Reign of Christ Sunday
Texts: John 18:33-37;
Dan 7:9-10, 13-14; Rev 1:4b-8
See also the accompanying Sermon Notes
RECOVERING THE NONVIOLENT GOD OF JESUS
UNDER THE SHADOW OF CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM
Happy New Year! Today is like “New Year’s Eve” in the lectionary. We are ending what’s called Year B, the year in which we feature Mark’s Gospel. Next Sunday, the First Sunday of Advent, we begin Year C, the year of featuring Luke’s Gospel.
It also happens to have been a year that I’ve been here as your pastor.1 Perhaps it’s a good time to offer a recap of sorts. My ‘thing,’ my passion, as a pastoral leader is to propose to the Church that we are in need of revitalizing our basic Gospel Message. When we look around us each Sunday at the relatively empty pews, especially missing our children’s and grandchildren’s generations, I believe a main reason is that our Gospel message has lost its relevance to speak to the crisis issues which our children and grandchildren face — and us, too, of course. We have given ourselves over to an overfocus on the afterlife, on going to heaven when we die, and lost why it is that the Gospel is such Good News to the whole creation, right here, right now. So let me give an overview of what I’ve been preaching this year, which I refer to as the Gospel of New Creation. (I didn’t make this term up myself; many others are referring to the Gospel in this way.2)
1. The promise of life after death remains vital, but as part of a much larger promise to renew all of creation — New Creation — in which the effects of human sin are defeated, and God’s power of life is becoming all-in-all.
2. The project of New Creation begins with the launching of God’s reign on earth through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. Jesus tells us straight out: ‘It’s all about the coming of God’s reign into the world’ (Mark 1:15). In Mark’s Gospel we see this reign through Jesus’ healing so many people, while crossing our human boundaries of division. He offers healing not only to all people but, even more importantly, to humanity itself — that we are broken and divided. Because . . .
3. Human reigns are characterized by scapegoating divisiveness, where the effects of mimetic rivalry leads to conflict — we’ve talked about how our way of desiring leads to conflict3 — and we try to contain it by the use of political violence. Throughout history, our rulers rule over others with these oppressive powers that we have named as “nationalism.” We live in a constant state of war between communities of people. And let’s be honest about this: the ultimate faith of our human reigns is in the power of violence to try to contain violence. We almost worship our militaries. Our gods are gods of punishment and war. Gods of retribution.
4. But the incredibly Good News is that Jesus came to launch God’s reign on and for the earth. ‘God so loved the world that he sent. . . .’ And this launching of God’s reign is chiefly by going to the cross and suffering the typical human violence of human reigns, in a pivotal act of nonviolent engagement with the powers of violence. The ultimate faith of God’s reign, the faith of followers of Jesus, is in the power of love to bring life and peace — the first fruits of which we see in the resurrection on Easter. God’s promise that Love wins.
5. But we also need to be clear that the God of Jesus is a God of love, and so a God that is completely nonviolent. And I think the revelation that God is nonviolent is the part of the Gospel which we’ve particularly lost [the central point of this sermon].
Today’s Gospel Reading offers us a precise picture. As Jesus stands condemned by Pilate, we are clearly told the difference between human reigns and God’s reign: “If my kingdom were from this world, my supporters would have fought to stop me being handed over to the Judeans.” We used the translation of pre-eminent New Testament scholar N.T. Wright,4 who makes the case about this passage which articulates my message to you this past year.5 I won’t read the whole thing. You can read it in today’s Sermon Notes. I do want to elaborate further, though, on what this means for our day-to-day Christian lives. Doesn’t it mean that we adopt a politics of love that centers on nonviolent engagement with the politics and powers of violence? What does that look like?
The first three centuries of Christian witness and life were centered around nonviolent engagement of the Powers in the Roman Empire. The Greek word for “witness,” martyr, named the Christian witness — that you’re willing to become a martyr. When the Church allied itself with the Empire in the Fourth Century, becoming “Christendom,” that nonviolent engagement with the nationalistic powers of violence was no longer associated with the Gospel. Fifteen or sixteen centuries passed in which the most poignant examples of nonviolent engagement with the power of violence were from indigenous peoples against Christendom. They had to stand against ‘Christian’ powers of violence. To me, this goes beyond tragic. It has meant a betrayal of the Gospel. It has meant a mixing the human gods of war with Jesus’ God of love such that we completely lost the central revelation that the God of love is completely nonviolent. Christendom had a two-faced god (essentially, a return to polytheism, masquerading as monotheism6). And I don’t think we can rectify this betrayal of the Gospel until nonviolent engagement with the powers once again becomes central to Christian practice.
