“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased” (Lk. 2:14).
Other than a few proper names, there is no word in my vocabulary more important to me than the word peace. I suppose it is because for a long time I lived without it. Anyone whose world has been stripped of peace knows just how much it’s worth.
But defining peace is nearly impossible. This is evident the moment you try to think of its opposite. There’s happy and there’s sad. There’s hope and despair. There’s joy and sorrow, good and evil, heaven and hell, dogs and devils I mean cats. But what is the opposite of peace? Is it war or is it worry? Is it Hostility? Restlessness? Angst? Anxiety? Fear? Bitterness? Hatred? Rage? Violence? Revenge? Discord? Division? Divorce? Chaos? Where is peace essentially located, or not? Is it in the heart or in relationships or in nations or between nations? Is it within or without? Is peace the natural state of affairs or do we, and does our world, default to its opposite, whatever that opposite may be at bottom?
Peace is such an all-encompassing word that there is no single word that can describe what it is like not to have it. Nor is it clear how to get it. There are no guaranteed paths that lead to peace, even though everyone is searching for it in one way or another, or perhaps running from its opposite, but there simply is no predictable profile of a person who has it or does not. We may have all been able to guess that Kurt Cobain struggled to find peace, but Robin Williams? Those at the top of the ladder are just as potentially bankrupt as those at the bottom.
Perhaps, then, there is no definitive opposite of peace to speak of, only its definitive absence. It is surely the case that no matter how many things a person might have, to have no peace is in a certain sense to havenothing. I do not mean tonot have anything but to have precisely nothing: an inescapable void right at the center of everything else, like the billions of stars in our galaxy that all have a supermassive black hole churning at the center. It is indeed the absence of peace that sets much of our world in motion, into commotion. Everyone is searching for its presence (or running from its absence) but more often than not search (or run) in vain. The absence of peace cannot be filled with any substitute presence any more than a black hole can be filled with starlight. It’s like the absence of a person. The only thing that can fill the absence of a person is that same person’s presence. There is no replacement for peace.
In the Bible the absence of peace is, in fact, a personal matter. There is a hole churning in the heart of the world. God made the world to be especially present to it, in it. After breathing the universe into being and hanging the stars and planets up like nursery mobiles on natural laws, he picked one planet to fill personally with his presence. Apart from his presence “the earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:2). The formless void is creation with no particular reference points, no special order, no governing Lord, like the raging storms of Jupiter or the searing surface of Venus–character without face. The laws of nature may be able to loosely hold things together but they cannot put life together in the least. Special attention is needed. A Person is needed to make persons. The world apart from God is utterly indifferent to life. Indeed, the popular atheist writer Richard Dawkins is at least partially write:
“The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference” (Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life).
Except that down here, at bottom, on the ground from which we observe the apparently lifeless, though unspeakably beautiful, universe, life is teaming and sprawling in a messy abundance. The world is given its daily bread—indiscriminately, not indifferently—because God has intervened, bringing order and giving form, separating seas from trees and shaping up mountains from the mantle, filling the void with his presence calling forth sea urchins and seagulls, petunias and pomegranates, and finally breathing his Spirit into a creature filled with a unique blessing of life in the form of love, completing his work by entering into on the seventh day, his first day off and our first day alive. The table was set and we were born into a feast, born at rest (Gen. 1:1-2:4). The world with God is utterly at peace.
God had given dominion to human beings to govern the world in his image with his presence under his guidance. But they abused their power, seeking to become gods in their own image, and thus turned away from the presence of God (Gen. 3). It was not long before all creation all but returned to a formless void: “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life…on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened” (Gen. 7:10-11). It wasn’t that God caused something unnatural to happen so much as it was that he allowed nature to take its course. He had separated the waters in ordering creation to make an oasis of life (Gen. 1:7). Judgment was simply a matter of withdrawing his sustaining hand.
And in the book of Revelation, the rider on the “fiery red horse” did not bring judgment by wielding his own sword. He was simply sent “to remove peace from the earth, so that men would slay one another” (Rev. 6:4). Men apart from God are utterly indifferent to life. The natural world and all that is in it defaults to chaos in God’s absence. There is no more terrible a prospect of God’s wrath than God’s absence.
Perhaps, then, peace does have a definitive opposite in that it does have a definitive absence. The opposite of peace is godlessness, in a literal sense. In the words of Karl Barth, “The enterprise of the No-God is avenged by its success.” So if you want to find peace, you have to go straight to the source. There is no replacement for God.
About five years back, Keldy and I were meeting regularly with a young gal helping her through some of life’s regulars, a few irregulars as well. One evening we had one of those rare “come to Jesus” moments, because it was pretty clear Jesus had come to her. There were tears, confessions, a white flag slowly being raised from her heart. But I could tell there was still some white in her knuckles as it related to one very destructive relationship she knew she needed to let go. I tried to convince her that staying in this relationship was like holding on to a ticking time bomb. I’ll never forget her response: “I’d rather die with someone who hurts me than be left alone. I just don’t want to be alone.” For this girl, it wasn’t a presence she feared, no matter how destructive, but an absence.
I can’t say that I blame her. I know what all sorts of pain feels like, and there is no pain that hurts more than loneliness, especially the loneliness born of grieve, the loneliness of a presence missing. Indeed, “it is not good for man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18), so we would rather die with the ones who hurt us than be left to live alone. “Your desire will be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (Gen. 3:16).
But that’s not our only option.
A few years later I got a text from the same girl. It’d likely been a year since I had talked to her. She was off to college and I had, quite frankly, given up on her. But Jesus hadn’t.
I saved our conversation:
G: [Her opening line:] “I am ready to give my life to Jesus. I’m not sure what to do, so I need your help.”
Me: “Did something happen? What changed?”
G: “I was lying in bed in my dorm room, by myself, and suddenly I just felt at peace. It felt like my room filled up with peace.”
Me: “What do you mean?”
G: “I mean I didn’t feel alone anymore, and the only thing I could think about was Jesus.”
Me: “Go and tell three people what just happened. I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”
His name shall be called Emmanuel, which means “God with us.” The Gospel of God-with-us is the restoration of the personal presence of God: peace, Shalom. The God-sized hole at the center of our hearts, which turned out to be anything but God-shaped (more like god-shaping—I believe Calvin called it an idol factory), was met with a Man with holes in his hands, who revealed how utterly void we are of peace without him—and he made peace by giving his life to those who tried to take it from them, loving them while they actively hated him with hammers, stripping them of the satisfaction of victory over an enemy, the satisfaction of triumph conflict born of mutual hatred (cf. Col. 2:15). The presence of God has come to us in the Person of Jesus Christ and comes to dwell within us in the Person of the Holy Spirit. Jesus himself said,
“The Spirit of truth…is with you, and he will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you…Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I will come to you…I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does take place you may believe’” (Jn. 14:18-29).
