Second Terrace

christian politics

I wasn’t sure whether the title should be “Christian Politics” or “Political Christians.” I’ll leave it up to you to decide which is better.

The question of how faith should be applied to politics is a tricky one, especially since it is possible to turn that statement around. Politics, indeed, has been and is being applied to – or rather imposed upon – faith. More than a few surveys report that there are quite a few people who use their religious label as a partisan identifier. 

When it comes to Christians and politics, there is a substantial problem. The early Christians – from the very first ones in the book of Acts through the persecution and illegality of Christianity in the Roman Empire up until its legalization by Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 AD – simply did not like politics. 

At all.

Don’t get me wrong. They lived happily with their fellow citizens. They didn’t withdraw into enclaves or separated communities. They didn’t look weird or act weird, as the delightful “Letter to Diognetus” (from 130 AD) makes clear.

And, contrary to general opinion, the early Christians were not standoffish. They weren’t sniffy about their non-Christian friends. They didn’t act as though everyone else had cooties.

Their problem was with politics and government. They did not hate it. They prayed intensely for civil authorities. But they harbored many doubts about the necessities of the State.

The State in a fallen world simply has to use force and the threat of death in order to suppress evil, as St Paul makes clear in Romans chapter 13. In a world that had fallen contrary to the Creation God had intended it to be – which was the Garden of Eden – the State inevitably deployed force, domination, coercion, even violence, destruction and death.

The early Christians saw themselves as the continuation of the Christ Who is Peace Himself. When they became Christians, accepting Jesus into their heart as personal Lord and Saviour, they tried their level best to act just like Him. 

So they took the Beatitudes as their personality test. They became aware of their own utter dependence upon the generosity of the Father. They mourned for those who suffered, for the victims of a fallen and cruel world. They became meek, gentle, and kind. They desired righteousness and social justice. They gave out mercy and forgiveness and grace. They were “pure in heart” – that is, they recognized the face of Jesus in their neighbor, and knew in their hearts that how they treated the “least of these” was ultimately and immediately how they treated Jesus Himself. 

They made peace wherever they lived, whether they were welcomed in society or were denounced and persecuted.

The early Christians were pretty, let’s say, “radical.” They really did hold “all things in common” (Acts 4.32).

Everyone shared their substance with each other and the poor around them. They shared their goods freely and “without measure.” Every Saturday night at Vespers they liberally distributed bread, oil, and wine – much like the Feeding of the Five Thousand.

They established the first one-stop welfare offices, the first hospitals. They collected money for famine relief and the freeing of slaves. They regularly saved unwanted babies who had been abandoned in infanticide by exposure, which was common in the Roman Empire. Peace and justice, gentleness and mercy, and generosity, comprised the character of early Christianity. 

It follows then that the Christians of the first three centuries refused to participate in violence and death. Consequently, the church discouraged Christians from participating in government and the armed forces.

And to complicate things further: the early Christians did not seek to impose their radically new character on society and the state. How could they? Having “all things in common” could never work in the “real world.” The high morality of the Beatitudes could never be legislated. 

How could early Christians ever get involved in the politics of the world? Especially when you have Jesus, the Son of God, Who utterly, totally “took upon Him the form of a slave, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross” (Philippians 2.7-8).

How can you square this radical humility, this fellowship of the Sermon on the Mount, with the scrum of self-promotion, the homo homini rattus, the violence of realpolitik in the world?

Emperor Constantine changed all this in 313 AD, when the Christian church became an imperial institution. Then it became possible for Christians to apply their faith to politics.

It also became just as possible for powerful and wealthy interests to impose their politics onto the Christian religion. 

Both possibilities have gone on ever since, especially right now.

Which is exactly why I left the title up to you.

peter missed

Today is Holy Thursday for us Orthodox, and tonight we think deeply on the betrayal of Christ and HIs arrest in Gethsemane.

Peter, attempting to defend his Friend and Teacher, famously sliced off the ear of Malchus, servant to the High Priest of the Temple.

Peter missed

Think about it. There is no way that the ear was Peter's intended target. It is impossible to aim with such precision as to slice off an ear.

Violent homicide was the aim. The neck maybe, certainly the head. Malchus should not have survived. The severed ear was but an "accident."

"No more of this," Jesus said, and He restored Malchus' ear to its rightful place (Luke 22.51).

"Put your sword back into its place," Jesus told Peter, and turning to the militia that the authorities had sent to arrest Him, He proclaimed a challenge to all who put their trust in mortal princes, wealth, and power (and all these potentialities for violence): "For all who take up the sword will die by the sword,. Do you think that I cannot appeal to My Father, and He will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?"

"How else," He continued, should the scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?" (Matthew 26.52-54).

How else could Jesus proceed to wage the true and only real struggle against the only real enemy: sin, death, and hell itself. There was only ever one way, and that was for the Son of Man to be lifted up so that He might go down.

The only way for Jesus to lead us free to heaven was for Him to go down and find us where we were, on Holy Saturday. The only way for Jesus to find us there was by His totally kenotic, Self-sacrificial pouring out of His Life on the Cross.

His way. Not the way of Peter's sword. 

 

bread from heaven, thunder and judgment

Bread from Heaven, Thunder and Judgment

The Gospel of Luke says that during Holy Week, Jesus “was teaching in the temple, but at night He went out and lodged on the mount called Olivet. And early in the morning all the people came to Him in the temple to hear Him” (Luke 21.37-38).

His teachings during this week are narrated in a large part of the Synoptic Gospels: Matthew 21-25; Mark 11-13; and Luke 19-21. The Gospel readings appointed by the Orthodox Church for Holy Monday through Wednesday are Matthew 24.3-26.16.