Ironically, it wasn’t until a Hindu man, Mahatma Gandhi, began to seriously practice Jesus’ nonviolent engagement, turning it into a mass movement against the Christendom power of the British Empire. I hear that a new movie about Dietrich Bonhoeffer just came out, one we might want to talk about.7 Well, Bonhoeffer was serious enough about learning the nonviolent engagement of Gandhi to the point of wanting to go to India and meet him.8 Martin Luther King, Jr., did go to India to learn from Gandhi’s disciples.9 It is because of this Hindu follower of Jesus that nonviolence has once again begun to takes its place at the center of the Christian Gospel.
So let’s take a brief look at where we see this in the Gospels themselves. In Mark’s Gospel this past year, the epitome of nonviolent engagement is the cross itself. Before that, we see it constantly in the ministry of Jesus through the ways in which he continually crosses usual boundaries, like touching lepers and healing Gentiles. But I believe we can also see it through acts like the one in the last scene just before the Passion Narrative begins: that story of the “Widow’s Might” that we read two weeks ago (Mark 12:38-44). We interpreted her giving of her last ‘penny’ as a protest against the greed of the wealthy who had, according to Jesus, “devoured her house.” She shamed them with her ‘generosity.’
While the cross is the epitome of nonviolent engagement, it’s important to know that there are many steps that can be taken before making the decision to offer up one’s very life, like Jesus. The movements of nonviolent engagement begin in many smaller ways. The other most important passage of examples from the Gospel is the one which Gandhi himself keyed upon, from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:
Jesus continued, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. (Matt 5:38-41)
Let me tell you the story of meeting Walter Wink in 1994 and 1995, who pioneered the theme of nonviolent engagement with the powers of violence as the heart of the Christian Gospel in his 1992 book Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination.10 I met him at my first-ever Girardian meeting in Chicago in November 1994. It was kind of funny how we met. I had never met him — didn’t know what he looks like. And we happened to be sitting right next to each other. So, when they were passing around a sign-up sheet to log our attendance, I saw him sign-in as “Walter Wink.” Then I had to suppress my “fan-boy” thing, to not go crazy on the spot, “Wow, I’m sitting next to Walter Wink!” I waited until after the presentation when we met in much calmer fashion.
Then I met him again the very next year, as he gave a presentation on his book right here in Racine at the Siena Center. Since I had met him a few months earlier, he enlisted me in acting out the nonviolence protests of Matthew 5:38-41 — which I will act out for you this morning. I’ve asked Willi to come up for the first one. [Asking Willi as we face each other:] “How do you strike me on the right cheek?” [Answer:] “With my left fist.” “Right! Like a boxer with a left hook. Except in ancient cultures like Rome, you weren’t supposed to use your left hand for such things. So how do you hit me on the right cheek?” [Answer, demonstrating the motion:] “I guess with my right hand with a back-hand slap.” “Exactly! It’s the blow of a person in a position of superiority over another. A master giving a back-hand slap to a slave. Or, unfortunately, sometimes the strike of a husband against his wife. Or, even more unfortunately, sometimes the slap of a parent against a child. So when Jesus is saying that if you’re in a position of relative powerlessness, offer the left cheek also. He is saying, ‘hit me now like your equal. Hit me here with your fist.’ It would be shaming the other person. Thank you, Willi. You can take you seat again.”
For the second part of Jesus’ scenarios of nonviolent engagement, this is where my having met Walter Wink the year before was relevant. He handed me gym shorts before the presentation started and asked me to put them on underneath my trousers in the bathroom. Then he brought me up to demonstrate what happened when someone sues you for your outer cloak. If you take them off right there, it can be shaming. I took off my shirt, and then I began to pull down my trousers. There’s a bit of a shock until everyone can see that I have gym shorts underneath. What if you also begin to take off your undergarments, becoming naked? A very shaming thing to do in that culture. You’re ‘exposing,’ pun intended, your opponent’s unjust behavior.