Jesus gives us his peace not as the world gives. I could think of no better time for us all to consider what it is we’re running after in our variously aimed pursuits of peace, but even more to consider what we might be running from. Perhaps we need to face the Absence square in the eye, like a man on Mars Hill, and fill the void with the Name of Jesus, calling on him to do what only he can do: to fill the absence of Life with the very Presence we’re running from. There simply is no replacement for Peace.
“Adam, where are you?” —Genesis 3:9
“It is not the war that disturbs our peace. The war is not even the cause of our unrest. It has merely brought to light the fact that our lives are all based on unrest. And where there is unrest there can be no peace. But God is peace.” (Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, Eberhard Busch).
As an evangelical pastor—in order to say what I need to say and to whom, I have to begin with a statement that may seem a bit abrupt but will hopefully preempt (and also demonstrate) the problem I intend to address:
I believe abortion is murder (except as a means of preventing the death of a mother) and I would support a federal ban on all abortions. Moreover, I have never and will never vote for a pro-choice candidate to assume the highest offices either of our federal or state governments.
This is my position on abortion. It is a red line for me. I am that stereotype. I make no apologies for it. Now that I have made a public confession of it and lost all credibility to half the country, I’d like to speak to the other half: to those who need to hear me confess my pro-life commitment publicly before you are willing to hear me say anything else politically. I want you to hear me say Yes, I am on yourside politically (so far as it goes), so I can explain why No, God is not on our side politically. God has his own red line: Jesus Christ is Lord.
“Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?”
“Neither,” he replied, “but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.”
—Joshua 5:13-14
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I am not writing as a polemicist but as a pastor. It’s not that I think I’m “right” and have something to say—I hope I’m not to some extent—but I’m genuinely puzzled, and equally troubled, by the willful and politically confused [mis]handling of the Word of God and Name of Jesus Christ throughout this campaign season. In my living memory, I do not recall an election ever being so explicitly framed as a holy war by both sides—both sides claiming to be on the side of the Good, both sides defining the evils of the other, both sides presuming definitions of good and evil that can be divided cleanly along partisan lines—but one side, the Right side, has been increasingly entangling their definitions of good and evil to names and terms and confessions of the Church, thereby effectively redefining “christ” and “christian” and “jesus is lord,” claiming that Jesus is on our side.
It has become commonplace now for celebrity pastors and Christian leaders, such as Eric Metaxas (known by some for his biography of Diedrich Bonhoeffer, by others for his ongoing misrepresentation of Bonhoeffer’s theology), to claim unequivocally that this election is a spiritual battle not against flesh and blood but against Democrats who are apparently more “principality and power” than “flesh and blood.” In this particular instance (representative of many like it) he, with the approval and echoes of a likeminded and likelipped panel of celebrity pastors, then proceeded to publicly urge all Christians whose pastors are not publicly endorsing Trump in this spiritual battle against the demoniacrats to leave their churches—to break fellowship with real communities made up of real relationships built up over years and decades in the name of Jesus Christ and held together by the Holy Spirit—dividing the body of Christ in the name of Jesus+Trump2024. He was at a church when he said this.
“Is Christ divided?” (1 Cor. 1:13)!
As a card-carrying Protestant, I can appreciate on this rainy Reformation Day that dividing is sometimes necessary to preserve the integrity of the Church—except where uniting is necessary to preserve the identity of the Church. It’s like the difference between calling off an engagement on grounds of faith and calling off a marriage on grounds of faith, on account that a spouse has just become too liberal politically. When Paul wrote to the liberal Corinthians, he did not call for division but for an alignment with the reality of the Church’s union in Christ as his body, the indivisible temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3; 6; 12), reminding them that “all of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Cor. 5:10). The only occasion for division in the New Testament seems to be the excommunications of individuals doing harm to the local Church community (cf. Mt. 18; 1 Cor. 5) or explicitly to the Name of Jesus Christ (1 Tim. 1:20).
Consider the difference between these criteria and the likes of what Eric Metaxas and company have called for. Consider the effect this public messaging has to a lost world, who hears the Church saying allegiance to Jesus is concretely proven (or not) by allegiance to Donald Trump (or conservative / pro-life policy, etc.) on November 5, Election Day, the day we will all choose whether or not we are the elect of the Lord Jesus Christ in our vote for the next president-elect. (If you don’t think this is the impression many believers and unbelievers alike have about this election, I will be happy to provide a truckload of examples.) Christ alone divides the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff, and too many Christians have assumed their position on the threshing floor and begun pronouncing “judgment[s] before the appointed time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart” (1 Cor. 4:3-4).
My concern is that the Church of Jesus Christ is being sucked into an echo chamber of collective self-deception among self-identifying evangelical Christians, who are daily listening to themselves call Jesus “lord” and themselves “christians” and “evangelicals” using definitions that “distort the Gospel of Christ” and thus lead people away from Jesus or to a false gospel (Gal. 1:6-7). I believe the most important problem facing the Church in America is not how our faith in Jesus should inform our politics but how our politics is informing our faith in Jesus. It is possible to be wrong about the former and end up with the wrong politics, to be sure, but it’s also possible to be wrong about the latter and end up with the wrong Jesus. Jesus is Lord—and this is far more than a political claim but not less (see part 2 in followup post)—but “not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter my kingdom” (Mt. 7:21).
The Stolen Words of True Community
It’s hard to know where to begin attempting to adequately summarize the word-circus of profanities entangling the Name (and therefore conception) of Jesus Christ in current political discourse. Instead, I’ll start with a principle description of the problem and then (in the final section) a particularly poignant and representative example.
The problem—The Propaganda of the Echo Chamber: In his Ethics, Diedrich Bonhoeffer described how Hitler (no, I don’t think Trump is analogous to Hitler but, as a social phenomenon, propaganda works the same in every age) “made use of the meanness of the human heart by nourishing it and giving it other names. Anxiety is called responsibility; greed is called industriousness; lack of independence becomes solidarity; brutality becomes masterfulness. By this ingratiating treatment of human weaknesses, what is base and mean is generated and increased ever anew.” He then describes how attempts to oppose this vision of reality would be vilified and demonized as a threat to humanity, so that the ulterior motives of all involved remain hidden (to all involved) behind “the stolen words of true community.”
