Last Easter I preached a sermon called “The Art of Battling Giants” that cast Jesus as an underdog who played a “different game” than the Romans and the institutional Jewish leaders. His “different game” sidestepped the ordinary concerns of power. I quoted his Beatitudes that lift up the humble and the meek and the peacemakers. I quoted Jesus reassuring Pontius Pilate that his (Jesus’) kingdom was not of this world. I presented a Jesus whose teachings concerned the spiritual realm and not ultimately with the material realm. As if he was saying, “Don’t worry – all you guys in power – you can keep your fancy palaces and temples and fine garb. Don’t mind me over here. I’m not coming for that stuff. I’m coming for people’s souls.”
Two days after that Easter sermon, Mark Holloway, our board president at the time, handed me a book called Zealot, by Reza Aslan, which I read and found out that everything I had said in my Easter sermon had been completely wrong. Oops. Well, not completely wrong. I had preached on the Jesus who has come down to us through mainstream Christian traditions – a Jesus of peace and love, a personal comforter and healer. And he may have been all of those things. The problem is, we don’t know. We have no idea really who he was or what his ministry was about over 2000 years ago in Palestine. There is very little evidence outside of the Christian New Testament that he even existed. 99% of what we know about him comes through the tradition passed down by his own followers. Think about that. Relying on the Christian gospels to tell us about Jesus is like relying on Frito-Lay to tell us about Fritos. It’s not necessarily misinformation, but it could be, and it’s probably not the full picture.
So in the book Zealot, Aslan tries to reverse engineer who the historical Jesus might have been based on what we know about what was going on around him in that place and time. What he comes up with is a picture of a poor, angry Jewish kid – disaffected, disenfranchised – growing up in an occupied land. He was born in the tiny cluster of dusty, impoverished homes known as Nazareth (not Bethlehem… but that’s a story for another time). He almost certainly lived with a brood of brothers and sisters in a two room mud-walled home – one room for the family, one for the livestock. He definitely would have been illiterate. Nazareth was the middle of nowhere – a day’s walk from the nearest city, and that city would have been the equivalent of, say, Hastings, Nebraska.
The province of Galilee, however, that Nazareth was part of, was famous – or infamous, depending on your perspective. The Galileans had their own particularly intense flavor of Judaism – they were apocalyptic and zealous, and they resisted the Roman occupation with a fierce indignation. Waves and waves of rebellion came out of Galilee, and self-made leaders were on every street corner claiming to be the Messiah and trying to lead an insurrection. Accordingly, in Galilee Rome had been particularly ruthless and cruel (and effective) in crushing these rebellions – the tools were mass killings and burning villages to the ground – every home, every tree, every blade of grass. (Think ISIS.) This is what Jesus grew up seeing all around him. Add to this the fact that the small subsistence family farmers, like Jesus’ community, were finding it harder and harder to make a living because wealthy estates were taking over the land, forcing farmers out or forcing them into slave labor to pay off impossible debts. You can imagine that all of this created the perfect conditions for Jesus to become an angry teenager who became an even angrier TNT.
The Romans were bad, but an even bigger affront to Jesus and many of the Galileans were the wealthy sellouts among their own Jewish people. These were the Pharisees and the learned priests and scribes of the Temple in Jerusalem who had cozied up to the Romans, participated in oppressing their own people, making them pay taxes to Rome, and most importantly to someone like Jesus, completely betraying their own faith. They had turned the Commandments into empty rituals, full of pomp and circumstance. They paraded around the Temple in fine robes. Much of Jesus’ preaching was about how these phony religious leaders were making a mockery of Judaism and profiting from the oppression of their people. The priests demanded that people come to the Temple with animals to sacrifice to atone for their sins and the priests themselves would wind up with part of each animal contributed. They encouraged even poor people to spend their last coins on buying an animal in the courtyard to the Temple so they would have something to contribute. (Think Catholic Church selling “indulgences” in the middle ages.) It was a racket. And the Temple grew rich.
And so when Jesus barreled into Jerusalem on a carpet of palms, he was beyond enraged. And when he overturned the tables of the merchants in the Temple courtyard, his wrath was directed at the high priests, who, he cried, had turned God’s house into a “den of thieves.” It was a direct attack on the Temple and he was arrested soon afterwards. As we saw last week, Jesus had no interest in “peace” with a lower case “p.” He said, “Let him who has no sword go sell his robe and buy one.” And the ethereal “my kingdom is not of this world” stuff was just politics … if he even said it at all. From all that we can surmise, Jesus absolutely did want to lead an actual, earthly, material world revolution. He wanted to reclaim the Temple from these false leaders and reclaim Palestine from the Romans. The Romans knew it and that’s why they crucified him and that’s why they wrote the sarcastic “King of the Jews” on the cross.
