Following in the Steps of Jesus: Peace
The Rev. Mark Sherwindt, Pastor
Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church
Epiphany 6: February 10-11, 2007
This weekend we end our shortened season of Epiphany with a single reading from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, which in Luke's Gospel is delivered from the plain. There are a series of blessings and woes directed to the poor and rich respectively. But I would like to make believe that Lent will arrive later than it does, and take a look at more of Jesus' Sermon from the Plain, like the very next text on love. “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also…. If you love those who love you, what's so special about that? Even ordinary sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what's so special about that? Even ordinary sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what's new about that? Even ordinary sinners with no special claim to being set apart as God's people and Jesus' followers lend to others expecting to receive as much again. But I say to you, love your enemies, do good, lend expecting nothing in return. Then, your reward will be great, and you will be children of God. Be merciful as your heavenly Father is merciful.” [Luke 6: 27-36] That's what it means to be holy. That's what it means to be faithful. That's what it means to be chosen as God's people and called to be followers of Jesus Christ.
Our Sunday School class has been reading a letter written to pastors and congregations by Bishop Mark Hanson of the ELCA asking us to take another look at the war in Iraq. In our conversations about this war back in 2003, and more recently with our reintroduction to Jesus' call for a Jubilee Year in the Gospel of Luke, we've rehashed some of the old stuff that it's important to rehash, namely, that early Christianity followed Jesus' teachings about peace with a stance we know as principled pacifism. Walking in the way of the cross seemed inseparable from such admonitions in life as Jesus' call to love even your enemies and turn the other cheek. Just look at Jesus, who gave his life on the cross while we were yet enemies of God [Romans 5:10], so that we might become friends with the One who is the way that leads to true life. [John 14:6a]
Participating in the violence of war was not a big issue for early Christians, since they were a small fringe group of little or no interest to Roman recruiters for soldiers to represent Rome on the battlefield. However, three hundred years of explosive growth turned that small group of Twelve into the dominant religious movement alive in the Roman world, and with the baptism of Constantine, Christians found themselves standing among the powerful, with an increasing sense of responsibility for improving the world in which they had increasing influence and real power among the movers and shakers. Christians began to look for ways to justify our participating in the violence of defending the State through war and keeping the peace in our neighborhoods through local policing. The dominant position in the church shifted from principled pacifism to just war; and as Lutherans, we stand with Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants in embracing our responsibilities to work for justice and peace, using the tools of violent force if we must, as part of our call to be faithful Christians.
The long and the short of this brief history on war and peace in the life of the church, as I confessed to our Sunday School class last week, is that in my mind I am a principled pacifist, in basic agreement with the historic peace churches who see so clearly the peace-making Jesus we meet in the Gospel of Luke and remind us about the pacifist stance of the early church; but in my gut, I am a Lutheran realist embracing what often emerges as the compelling need to use the power we possess to end the brutality tyrants often inflict on the defenseless. If my neighbor is suffering at the hands of a brutal oppressor, and I have influence and can act to end the tyrant's reign of terror, then how can I not advise action? That's the thinking behind Just War, short for justifying our participation in the violence of war. That was the thinking behind Dietrich Bonhoeffer's willingness to join with those who plotted Hitler's assassination. That was the thinking behind our entrance into the Great Wars. That was our thinking behind the Gulf Wars, first in the 1990s and now for the last four years. Christians in the Western world have had influence with the powerful since the baptism of Constantine. The question and imperative has always been the same. If we can use our influence and power to end oppression, brutality, and the terror of madmen, then how could we not attempt to try?