Slowly, over time, as the language seeps into the vernacular of everyday descriptions of people and problems (or is forcefully shouted through the screens into the minds of a fearful nation), fundamental terms like “good” and “evil” and “God” and “loyalty” begin to change in their imagined meanings and proper syntax. I believe the terms and confessions that belong to the communion of the saints are being stolen and coopted in American political discourse, willfully by false Christians (whose motives are transparent unto themselves) and unwittingly by genuine Christians (whose motives may be pure but whose regurgitation popular Christian-political tropes echo Gospel distortions that people hear as a false gospel—it’s not just what gets said but what gets heard!), to break up the body of Christ to form a new communion.
With the emergence of even the most primitive forms of mass communication, long before the digital age, Bonhoeffer recognized the ever-present threat of the spin-cycle of deceptions possible when the language of God’s Word is taken out of context and thrown to the brothels in the public exchange of political discourse, where words and definitions exchange fluids and names, so that the language of God begins to evolve into “the language of Ashdod” (Neh. 13:24)—and thus “the name of God is profaned among the nations” (cf., Ezek. 36:23; Rom. 2:24). To profane is ‘to make common’ by improper use (taking his Name ‘in vain’), leading to confused conceptions of God based on human projection, not divine revelation.
The Evangelicals Who Beat Their Wives: Evidence of this type of ‘profanity’ doesn’t have to be inferred from the hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance of evangelicals. According to a recent survey by Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research, it’s out in the open. “43 percent of evangelicals said Jesus was ‘not God’ and 65 percent seemed to disagree with the doctrine of original sin. [However], On hot-button social issues like abortion and sex outside of heterosexual marriage, however, evangelicals were nearly unanimous that they are sins.”[2] Who exactly do we evangelicals believe defines sin?! If this study is even approximately representative, the implication is clear: the term “evangelical” has been adulterated to such an extent that about half of the self-identifying evangelicals in this country are not evangelical Christians—they are evangelical Republicans.
The trickle-down effects of this evangelonomics is ugly, particularly among men. It leads to absurd statistical contradictions that have long plagued the Church’s reputation, and therefore our witness of Jesus Christ, because of so many self-designating “evangelical Christians” who don’t belong to, and are thus not representative of, the body of Christ. In her illuminating book, The Toxic War on Masculinity (advocating for the return to godly masculinity), conservative author Nancy Pearcy exposes the way studies that fail to differentiate between what she calls “devout” evangelicals (qualified by their attending church at least three times per month) and “nominal” (“in name only”) evangelicals (who do not attend church regularly) misrepresent the character of practicing Christians, leading to a number of misleading statistics that have been used as fodder for charges of Christian hypocrisy. It’s worth quoting at length:
Whereas “evangelical Protestant men who attend church regularly are the least likely of any group in America to commit domestic violence…Nominal Christian family men do fit the negative stereotypes—shockingly so. They spend less time with their children, either in discipline or in shared activities. Their wives report significantly lower levels of happiness. And their marriages are far less stable. Whereas active evangelical men are 35 percent less likely to divorce than secular men, nominals are 20 percent more likely to divorce than secular men. Finally, for the real stunner: Whereas committed churchgoing couples report the lowest rate of violence of any group (2.8 percent), nominals report the highest rate of any group (7.2 percent)…Sociologist Brad Wilcox, one of the nation’s top experts on marriage, summarized his research in Christianity Today, writing, ‘The most violent husbands in America are nominal evangelical Protestants who attend church infrequently or not at all” (Pearcy, 36-37).
When you account for the difference of these designations, the results describe two entirely different groups, indeed two “churches”—the gathered evangelical church and the ungathered evangelicals. Except that they are gathering—at Trump rallies.
Rallying Around “Jesus is Lord”
The example: Jesus is Lord is Not a Conservative Confession: At a campaign rally last week, as Kamala Harris was criticizing Donald Trump for his part in selecting supreme court justices that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a few hecklers began shouting, “Christ is King!” “Jesus is Lord!”, to which the Vice President responded, “You guys are at the wrong rally!” This response elicited a predictable reaction of evangelical outrage, on the one hand, but also reinforced all the implicit and explicit claims (of many evangelicals) that the Jesus-is-Lord people do not belong with the Harris-for-President people and therefore obviously do belong with the Trump-for-Present people.
Naturally, Trump picked up on this line of reasoning and capitalized on it, beginning with his first response at a rally in NC, where he reassured Christians they belonged in his movement (“in our movement we love Christians”) and, after the crowd stopped chanting “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” (to which he reciprocated thank-yous), he then gave them their marching orders: “At Trump rallies we don’t tell Christians to get lost; we tell Christians to get out and vote! You don’t have the choice of sitting out this election because if Kamala Harris gets four more years the radical left is not going to leave Christians alone. It’s going to get worse and worse. You will suffer greatly.” This this past weekend, at the MSG rally, the rhetoric reached new heights in this ever-escalating holy war of words, where Kamala Harris achieved the rank of “the devil” and “anti-Christ” by one speaker (as he held up a wooden wall crucifix), with enthusiastic approval from the crowd—not to mention Hillary Clinton is “some sick bastard…a sick son of a bitch,” and “the whole fucking [Democratic] party a bunch of degenerates, low-lives, Jew haters.” This is the side Jesus is on. No—Jesus is Lord.[3]
These are the words forming a new communion. It’s not about Trump himself; it’s about the words being used to rally people around him and the fact that the name of Jesus Christ is being brought night after day into alliances with many strange bedfellows.
The notion that Jesus is more at home at Trump rally, where he is “welcomed” with open arms, than at a Harris rally, where he is “rejected,” seems almost willfully naïve. We teach our kids to know better. We teach our kids to be aware that sometimes invitations come with ulterior motives. Hansel and Gretel were welcomed in with open arms. Jesus was welcomed into Jerusalem with outstretched arms of evangelistic praise by the same crowd who cheered him into execution a week later. Jesus does not always respond compliantly to our invitations, even if we don’t support abortion or claim to believe in him or shout his name in protest of his enemies: “Many believed in his name…But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man” (Jn. 2:24-25).
