was seen as the one that saved the empire from the throws of civil war (hence the term savior of the world) and brought an unprecedented peace to the nations. The premise of this book is that the Romans (and all Empires before and after) sought peace through the method of violence but the vision of God is to create lasting peace through justice. This contrasts human retributive justice (punishment) v. God's distributive justice (sharing). That is where we come in. We have a choice about how we will fight for peace. Will we use violence or justice as our tool? The difference is dramatic because history is filled with examples of how peace obtained through violence is a temporary illusion. Not until we accept Jesus’ principles for peace through justice can we ever hope to achieve the sustainable peace intended by God.

Crossan doesn’t leave the present day application of this lesson up in the air. He boldly makes the claim that America is the new Rome. I agree.

Resurrection

I missed the importance of resurrection most of my life because I was too focused on stories about a physical resuscitation of the historical Jesus. I was taught that the reason for Easter was the need to muster up faith that the legends were historically accurate. What I missed was the idea that resurrection means the world rejected the message of Jesus and killed him but we still have hope that his vision of peace and justice can live again. This is shift from faith as belief or confidence that certain events happened as they were reported in this beautiful narrative toward faith as hope that Jesus’ vision could become a reality through our active decision to take part in making that happen.

Why is this shift in understanding important? Because our actions are deeply effected by our theology. Changing how we understand the resurrection is key to recognizing the kingdom of God as something that is here and now not simply a higher status in afterlife (heaven v. hell). Maybe I’m a little biased and maybe people that keep a literalistic view of this story can also come to value Jesus’ vision. I know people that are able to pull this off and I don’t mean to seem overly critical, but I am constantly voicing my opinion on this issue because I think it is the number one reason why people leave the Christian faith. It is also the most prominent reason that the vast majority of Christians make social and political decisions that counter Jesus’ vision. I hear people say:

“Justice is God’s business not ours. We should keep our faith out of politics. God brings his kingdom, not us.”

That is why I force this issue so much and why I think moderate and progressive Christians should be more outspoken within churches to change this misconception. In the new book “God and Empire”, John Dominic Crossan has this to say about how Jesus changes John the Baptists' view of the kingdom of God from a vision of something yet to come into a vision of something that is already present:

“You can speak forever about a future-imminence of the kingdom… But to claim an already-present Kingdom demands some evidence, and the only such that Jesus could have offered is this: it is not that we are waiting for God, but that God is waiting for us. The present Kingdom is a collaborative eschaton between the human and divine worlds. The Great Divine Cleanup is an interactive process with a present beginning in time and a future (short or long?) consummation. Would it happen without God? No. Would it happen without believers? No. To see the presence of the Kingdom of God, said Jesus, come, see how we live, and then live likewise.”

The vision of a kingdom of peace and justice is still alive. Easter is the celebration of this vision resurrected in the lives of those who dare to live it.