The trouble with the power of violent force is that it doesn't open as many doors as we would like to imagine. Many among us have raised the concern that failure in Iraq could create a huge mess. The trouble is that many of us can see that our early successes in Iraq have done a pretty good job in creating quite a mess, too. Violent force didn't open as many doors as we thought, or hoped. We proved that we could topple Saddam in record time; but that didn't bring us any closer to peace and order. That may have been the wisdom that led Jesus to the cross as the form our love must take if we are trying to find the way that leads to peace. That seems to be what early Christians thought; but then again, they didn't have the influence and the power that we think we have. That's why it's worth taking another look back at the fact that Jesus' views on the violence of the sword, whether it was wielded by local Zealots or Roman rulers, was the same, namely, rejection of the sword as the way to peace. It's not only here in the sermon from the plain; we can see it in the wilderness where he faced temptations that would revisit him during the course of his brief ministry among us. Think, for instance, of the perfect continuity of witness between the words we hear from Jesus' lips and the life that wound up on the cross. Let's face it, there on the cross we see a man who loved his enemies, a man whose righteousness was greater than that of the Pharisees, one who being rich in God became poor for us, who gave his robe to those who stole his cloak, who prayed for those who abused him. How much clearer need the dots be connected and the lines of continuity drawn? The cross is not an unexpected detour on the way to heavenly glory, nor it is a hurdle to be cleared on the way to arriving at the gates of the kingdom. The cross is the way. It is Jesus' choice, revealing a good deal about the form and the content of the way that leads to true life and lasting peace.
Of course, debates continue about the connection between the life Jesus gives and the way he calls us to live; but none of these debates about past and present faithfulness should distract us from seeing the obvious. In every layer of New Testament witness - from the writings of Paul in 1st Corinthians to the pastoral epistles that came much later - there is one point, and one point only, where models of imitating Jesus and Christ's call to follow him completely converge, and that point is focused clearly on the cross. [John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, pp. 95-97] It is clear in Luke's Gospel that the cross cuts a path between insurrection advocated by holy warriors like the Zealots and capitulating to the Romans with establishment-types like the Sadducees. The cross cuts a path between withdrawing to the wilderness with the Essenes to avoid getting stained by the world's many messes and accommodating the world by kneeling before its claims of power. Jesus faced that temptation in the wilderness [Luke 4:5-8], and he faced it down again with Peter bringing his sword to the Garden of Gethsemane. “Enough of this!” he demands [Luke 22:51], as he chooses the cross over the violence of resistance, refusing as well to bow before Pilate as the source of his own power.
Many have claimed to be imitating Jesus in the choices they made when following Jesus. For Francis of Assisi, it was imitating Jesus with the vows of poverty and celibacy. With the Jesus Movement of the 1970s, it was long hair and sandals, and Jesus' down-to-earth, back-to-nature, country preaching. But the New Testament follows none of these moves. “There is but one realm in which the concept of imitation holds - but there it holds in every strand of the New Testament literature…. This is at the point of the concrete social [and political] meaning of the cross…. Servanthood replaces dominion, forgiveness absorbs hostility. ” This is the one place where we are “bound by the New Testament to 'be like Jesus'.” [TPoJ, p. 134] Yoder's book, the Gospel of Luke, the life of the church in the Book of Acts, the ministry of Jesus and the message of the cross: all of these factors reinforce the relevance of the tensions between the principled pacifism of the earthly Jesus and the Christian realism of mainline churches. We learn more about peace when we reflect on this contrast. Just think about the mess holy warriors are making of Iraq, and compare that with the movements of Gandhi, King, and Mandela, all of whom acknowledged having learned from Jesus the connections between the disciplines of suffering love and the way to peace. We're not going to get any closer to peace by following holy war jihadists in Iraq. We are much better off when we remember that the further we stray from the principled pacifism of the Jesus we meet in the Gospel of Luke, the harder it becomes to use the power of violent force to find peace, secure order, and establish justice. It is not the sword that leads to peace, but the cross. It seems counter-intuitive, I know. But all we can do is pray that we'll learn from Jesus what Paul meant when he said, “We preach Christ crucified, stumbling block to folks looking for miracles and foolishness to the worldly wise, but to those who believe it is the wisdom of God's ways displayed in the power of God's love.” [1st Corinthians 1: 22-24] Indeed. Amen