Just because “their side” supports abortion, it doesn’t follow that Jesus is therefore on “our side.” This is like saying the Caiaphas was on Jesus’ side but Pilate wasn’t, like Jesus was more at home in the Sanhedrin than he was in the Praetorium. You don’t think the chief priests and the Pharisees would have been pro-life? This is like pretending the Gospel leaves us with the impression that to join the side of Jesus one only needs to affirm the laws and policies closest to God’s Law, like the Pharisees did. Does Jesus take sides based on a legal basis? What implications follow from that thinking? Iraq, for example, has a federal ban on abortion, so if America goes to war against Iraq, whose side will Jesus take? Does Jesus take sides based on a legal basis—or does he give us his own commands and call all our laws and policies and presidents into his courtroom for examination and judgment?
The Minimal Ethic of a “Christian” Nation
Of course, I genuinely believe most Christians have good intentions in the desire to see justice in their nation. The problem is when the Church tries to ‘christen’ the nation, rather than call it to repentance and faith in Christ. You don’t get a more Christian nation by getting policies that are “closer” to Christ’s commands to not be angry or lust or turn the other cheek or refuse seats of honor, etc., but by getting more Christians in the nation who obey Christ, who truly “know [him” (Mt. 7:21-23!). This requires accurate definitions of sin and righteousness, sin according to God’s Law and righteousness according to faith in Jesus Christ. Moreover, the Church’s job includes naming first its own sins (integral to our confession), but then, yes, the sins of the world and of the state—like abortion and no-fault divorce (the latter policy was first signed by Ronald Reagan as Governor of CA in 1969 in the Family Law Act)—the naming of which helps the Church and the state know the difference both the Church and the world.[4] That difference is the Church’s visibility.
For the church to get the world to adopt Christian convictions, it has to abstract “moral principles” from Christ’s specific commands, detaching them from Christ himself (as though Christ wants obedience to his commands apart from “know[ing him]” (Mt. 7:21-23!)! This depersonalizing reduction leads to a “minimal ethic.” We dilute Christ’s commands to what can be reasonably agreed upon and adopted by the world. How is this effort any different in principle to the efforts of secular humanists? How is political evangelicalism not merely religious humanism? Regardless, when the world does adopt this minimal ethic it, in turn, becomes the new standard for “Christian ethics.” Then you end up with people who call themselves “evangelical” and “Christian” because they hold to the high standard of not murdering babies or supporting the state sanctioned murder of babies.
The Church’s Confession
Furthermore—don’t get me wrong in the statements above that began with a couple of Christian hecklers: I’m all for evangelistic heckling, and I’d be happy join in heckling people with the Name of Jesus and the call to repentance at a Harris rally, but not because I think there is more need for repentance and conversion among Democrats than Republicans. Herein lies the rub, and it has everything to do with the particular confession in question. “Jesus is Lord” is singular confession that defines Christ’s identity in relation not only to Christian identity but to human identity. Jesus is not “my Lord” or “the Church’s Lord”—he is Lord in the absolute sense—King of kings and Lord of lords—the one to whom “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given” (Mt. 28:18).
“Jesus is Lord” is not a Christian confession—it is the Christian confession. It is the divine claim from God’s Word that divides the world and unites the Church. “Jesus is Lord” is the Church’s confession. It is constitutive of it. It belongs to no other group as a group than the group that believes it, and that group is the Church. It’s function as our confession is to give reason for our way of life (we say what we say and do what we do because Jesus is Lord). The Church cannot be identified with boundary markers typically associated with religious identity (e.g., ethnic, linguistic, national, etc.), only by its confession. When Nero set out to arrest Christians in Rome, the only way to find them was to get them talking—confessing—and talk they did: Jesus is Lord! Many were promptly killed for it. This confession is treasured above life by those who truly believe, because there is “no other name under heaven by which we must be saved” (Acts 4).
“Jesus is Lord” is the confession of the Church’s faith in the world (this is why we’re weird, different) that is at once our proclamation to the world, “because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9). It is no an exaggeration to say, therefore, that this confession is the single most important statement that the Church has to say to the world, and that no statement could be more important for the Church to communicate to the world clearly, which is also to say not to miscommunicate to the world, and at the very least not use the Church’s confession in service any other syncretistic allegiances (which form false alliances). Sadly, Jesus anticipated precisely this kind of miscommunication: “And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you” (Mt. 7:23).
What to Do on Election Day
I’m going to have to end with a conclusion as abrupt as the beginning of this article, but I will put out a followup article tomorrow (Lord willing!) that includes an exposition of the above reference from Matthew 7 and its troubling implications. For now, I just want to offer an orientation to Election Day different than what many popular Christian leaders are suggesting, placing an ultimatum on the children of God to the effect that their vote for Trump is an exercise of their faith in Christ, and that the refusal to vote, or a vote for the opposition, calls their faith into question. To this I say: Leave the children alone. The children of God are free! The conditions for life and faith as a child of God and co-heir with Jesus Christ will not be amended by some evangelical pastor or leader caught up in the faithless anxiety of a political moment, recklessly drawing new dividing and uniting lines around anything other than the name of Jesus Christ. If your convictions lead you to vote for Trump, for Harris, or the vote of a non-vote because you are being so radically misrepresented by both candidates, Beloved, you are free.
Here’s the rule: if it’s not necessary for salvation, it’s not the right boundary line.[5] “Whosoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Rom. 10). There’s salvation. Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in their midst” (Mt. 18:20). There’s the Church. The name of Jesus is the boundary for both. May the name of Jesus Christ be hallowed by his Church.
[1]Disclaimer: I May Be Wrong—I Hope I Am. I may be wrong in the analysis that follows, and the interpretations and intuitions and judgments it presumes—I truly hope I am to some extent. If I am wrong, fundamentally speaking, it is because (a) I have underestimated the general American’s ability to readily discern and understand the Gospel through the maelstrom of popular and political Christian messaging and / or (b) I have overestimated the importance of hallowing the name of Jesus Christ and the integrity of our—the Church’s—principal confession: Jesus is Lord. If my ‘estimations’ are even approximately accurate, then my sense of urgency is justified.
[2]The Week, “Has U.S. evangelical Christianity become more a political culture than a religion?”
[3] Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Jesus is not on “our side” because our side has become so vulgar or whatever. This has been true of every side since Ceasar on through Biden by way of Washington. Nor am I an anarchist who thinks the governing authorities have no responsibility before God and/or the Church should just stay out of politics. It’s an issue of definitions and roles—the most fundamental issue—and the Church has different responsibility before God than the governing authorities. I will offer an approach to navigating the complexities of the Church’s relation to state in a democratic republic in a followup article.