It is interesting that the Gospel of John devotes only the remainder of the twelfth chapter after telling of His Entrance into the city. This Gospel pays crucial attention to what the Lord had to say in at the Last Supper on Holy Thursday (John 13-17). But the comparatively small space given to His public address in Jerusalem (maybe in the Temple precincts), should invite special notice.

The Passover was coming soon, and the city was filled with pilgrims from all over the Mediterranean world. They were Jews, of course, along with many Greeks who were interested in Judaism. Some of these (i.e., “proselytes”) were even in the procession of conversion.

At one point, some of these Greek inquirers contacted Philip, one of the Apostles. They said “Sir, we wish to see Jesus” (John 12.21). This was the critical moment that set the final movements of the Gospel into action, and what Jesus said next made plain how significant the moment was: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12.23-24).

Again, and most poetically, we hear Christ speaking of the pouring out of His own life in sacrificial death for the sake of the entire world – the cosmos, all of humanity and creation.

This all-important theme of Jesus giving His life for the life of the world was always the main theme of His entire ministry – His teaching in words, His actions in drama, His entire life in the Divine poetry that overcame the corruption of darkness. Earlier on in John, after the Eucharistic and stupendous Feeding of the Five Thousand, Jesus spoke openly about this very theme:

“I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died But this is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the breach which I shall give for the life of the world is My flesh” (John 6.49-51).

It turns out that this Divine Self-sacrifice, this willingness to become the grain of wheat that dies to bear much fruit, was always God’s Will:

“It is too light a thing that You should be My Servant,” said God the Father to His Son in the prophecy of Isaiah, seven centuries before, “to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel. I will give You as a light to the nations, that My salvation may reach to the ends of the earth” (Isaiah 49.6).

Now in Holy Week, that universal salvation was soon to be accomplished. The Greeks – whom Jesus recognized as a symbol of the nations at the ends of the earth, just because they were Gentiles, uncircumcised, outside the written Law – had come, wanting to see this “light to the nations.”

Thus Jesus knew that the Cross was coming, that Golgotha loomed on the near horizon:

“‘Now My soul is troubled. And what shall I say? “Father, save Me from this hour”? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glory Thy Name.’ Then a voice came from heaven, ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again’” (John 12.27-28).

There had been a crowd around Jesus when He was told (by Philip and Andrew) of the Greeks’ request. The words from heaven were beyond their comprehension. Some thought it was thunder. Others thought that it must have been an angel speaking to Jesus. 

I can’t help but think of the seven thunders that John heard in his first book (Revelation 10.3-4). There were words indeed that he was not even permitted to write down. Of course this thunder was the voice of God in apocalyptic judgment in response to the cry of the Son, Who had voluntarily immersed Himself in the dark tide of the fallen world:

“Afflicted, I called upon the Lord, I cried out to My God: He heard My voice from His holy temple … The Lord thundered in the heavens, the Most High gave forth His voice … For Thou wilt save a humble people and Thou wilt humble the eyes of the arrogant. For Thou wilt light My lamp, O Lord, O My God, Thou wilt light My darkness” (Psalm 17,6,13,27-28 LXX).

Thunder in the heavens is the echo of judgment, and judgment indeed is what Jesus speaks of next immediately:

“This voice has come for your sake, not for Mine,” Jesus says. “Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the Archon (i.e., ruler) of the world cast out; and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to Myself” (John 12.30-32). The Lord made clear to the disciples, on a number of occasions, “by what death He was to die” (12.33).

Early on, when Jesus spoke with Nicodemus way back in the third chapter of John, He told the “ruler of the Jews,” after He spoke of being “born from above,” that “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosever believes in Him may have eternal life” (John 3.15).

And this was all for the sake of divine love, as is clearly said in the next verse. We know it well: “For God so loved the world that He gave His Only-Begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3.16).

We are too familiar with this verse. We do not appreciate it for the profound revolution that it is. All Scriptural interpretation rests on this verse. All theology, indeed, all philosophy is determined by the truth of John 3.16. Yes, it is the reason for why Jesus died on the Cross and rose again. It is the reason why He came and was incarnate.

It is also the reason why anything exists in the first place.

It is also the standard of judgment. “Now is the judgment of this world,” Jesus said as Golgotha came within His sight. The chief function of archons, or rulers, is judgment – which is much more than determining the rightness or wrongness of an issue. Judgment is the establishment of righteousness, a culture that reflects divine love.

The Archon of this fallen world not only failed at establishing a culture of love: he rebelled against love. And since the Holy Spirit is the Actualizer of Divine Love both within the Trinitarian community and in Creation, then the Spirit’s descent – which was made possible by the Crucifixion and Resurrection and Ascension – would “convince and convict the world … concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged” (John 16.8,11).

“Judged” as in condemned and replaced. Why? Because the ruler of this world ruled by hatred, violence, domination, lies, corruption, and oppression. He sought and aggrandized self. He aggregated to himself power, wielding hurt, pain, and death. 

That is why Jesus told His disciples, right before His Palm Sunday Triumphal Entry, that His own “culture,” His Body, His church, was to be completely different from the world-historic ways of the Archon of the age:

“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave; even as the Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20.25-28).

The “culture” of Christ, the communion realized by the Holy Spirit, would be “self-outpouring” just like Jesus.

In other words, the Body of Christ, His continued presence in every Christian, is itself the judgment. The Body of Christ that was made possible by His death and Resurrection, and His request for the Spirit to be sent, was now to be extended to all the world, not just one nation.

That is why when the Greeks told Philip “We would see Jesus,” Jesus knew His time had come.