So Jesus wanted to retake Jerusalem… and then what? What kind of Peace with a capital “P” would follow the disruption of the peace with a lower case “p?” What kind of world did he envision when Jews – the right Jews – were in charge again? (Don’t think modern day Israel.) This is a big question mark in the scriptures. When Jesus talks about the future – the earthly future – that he envisions, it’s often in vague and coded language. So we look for clues.
Much of his vision is couched in teachings about the “Kingdom of God,” which was, most scholars agree, not heaven, but a vision of a future utopian but worldly kingdom. Jesus describes the Kingdom of God through his parables, which we’ve been talking about this year. The Kingdom of God is like a landowner who gave a full day’s pay to full day workers and to partial day workers – remember that one? A message of universal love, yes, but also a pointed contrast to the wealthy landowners of Jesus’ day who were doing the opposite – squeezing as much as they could from the peasant farmers who had been his childhood neighbors, cheating them of their day’s wages, and enslaving them. The Kingdom of God would reverse this, compassion would rule, and laborers everywhere would get more than a fair day’s pay.
We can also see clues of Jesus’ vision of Peace in his quoting of the Torah and the Hebrew prophets. There’s a fascinating scene in the book of Luke where Jesus goes back to his hometown of Nazareth and preaches in the synagogue there. He chooses to teach on a passage from Isaiah that talks about the Jubilee year, one of the most progressive, even radical, concepts in the Torah. The Jubilee Year is part of Jewish law that stipulates that every 50 years, all debts are to be forgiven and all the wealth in society gets redistributed – every family that lost its land gets it back. A poignant teaching in Nazareth where so many had lost their land to the predatory elite. Obviously it was not being practiced in Palestine at the time of Jesus, nor is it today. Historians say that the Jubilee year was supposed to have hit right during Jesus’ ministry. It must have enraged him that it was here now and it was being conveniently, cynically ignored by the religious leaders. If Jesus were king, there would be a Jubilee Year.
He goes through several of the Ten Commandments, reaffirming their validity and expanding their meaning. So not only should you not kill, he says, but if you’re even angry at your neighbor or, God forbid, you’ve called them a fool, you should go immediately and try to reconcile with them. (Think right relations.) Pretty interesting for someone who said, “Let him who has no sword go sell his robe and buy one.”
And even more interesting is that that very phrase with its implicit violence was probably an intentional reference to the prophet Micah, whom he quoted a lot and after whom my son is named. Micah describes the future utopia where, instead of turning a peaceful garment into a sword, as Jesus recommended, instead “they shall beat their swords into plowshares (which is part of a plough), and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.”
Put all of this together and we can imagine the ultimate vision of peace that Jesus had in mind. It was the inverse of the world he lived in and pretty much the inverse of our world today. It was a kind of agricultural socialist utopia in which everyone gives according to their ability and receives according to their need. (Think Jewish Portlandia.) No one is invading anybody, no one is occupying anybody, everyone is just plowing their own fields and sitting under their own fig tree. Everyone is keeping the commandments in both their letter and their spirit, and resolving conflicts by talking it out. On the surface the scene might look like the kind of peace enforced by the Romans, but it reality could not be more different. It’s a peace that is not just the absence of conflict but the presence of justice and goodness and compassion and equity.
And yet, sadly, Jesus’ message seems to be that this is not a peace that can be achieved peacefully. I hope we will apply this to our own struggles figuratively, not literally, but when he told his disciples to sell their robes to buy a sword, he meant it. Yes, Micah, he was saying, the day will come when we can beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, but that day is not today. The metaphor for us, especially on Easter, is powerful. On Easter we remember that Jesus himself was a victim of terrible violence, with a spear in his side. He was a casualty of the principled upheaval he had perpetuated. And yet Easter is a celebration. Because those who knew and loved Jesus became charged with his presence after his death. They called it a resurrection and in a sense they were clearly right. Something of Jesus rose from the grave and his vision of Peace, and the struggle that it takes to get there, lives on to this day. He was willing to let go of everything, even his own life, in the name of the ultimate victory of that vision.
And so on Easter we gather to celebrate victories that are hard won. We remember that we sometimes have to go through the painful stuff – not around it or over it or under it – to come out the other side. And when we do, our own personal version of the Kingdom of God becomes possible. On Easter we celebrate the unique kind of Peace that Jesus taught — the mature, full-bodied peace that comes after the struggle, the calm after a storm, the dawn after the night. This was the Peace that Jesus lived and died for. This was the Peace that lived on after his death. And this is the Peace that we glimpse in our best dreams, with our most faithful imaginations, and in our moments of greatest courage. In its perennial resurrection we find hope.