[4] The Church that has preserved its identity will understand how and on what basis to condemn not only abortion but also no-fault divorce, and explain why this policy has, according to Jesus’ definition of marriage (which is utterly different than our state-authorized contract with its godless terms and conditions), millions of people are living in adulterous second- third- fourth-, etc., marriages, who were married by pastors who never thought twice about the implications of Jesus’ teaching on marriage and amendment to the divorce clause in the Old Testament (cf., Mt. 19:7-12). We would also be able to encourage people to see the obvious connection between this destructive marriage policy and the increase in abortions in our country.
[5] And if an individual has is not harming the body of Christ or the confession of the Church’s faith, they must not be treated as excommunicates.
Adapted from a journal entry, sometime in the blur that was 2020—
The Son of Man, A Self Portrait by René Magritte
The other day I was working with Ryser (my then six-year-old son) on some simple math problems because #COVIDCLASSROOM2020. On a worksheet was a group of apples. The first question was How many apples are there? Ryser responded, “lots of ones.” I asked him what he meant. He said, “that’s one apple, that’s one apple, that’s one…” and so on. I almost corrected him with conventional notions of addition, but I stopped myself and ended up explaining to him why he was right and conventional mathematics was wrong. It occurred to me that Ryser still saw the world as it truly is, in all its particularities, and I did not want to aid in his loss of innocence.
Ryser was seeing the personal creative form of the divine λόγος (logos, word/identity) in the particularity of each apple, each a unique “fingerprint” of its Maker. The question of identities has been observed and described in various aspects from various standpoints, some attempting to generalize, others to particularize, but all observing parts and wholes and relations the sum of which, in the end, should lead us all back to the ability to see everything in ones, in my mathematical aesthetic judgment.
It’s what Plato first called “ποιότης” (poiotes, literally “whatness,” the quality that distinguishes this from that, orange from apple, orange from red, etc.), or what Aristotle called with a back-and-forward tilt “τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι” (to ti en einai, “the what it was to be”), or what medieval scholastics called “quiddity” (“essence” / “whatness”), or what Duns Scotus called its “haecceity” (literally “thisness”), or what Gerard Manley Hopkins’ called “inscape” (or “the thingness of a thing” according to Thomas Merton’s reading of Hopkins). Ryser was putting his finger on the distinct and peculiar identity of every created thing and being—precisely because it is a created thing or being.
[For a sermon that explains the substance of this essay (and why it matters) in plain language, click here.]
The following essay considers the implications of a commonly accepted mistranslation of the Great Commission text for developing a misguided folk-missiology throughout many evangelical circles.
In a word:Jesus did not command his disciples to “make disciples of all the nations.” He commanded them to “disciple all the nations.” There is a world of difference in the natural reading of these two renderings, a difference that can indeed create two entirely different visions of the Church’s way of being in the world. I offer the following as a starting point for reflection on what may be regarded as an alternative vision to the the Great Commission based on an accurate rendering of its grammar.
1. The Grammar of Discipleship
μαθητεύσατε πάντα τὰ ἔθνη (Mt. 28:19).
A cursory survey on the literature coming out of Protestant circles, both popular and academic, will quickly reveal The Great Commission in Matthew 28 to be a foundational text for how Protestants understand God’s global mission the Church’s role in it. But as it often happens with the most familiar texts of Scripture, the Great Commission is more often invoked than it is investigated, much less understood. It is regularly cited as the rationale or basis for any number of applications on the assumption that it is already well understood. But this is a mistake.
The importance of the Great Commission with regard to the topic of discipleship is undoubtedly due to (1) its unique placement at the closing of Matthew’s Gospel after Christ’s resurrection (the only post-resurrection appearance and address to his disciples in Matthew), (2) the universal claims of claims of his authority (“all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”), (3) and the corresponding universal scope of the role given his disciples (“disciple all the nations”) in perpetuity (“behold, I am with you always till the end of the age”). Given the obvious ecclesiological and missiological significance of the Great Commission text, it is surprising that the majority of English translations have erred on the side of imprecision in their rendering of the imperative (“disciple”), presumably for the sake of readability in light of the unique verbal usage of the word. It is, however, precisely because of its unique usage in the Great Commissiontext that precision should, it seems, be regarded as paramount.
The majority of modern English translations render the imperative clause in the Great Commission to read thus: “Make disciples of all the nations…” (Mt. 28:19; cf. ESV, NASB, NIV, NLT, NRSV). In Greek, the word “make” is not present, and therefore “disciples” is not the object of the verb (command). Below are three reasons a translation that preserves the grammatical integrity of Jesus’ command in Matthew 28:19 is preferable.
The uniqueness of the verbal form of disciple, μαθητεύω: to disciple.
In the New Testament the word “disciple” is found in its nominal form 285 times in 276 verses (BibleWorks). By contrast, it is only found twice in its participial form (Mt. 13:52; Acts 14:21) and twice in its (purely) verbal form: first, in Matthew’s burial account when Joseph of Arimathea, who “was discipled by Jesus” (Mt. 27:57, ἐμαθητεύθη, aorist passive indicative), procured Jesus’ body as those “who had followed Jesus from Galilee” now “watched from afar” (Mt. 27:55); the second and last time in the Great Commission text, which is the only time it is used in its specifically imperatival form in the entire New Testament. The Gospel of Matthew spends 28 chapters describing the identity of Jesus’ followers as “disciples,” and when it comes time for them be commissioned, the author transforms his usage of the word that had defined their identity in the Gospel into a command that defines their mission.[1]
The use of the verb μαθητεύω, despite the availability of alternative options
There is no reason to think Koine Greek had no way of communicating the idea of people “making” other people something they otherwise were not by use of the word ordinarily translated make (pοιέω). There is precedent for this usage of pοιέω to communicate this idea in Matthew’s own Gospel account: καὶ λέγει αὐτοῖς δεῦτε ὀ opίσω μου, καὶ pοιήσω ὑμᾶς ἁλιεῖς ἀνθρώπων. (“And he said to them, ‘Follow me, ‘and I will make you fishers of men’”, Mt. 4:19). Another example of this construction in Matthew’s Gospel comes in a context that (tellingly) demonstrates the great potential for human-on-human malformation in the effort to “make converts”: Οὐαὶ ὑμῖν, γραμματεῖς καὶ Φαρισαῖοι ὑποκριταί, ὅτι περιάγετε τὴν θάλασσαν καὶ τὴν ξηρὰν ποιῆσαι ἕνα προσήλυτον, καὶ ὅταν γένηται ποιεῖτε αὐτὸν υἱὸν γεέννης διπλότερον ὑμῶν. (“Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross the sea and dry land to make one convert (or proselyte / προσήλυτον), and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves”, Mt. 23:15).
