No to Empires--February 28, 2023

No to Empires--February 28, 2023

“Again, the devil took [Jesus] to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, ‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Away with you, Satan! for it is written, Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’ Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him. [Matthew 4:8-11]

The end doesn't justify the means for Jesus. 

That's the long and the short of it. We Christians do indeed confess that Jesus is Lord of Lords and King of Kings and the very Son of God... but he isn't willing to play the devil's game to skip the cross and grab a crown.  In fact, Jesus makes it pretty clear that whatever his "kingdom" actually looks like, it isn't the sort of kingdom, empire, or government that the world is used to.  Jesus isn't interested in setting up a kingdom, a nation, or a government in his name--he's just not.  And he's certainly not interested in what the world calls "greatness" and "splendor" at the cost of avoiding the cross.  

That's really what's at stake here in this final scene from the temptation story in Matthew's Gospel: it's whether Jesus will take the path of suffering love and servant-leadership that inevitably leads to a cross, or whether Jesus will look for a detour and follow the route of every king, Caesar, pharaoh, or emperor before and since, that sells out for power.  It is a question of whether Jesus will try to be a king like the world recognizes kings, or whether he will subvert the whole notion of power by laying down his life, even at the hands of the empire, on a cross.

Sometimes, I think we get this confused, and we end up treating the cross like it's an unfortunate mistake, as if things would have just been better if Jesus could have been crowned king and ruled in place of Herod, and the story would have had a nice happy ending.  But that makes the mistake of thinking that God's Reign is just one more kingdom, one more government, like any other, that words through coercion, domination, and force.  That's where the devil makes a critical mistake, honestly--he seems to think [or at least he wants Jesus to think] that Jesus' kind of kingship will look like the thrones, palaces, and armies of every other kingdom, and that Jesus would be willing to pay whatever price necessary--even bowing down to worship the Accuser himself--in order to achieve that goal.  But that's not what Jesus has come for--there is no kingdom that can be separated from the way of the cross.  The Reign of God will never be the entity crucifying its enemies or dominating them into submission--God's reign will always be willing to bear a cross in love for those enemies, and to lay down life for their good.  That's how Jesus' kind of kingdom works: the basin and the towel, not the scepter and the sword.

I'm reminded of a line from the great 20th century missiologist and theologian Lesslie Newbigin, who put it this way:  "The resurrection is not the reversal of a defeat but the proclamation of a victory.  The King reigns from the tree. The reign of God has indeed come upon us, and its sign is not a golden throne but a wooden cross."  In the wilderness, the Tempter compels a choice from Jesus--which sort of kingdom is he pursuing?  Is Jesus building an empire, with himself at the top, compelling obedience at the point of a sword and conquering all who dissent, or is Jesus creating a new kind of community where the last are put first and the greatest take the roles of servants?  The devil bets hard that Jesus will fall for making himself a new Caesar, Herod, or Pharaoh--and he loses.  Jesus says no, knowing, however that the choice is also the choice to be willing to go to a cross as the crucified one, rather than as the executioner.  He will not settle for being one more king like all the others, and he certainly won't bend the knee to Satan in order to do it.  

We need to be clear about this, because to be totally honest, for an awful lot of Christian history, we've gotten this part wrong... and we're still getting it wrong in so many circles of Respectable Religion.  As I write, it is the anniversary of the Edict of Thessalonica, the official proclamation, made on Feb. 27-28, 380AD, that made Christianity [in particular the kind described by the Nicene Creed] the official religion of the Empire--and more to the point, punished with death those who strayed from that official doctrine.  The Emperor Theodosius no longer just permitted Christianity--he pledged to kill those who didn't fit "orthodoxy," and from there on it's been damnably easy for us to kill people or grab for political power while telling ourselves we're doing it in the name of Jesus.  As 20th century writer Jacques Ellul put it, “When Satan offers to give him all the kingdoms of the earth, Jesus refuses, but the church accepts.”  And we've been doing it ever since.

We still live in a culture where it dangerously tempting to try and force the way of Jesus into the mechanism of the state, the crown, and the scepter.  We always tell ourselves we have the best of intentions, and we use the talk of wanting to be a "godly nation," but that's exactly the point at which we have fallen for Satan's trick where Jesus doesn't.  There is no way to build an empire, a kingdom, a nation, or a government and make it a "Christian" one, any more than you can have a "Christian" kind of nuclear missile or a Jesus-endorsed genocide.  Jesus isn't after those kinds of empires and kingdoms--he is seeking after us, to gather us into a new kind of humanity that includes people of all nations, tribes, languages, and lands.  Until we understand that, we'll always keep falling for the devil's same old snake-oil sales-pitch where Jesus knew to say "No."

So maybe that's where we need to land for today:  in our own time and place, we're still called to echo Jesus' "No" to the attempt to wed the Reign of God to the ways of Empire. We're still called to say "No" to grabbing for political influence or governmental power in the name of building an empire, a kingdom, or a nation "for him." Jesus had that option and chose against it--we would do well to trust that he knows what he's doing.  Today we are called into something better than one more empire in a long line of empires--we are gathered into the community of the One who reigns from a cross.

Lord Jesus, teach us to echo your No to the temptation of building empires and acquiring glory, so that we can say Yes to your Reign of self-giving cruciform love.