A Jesus-Kind Of Struggle--September 13, 2024

A Jesus-Kind of Struggle--September 13, 2024

"Consider him who endured such hostility against himself from sinners, so that you may not grow weary or lose heart. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood." [Hebrews 12:3-4]

Every time I come across this passage in Hebrews, I am brought up short. It astounds me that we seem so out of touch in our age of comfortable, lazy (even lethargic) Christianity from what we so staggeringly obvious to the early generations of Jesus' followers. We seem to have forgotten--either by accident or by willful ignorance--that the first generations of Christians assumed they would be brought into conflict with the powers of the day... and that their way of responding to that conflict would be suffering love, rather than threatening bluster at their would-be persecutors.

Let me just unpack for a moment what the writer of these verses is saying. He starts with Jesus as our example, as if to say, "When you are going through difficult times, or you start to feel like the world is out to get you, remember how Jesus dealt with that, because he is the hallmark. And Jesus not only endured hostility from the lynch mob and the political and religious authorities who strung him up on a cross, but he responded to their hatred with self-giving love." Jesus sets the bar. More than that, he charts out the particular course we, his disciples, are to follow in the world (that fits, too, since just a sentence or two before in Hebrews, Jesus is referred to as the "pioneer" of our faith--like he is the one blazing the trail that we follow in).

And quite simply, Jesus' response to struggles with others was the kind of transforming love that would not answer hate with hate, but even laid his life down for his enemies. Jesus defeats the power of hatred, not with more hatred, but by refusing to accept hatred's terms. Jesus defeats the power of fear, not with his own litany of intimidating threats, but by refusing to be intimidated by the blowhards in authority who say, "Don't you know that I have power to crucify you?" Jesus defeats the power of violence, not by breaking out his own celestial army, but by taking the nails and exposing the ultimate impotence of the killers by rising from the dead. Rather like the famous line of Booker T. Washington, often cited as, "I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him," Jesus simply refuses to accept the terms that evil plays by--and thereby evil is undone.

Now, that much should seem pretty basic theology, like Christianity 101. The beating heart of our faith is that God's greatest victory came, not by sending in angel armies and a conquering hero but as a crucified homeless rabbi who rises from the dead regardless of what the Romans think. As Jim Wallis has eloquently noted, the Romans placed an imperial seal on his tomb (see Matthew 27), so when Jesus rose from the dead and broke the seal, it was an act of civil disobedience against the empire. Resurrection is resistance. And, more than that, it is a resistance that refuses to kill or threaten or even hate the ones who placed the seal on the tomb.  There's no way around it: the way of Jesus will always involve a struggle against hatred, evil, and death--but not one that resorts to using those tactics in the fight.  

But now, notice how the writer to the Hebrews takes that insight and turns it back to us--the people who dare to name the name of Jesus and claim to follow in his footsteps. As soon as he has invoked the example of Jesus, who endured hostility from his opponents, the writer of Hebrews says to his struggling readers, "Look, you all haven't even had to resist to the point of having your blood shed yet! It may come to that, but let's be clear about the lengths Jesus went to in his resistance to evil. Jesus laid down his life--so that's what we should be prepared for as well. And then just as Jesus broke the power of death with his own resurrection, we'll trust that we will be raised up to new life as well."

Look at what the writer of Hebrews takes for granted--that if it comes to a conflict between us and the powers of the day, or us and a hostile society, we will be the ones who offer up our lives, our blood, and our selves, in the name of Christ's love. We will not be the ones shedding blood. We will not be the ones threatening to shed blood. In fact, we will not be holding the tools for killing at all--the writer of Hebrews cannot even fathom that as a possibility. What he sees is that, yes, sometimes, the followers of Jesus will unavoidably run into conflicts with the powers of the day who want us to worship Caesar, bow down to Nebuchadnezzar's statue, or kowtow to Herod. And when those powers demand that we give them their allegiance, we will say, simply, "No." But the writer of Hebrews seems to take it as a given that we will not point a sword or a gun or a drone at anyone back. We will simply say "No," because we are not afraid of what they can do to our bodies, and because we will not let them "degrade our souls" (like Booker T. Washington says) by making us answer their hate with hate, their threats with threats of our own, their violence with ours against them.

This is the really and truly radical thing about the actual New Testament-era Christian community: for at least the first three hundred years of our faith, the default assumption of the Christian faith was that some wicked power or imperial blowhard might try to kill us for our faith in Jesus and his Lordship, and if they did, we would keep on loving Jesus and loving our neighbors, no matter what they threatened or did to us. But we would not kill them or threaten them back. That is not our way--because it is not the way of Jesus. The writer of Hebrews assumes this, because it seems so blatantly obvious to him... and yet we live in a time when folks will often try to pair their Respectable Religiosity with some thought that we have to be able to threaten people back with weapons in case we get cornered.

The mindset goes something like this: "We need to have the tools of violence at the ready in case some tyrannical government starts telling us to do things we don't like! We need to have our swords and guns and whatever else at the ready so that we can resist the voices of tyrants! And if we don't have blades or bullets to beat them back, Christianity will be defeated and destroyed!" The only problem with this way of thinking is... well, everything. It completely forgets that for the first three hundred years, Christianity thrived--it spread like wildfire across the empire, even when it was brutally persecuted by the tyrannical government of the Roman Empire. And for all those generations, Christians were simply taught and trained to understand that their form of holy resistance was to look like Jesus--not killing but laying down their lives, not giving into hatred but responding with self-giving love. This was so obvious to them because they took it seriously that the Christian faith should produce lives that actually look like Jesus' life. So if Jesus' way of dealing with the powers hostile to him was to die at their hands and then rise in resistance against their imperial demands, then our way of practicing holy resistance will be with the same self-giving love. Like Walter Wink says so powerfully, "To have to suffer is different from choosing to suffer.... Martyrs are not victims, overtaken by evil, but hunters who stalk evil into the open by offering as bait their own bodies."

Sometimes you'll hear folks lob an argument that goes, "What will you do if they come for you and you don't have weapons to defend yourself with?" as though they don't really recall that the Christian faith is centered on the actual night in history when they came for Jesus and he refused to use weapons to defend himself, but chose to give his life up both for his followers and for his enemies. Like Jon Foreman sings it, "Love is the rebel song." So, in all seriousness, the answer to "What will you do if they come for you?" for an honest follower of Jesus is, "I will rise."

How does Maya Angelou put it?

"You may shoot me with your words,

You may but me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I'll rise."

That has been our strategy as the followers of Jesus from the beginning. It's just that from time to time--sometimes for many centuries at a time, even--we forget that is how our story goes. We forget what was obvious to the writer of Hebrews: when it comes to the struggle of this life, our resistance to the powers of evil is so deep and radical that it doesn't accept the terms of engagement that evil wants to use. We will resist against the powers of evil, hatred, and violence--but we will do so by offering ourselves up... and then, when they have done their worst, still we shall rise.

The followers of Jesus won't be the ones bearing torches and weapons, but will be the ones bearing the hatred and violence of others and responding with truth-telling love, like Jesus himself. That is to say, love is the shape of our resistance.  It is a struggle, to be sure... but it is a Jesus-kind of struggle.

Lord Jesus, shape our way in the world in the form of your suffering love. Let your cross be our resistance.