Preserving the inner-logic of a sentence in translation depends on its grammar
The majority of the aforementioned English translations of Matthew 28:19 construe the verb-object relationship in some variant form the following: “make disciples of all nations.” The problem with this translation is that it construes the grammar of the Great Commission in a way that significantly alters its possible range of meanings and applications. Namely, it renders “disciples” as the object of the imperative “make,” which is then modified by the partitive genitive phrase, “of all the nations.” But in the grammar of the original text the imperative is not “make” and the object of the imperative is not “disciples.” Rather, the imperative is “disciple” (μαθητεύσατε) and the object of the imperative is “all the nations” (πάντα τὰ ἔθνη).
Translating texts from one language to another involves more than just finding the best lexical or conceptual equivalents of individual words or ideas. Preserving the grammar and syntax in translation is often critical for maintaining the inner-logic that dictates how words in a sentence relate one to another. “Feed all the visitors” and “make food of all the visitors,” for example, do not have the same range of implications and outcomes, say, for a cannibalistic tribe receiving written orders from their chief.
Disciple the Nations
A translation that preserves the grammatical integrity of Jesus’ command would simply read as follows: “disciple all the nations…” (μαθητεύσατε πάντα τὰ ἔθνη, cf. YLT; The New Testament: A Translation by David Bentley Hart). There are any number of implications that follow from turning the verb/command into the object of the verb/command in this text, not least of which is how it informs the way “baptizing” is understood to modify the verb. In Greek, the participles “baptizing…and teaching…” are not modifying the object of the verb “make” (suggesting they indicate how to make something out of the nations) but “disciple” (how to disciple the nations). In other words, the question is not What qualifies as a disciple? but rather What qualifies discipling? If the question is What qualifies a disciple? then the answer will have to draw a hard line between a disciple and not-a-disciple. That line, for many, is baptism.
The implications of translating Jesus’ command “make disciples of all nations” instead of “disciple the nations” is like the difference between being instructed to “make potatoes” and “water the plants,” or the difference between what Paul and Apollos did in Corinth and what God did in Corinth: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Cor. 3:6-7). The former is focused on the product of discipleship, the latter on its process; the natural measure of success in the former is determined by the quantity of disciples made, the latter by the quality of discipling. The former orients the Church to valuing disciples, thus valuing non-disciples only according to their potential for becoming such. The latter orients the Church valuing the nations and therefore sets out to disciple them.
It is not hard, therefore, to imagine how the general concept of discipleship is understood among denominations that practice “believer’s baptism” (such as my own, the C&MA) to consist of two distinct components that are, practically speaking, unequal in importance and priority—first: Christian conversion (baptism), second: Christian education (teaching). Of first importance in the “making” process is getting people over the hard line of conversion—from not-a-disciple to a disciple—the mark of which is baptism. Second, then, is educating them in matters of faith and practice. This second component of discipleship, it is safe to say, is generally regarded to be less important, presumably because the failure to sufficiently educate a person with the status of “disciple” (or “Christian”—the conflation of these terms is common, and telling) does not bear the same consequences as the failure to convert a person into that status.
Given the observation above from Jesus’ “prophetic woes” in Matthew 23, it worth serious consideration that the only time Matthew (or the rest of the New Testament authors) refers to “making converts” is to describe the extensive proselyting efforts of Scribes and Pharisees that results in converting people into “twice [the] child[ren] of hell” they are (Mt. 23:15). While conversion is a legitimate concept to describe a person coming into the faith, only Jesus can determine who is truly his disciple, or not (cf. Jn. 8:31). The Church’s job is not to make that determination but to do what Jesus commanded to do, trusting that he will accomplish his will through it. As such, the place of conversion in relation to the Church’s responsibility to disciple the nations must not be unduly reified into (one of) the terms of discipleship such that it gets conflated or confused with the meaning and function of baptism.
If the question the Great Commission implicitly raises is not What qualifies a disciple? but rather What qualifies discipling? then the answer is it provides is concerned with the action of the discipling community, not the status of a would-be disciple. It qualifies what constitutes a true discipling community and only derivatively what constitutes true disciple.
The Setting of Discipleship & The Journey of Disciples
The first post-Easter worship gathering was 65-mile miles away from where Jesus was, and where the disciples were, on Easter morning—Jerusalem, just outside the city gates (Heb. 13:12). The two Marys came to “see the tomb” where Jesus had been laid to earth but instead saw an angel descend from heaven. The angel said, in effect, come and see nothing, then go and tell his disciples something: the tomb is empty, the Lord is risen. Not just that, he told them to tell them to go to Galilee—they had a meeting—and Jesus was already on his way. He was going before them, so they would see him upon arrival. So the two Marys went to tell them, and on their way they saw Jesus. He met them on the road. They worshiped him, and he sent them to go with the same instructions. This time he called “his disciples” “my brothers.” He had never called them that before. So Jesus’ disciples-become-brothers left the Holy City, walked 65 miles to hear a three verse sending sermon, after which they would have to walk 65 miles back to go to the people to whom they were sent. That is a 130-mile detour to go from point A to point A. Why would Jesus tell them to go and meet him there instead of stay and meet him here?
Two reasons seem likely. First, he met them on the mountain. Neither Jesus nor the angel had said anything about where exactly in Galilee they would see him, just that they would see him there—in a 1,341 square mile region with a population ranging anywhere from four hundred thousand to three million.[2] Presumably, then, “the mountain to which Jesus directed them” (τὸ ὄρος οὗ ἐτάξατο αὐτοῖς ὁ Ἰησοῦς) either refers to (1) a detail left out in the instruction to the Marys that Matthew included here (i.e., that he indicated which mountain to meet them and instructed her to tell them) or (2) to a mountain of some special significance they would have intuitively expected to meet him (like a person receiving an invitation from the President to “come see me at the House in D.C.” and thus going to the White House to meet him). The latter is more plausible.
In fact, the most natural reading of the phrase “where Jesus instructed them” (οὗ ἐτάξατο αὐτοῖς ὁ Ἰησοῦς) is not, in effect, “where Jesus instructed them to meet him” (referring to a future meeting) but simply “where Jesus instructed (or appointed) them” (a past meeting). The word “instructed” or “appointed” (ἐτάξατο—3rd person aorist indicative, though most translations take liberties in rendering it in the perfect aspect, e.g, “had directed”) means to “bring about order” or “put in place” and often refers to being “put under someone’s command” (BDAG), as in the examples in BDAG of the man who has soldiers “under [him], who says to this man go and he goes…” (Mt. 8:9’ Lk. 7:8)[3]
So the disciples, in all likelihood, went to the mountain in Galilee, the original point A, the place they were first organized, where they first gathered as a distinct group of disciples, and precisely as those gathered around a new teaching with authority: “Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’” (Matt. 5:1-3 ESV). Jesus met them on the mountain where he began discipling them, no doubt because it situated them in the proper frame of reference for understanding the commission they were about to receive—to disciple all the nations—recapitulating Jesus’ way of discipling them as a principle model for discipling others. It was there that he first taught them to obey all he commanded, and thus provided the “curriculum” for teaching others to obey all he commanded.
The second reason has less to do with where he met them and more to do with where he did not meet them. They had to leave Jerusalem to receive the Great Commission because they would have to leave Jerusalem to fulfill the Great Commission. In other words, Jerusalem, the holy city of the Jewish dynasty, was not going to be the center toward which God’s kingdom purposes would be directed, but rather the center from which God’s kingdom purposes would be directed (cf. Acts 1:4, 8). This, it is safe to say, was a disorienting prospect.
Prior to his death and resurrection, there is no shortage of evidence suggesting the disciples’ expectation of Jesus as the Christ (or Messiah)and Jesus’ expectations of himself as such were, quite literally, worlds apart, particularly with regard to the promised “kingdom” that they were expecting and Jesus was inaugurating.[4] Their vision of the kingdom was rightly bound to Israel’s history but wrongly restricted by historical precedent. Their model king was David, who had first established the borders of the Promise Land, and they simply did not have the categories to understand where much of Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom fit. Their categories were bound by precedent and thus could not open to promise. In a word, they were right about the Man, wrong about the mission, right about the Christ, wrong about the kingdom (see especially Mt. 16:13-28).[5]
Jesus’ claim of universal authority corresponded with a commission of universal scope. If “all authority in heaven and on earth” had been given to Jesus, “all the nations” of the earth had been given to the reign of his kingdom. But his kingdom did not advance through colonial expansion. It was a kingdom that somehow fit within all nations that nevertheless belonged to Him, something more like cities scattered on the hills (Mt. 5:14) than nations trampled underfoot (Ps. 47:3; 63:80). In Frederick Bruner’s words, “’All nations’ deparochializes disciples and makes them world persons; and it ecumenicalizes them and introduces them to the worldwide church” (Bruner, 819).
Jesus had described such a vision the first time they met on that mountain in “Galilee of the nations,” as the prophet Isaiah referred to it, describing the eschatological setting in which “a child” would be born, “a Son” would be given, the “increase of [whose] government and of peace there [would] be no end,” indeed, in whose single name the “Mighty God” of creation would be known in an altogether new way as “Everlasting Father,” “Prince of Peace,” and “Wonderful Counselor” (Isa. 9:1-7). It is fitting, then, that on this mount in Galilee, where they first were taught to pray, scandalously if not seemingly blasphemously (Jn. 10:31-39), “Our Father…”, that they would be sent to “all the nations, baptizing them in the name,” echoing what Isaiah described, “of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
[1] The myriad of questions that could arise about the unique usage of form of this word, especially given the context in which it is used, not to mention the tremendous influence the Great Commission has on Christian thought and practice throughout the English-speaking world, should be grounds enough for preserving its grammatical integrity. But the questions can never be answered if they are never asked.
[2]Bible Dictionaries Hastings’ Dictionary of the New Testament > Galilee
[3] So, e.g., Davies and Allison, 3:681. Contra France, 1110, who argues we would have expected to see διδάσκω (to teach) instead of τάσσω on the basis that the mountain in Galilee where he first “taught” them (i.e., the Sermon on the Mount) would have more naturally been described in such terms (teaching). But (a) Matthew may very well be intentionally framing the scene in terms authority—the kind of peaceful authority had had demonstrated over them from the day he began to nevertheless teach them as one with authority (e.g, “you have heard it said…but I say…”, Mt. 5:21ff)—the full extent of which they are about to hear him announce (“all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Mt. 28:18); and (b), oddly enough, he also argues against the notion that Matthew is suggesting they had been instructed to meet them at a particular mountain, recognizing such a rendering cannot be justified in Greek, so he just suggests it was a general mountain in Galilee they went to where they waited “for Jesus to take the initiative to meet with them.” Such an assumption may be an attempt to be conservative in interpretation, but it does not do justice to the humanity of the characters. It is safe to assume they, like any real human being given such general instructions, would have gone to the place would have gone to the meeting place most significant in shared memory of both parties involved.
[4] E.g., the disciples arguing over who would be “greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 18:1-3); James and John attempting to secure coregent positions of power by “grant[ing them] to sit, one at [his] right hand and one at [his] left” once he assumed the throne in the pattern of Gentile rulers (Mk. 10:35-45); or, most emphatically (and ironically), Simon Peter, the first of the disciples to explicitly name Jesus as the Messiah, “the Christ” (Mt. 16:16)—and so Jesus names his the “Rock” (Peter)—only to turn around and “rebuke” Jesus when he revealed the job description he was bound to precisely as the Christ (“From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised”; Mt. 16:21)—and so Jesus, in turn, names him “Satan” (“Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. You are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man”; Mt. 16:23).
[5] And if there were any doubt that confusions still persisted after the resurrection (and the Great Commission for that matter), the disciples’ question and Jesus’ answer in the opening of Acts seems make clear that they were still confused and provide insight into the nature of their confusions. Acts begins with a summary of Jesus’ ministry to the disciples prior to his ascension, indicating that he “appear[ed] to them during forty days…speaking about the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3) and telling them to wait for the promised of the Father—“you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 1:4-5). The first words out of the disciples’ mouths, directly following this summary, we are told, “when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel” (Acts 1:6). The confusion, it seems, is that they could not distinguish the “kingdom of God” as Jesus taught had described it from the “kingdom of Israel” as they had expected it. So Jesus, instead of answering their misguided question and all its inherent assumptions, responded thus, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:6-8).
Just after Jesus breathed his last breath, one of the Roman soldiers who helped fasten him to the cross uttered the surprising confession, “Truly, this man was the Son of God!” This soldier, who, at one moment, blindly hammers away in the darkness of deception only to, in the next moment, be awakened to see the weight of his sin in the light of truth, acts and speaks for more than just himself. He both acts and speaks for the whole Church of Jesus Christ. Our hands are his and his confession is ours.
And so it is, this soldier is the truest image of a Christian at the strained feet of the truest image of God. It is too soon, at this point, to speak of the day after tomorrow, too soon to speak of life after this moment. All we know at this moment is that we have just discovered God, just after we have killed him. Today Nietzsche is right: “God is dead, and we have killed him.” The only one more helpless than the Christ-corpse are the ones at his feet, we who look to God for strength, for power, for justice, for hope–it is we who today discover utter weakness, powerlessness, injustice: the total eclipse of this world’s future. Our faith today seems so ethereal and phony, so unrewarding as the concreteness of our sin still pools below, splattering our upward gaze with the darkest shade of red. We have blood to show for our sin and nothing to show for our faith. We dare not think of the sweet bye-and-bye in the sky at this moment, because eclipsing our view of the heavens is a gaunt draping face, whose open mouth and hollow eyes cry out to us that we have all sinned more passionately than we have believed. And the blood now flooding this ark-less earth cries out from the ground for justice for an all-consuming justice.
The tomb prepared for the criminal wraps is now a tomb prepared for the world. This Friday, we bury all hope. Like the days of Babel, humankind has come together with its hammers and nails in the concerted effort to conquer God. Rallying behind Judas and Caiaphas and Pilate, our leaders up to this point, we have joined the whole world in the war against God. And we won. But just as soon as he is gone we somehow realize that our victory is precisely our judgment; that our preference for godlessness is precisely our hell; that the enterprise of human rebellion is avenged precisely by its success.
This is our cursed confession: we cannot confess that Jesus is the Son of God without confessing that we are the son of the Soldier. Our claim to righteousness and our claim to judgment are the same claim. We speak of the cross of Christ as God’s altar, but it never becomes other than a cross. We come to receive forgiveness from the fountain and are handed a hammer and a long iron stake. We must tap into this fountain with our own guilt. Blood spills out from Jesus’ hands before water can spill out of his heart.
And thus the cross is for us the truest image of ourselves and the truest image of God: mirror of earth, window of heaven. In it we see at once a love that is furious enough to die for another and an evil that is furious enough to kill for itself. God stayed the hand of Abraham to save Abraham’s son, but he did not stay our hand to save his own Son. The cross and the soldier face the world and show us both who God is in Christ and we are in the soldier. We are drawn in a moment to the contradiction of the strange beauty of Calvary, oscillating between ray and shadow but without ever changing its form. We quickly look away only to realize that we cannot look away. Like a sun spot in our vision after glimpsing the naked noonday sky, the man on the cross, whom we so desperately want only to be a man, becomes the indelible image that demands we affirm either the hammering of the soldier or confession of the soldier, Christ’s condemnation or ours, for we all are that soldier. There is no middle ground on the razor summit of this hill. Jesus came not to bring peace but to bring a sword.
Either way, what we surprisingly discover is that the witness of Jesus Christ was not just a radical picture of the divine life in a herculean human form, a human life so infinitely removed from our own (cf. Heb. 4:15; 2:18). Jesus will one day come out of the clouds of heaven, but when he first came he came out of the thorns of earth. We do not simply look to Jesus and see God; we look to him and see ourselves, and in so seeing we see the sad realization that if the human experience is wholly embraced in the radiant transparency of truth, even God himself cannot escape its sorrow. His call to cross-bearing is as much a call to honesty about the human situation as it is a call to do anything unique. It is not the pain of the cross that we fear–indeed, we already suffer from its pain–it is rather the shame of the cross. We fear exposure. We do not want to identify with the guilty precisely because we know that we are guilty. But to hear the good news of God’s grace can only be heard as God’s grace. Jesus comes not for the righteous but for sinners. We must come to grips with the fact that the way of Jesus is the way of every man, a way which is full of cursed thistles and twisted thorns, and believe the announcement that God has come to dwell with us in the briar patch, indeed, to be crowned its king.
So here we all are, entangled in the thorns. Christ did not come to hover above and offer salvation by way of abduction. Instead, he just got stuck. And in so doing he removed all doubt about how we are to interpret this life and this world. The death of Jesus is hanged before us today as the purest human self-portrait painted against a narrow setting that envelops the universe, the intersection of time and eternity, the finite and the infinite, of man and God. The cross consists of both fragments and lines. It is, indeed, the truest mirror of our world, of God’s world, of another world–this one. In it the veil of heaven is lifted to see the chaos we have made out of the beauty that God made out of chaos (Gen. 1:1-2), to see as reflection what God sees as sight–a world of incongruence: a world whose smiles do not match its anxieties, whose thrones do not match its fears, and, thank God, a world whose present does not match its future.
If Jesus reveals something about the essence of the human experience, it should perhaps alarm us on this day that we never once read in the Gospels that Jesus laughed, but we do read that he cried. We never read that Jesus smiled, that he was happy, but we do read that he was enraged, that he “made a whip of cords” (Jn. 2:15). We never read Jesus found even one piece of fragmented hope as he wandered the dusty streets of Galilee and eventually on into Jerusalem, the city that, if any, would have enshrined the hope of the world in its temple. Even as he approached the city, there was no hint of a glistening reflection of hope as the temple was reflected in his eyes. All hope beaded up and fell to the dirt as “he drew near and saw the city, and wept over it, saying, ‘Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes'” (Lk. 19:41-42).
The curtain had fallen. The eyes were darkened. The temple preserved only an illusion. They looked at the temple and saw God. Jesus looked at the temple and saw godlessness. He marched directly to its courts and announced its end (Mk. 13:1-2; Jn. 2:19). The people condemned him for it (Mk. 14:53-65; Jn. 18-19). And when they crucified his flesh, a startling thing happened, the temple curtain, the dwelling of God, tore in two (Mt. 27:51). We dared to look beyond the curtain and to our dismay found nothing. Then, in a shrieking moment of terror, turned to the Crucified One and saw ourselves. And we saw God. And we saw the tomb. And together, with God and with Hope, we all marched tomb-ward. On Good Friday we discovered the love of God and the power of men, but that is all we discovered. If there were more of God to be shown, there was no possibility of seeing it, for the tomb is absolute darkness. And our eyes had been imprisoned behind its stone. There nothing more to say about this day, nothing else to see. If ever there is, it will require the miracle of a new day. Until then–silence.
Dim Reflections For Now 