For the third scenario, about walking the second mile, it’s helpful to know that Roman law of the time permitted soldiers to force anyone to carry their heavy packs for a mile but no further. So to carry it the second mile meant that you were putting the soldier in the position of breaking the law. Again, a shaming thing to do. Do you see how these are similar to the story of the Widow’s Might? Shaming the powers that seek to dominate you? Protesting their injustice?
Let’s end with a quote from the person who took Gandhi’s movement and brought it to our politics here in the United States, Martin Luther King, Jr., from his Christmas sermon of 1967:
Love is understanding, creative, redemptive good will toward all men. . . . We must never let up in our determination to remove every vestige of segregation and discrimination from our nation, but we shall not in the process relinquish our privilege to love.
I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many sheriffs, too many white citizens’ councilors, and too many Klansmen of the South to want to hate, myself; and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say: “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good, and so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you. . . . But be assured that we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.” (A Testament of Hope, 256-5711)
Are we about to see a rise of nationalistic violence in this New Year ahead? Can we begin in prayer, and through a relearning of the Gospel, to ground ourselves, prepare ourselves for living into the promise of nonviolent engagement with the Powers — the promise which trusts deep in our hearts why we do this. It’s because Love Wins! Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, November 24, 2024
Notes
1. My first sermon at this congregation — Bethania Lutheran in Racine, WI — as its regular preacher was November 5, 2023. Most of this year has been preaching about revitalizing the Gospel message under the shadow of Christian Nationalism.
2. A primary pioneer in this regard has been superstar New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, beginning with his book The Resurrection of the Son of God.
3. Behind all my preaching are the insights on René Girard’s Mimetic Theory. In this current parish, the book I’ve used to introduce his work, as a supplement to preaching, is The Ideas of René Girard, edited by David Cayley (2019).
4. N.T. Wright, The New Testament for Everyone: A Fresh Translation (Zondervan, 2023). Originally published as The Kingdom New Testament: A Contemporary Translation (HarperOne, 2011).
5. I’m referring to a long quote in the Sermon Notes from N.T. Wright & Michael F. Bird, Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies (Zondervan, 2024), 35-36.
6. I did not state this in the spoken sermon, but I emphasize it in the aftermath: Christendom theology is effectively a return to polytheism. All the energy spent on articulating Trinitarian monotheism in the early centuries of Christendom I view as mostly a waste of time since they missed the main point: when New Testament writers like John clearly state that God is love, then any allowances of God as the old violent gods of wrath becomes polytheism. It is this polytheism of Christendom that explains the modern experience of atheism. The revelation of God as love, and as completely nonviolent, has been the betrayal of the core Christian revelation which has led to a worsening of human violence and a justifiable rejection of “Christianity.”
7. The movie is titled Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin., produced by Angel Studios (2024). It is being manipulated by Christian Nationalists like Eric Metaxas (whose roundly criticized book, by the way, is more generous in its title: Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Martyr. Prophet. Spy.) and has been roundly criticized as being susceptible to such manipulation because it so highly emphasizes his involvement in an assassination attempt to Hitler, to the detriment of what most of his life was about. “Spy. Assassin.” way overplays that moment in his life to the detriment of his being a pastor, theologian, seminary leader, consistent resister to Hitler and Nazism, and martyr. For more on the criticism, see the website for the International Bonhoeffer Society: https://bonhoeffersociety.org/
8. See, for example, Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Knopf, 2014), 220-22. Marsh helpfully cites letters regarding the matter in Dietrich Bonhoeffer: London, 1933-35, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 13 (Fortress Press, 2007), 225-30.
9. See, for example, King’s own sermon describing the trip in March 1959, in Martin Luther King, Jr., The Radical King, edited and introduced by Cornel West (Beacon Press, 2015), 23-38.
10. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Fortress Press, 1992). His analysis of Matthew 5:38-42 which follows can be found on pages 175-86.
11. Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by James M. Washington (HarperCollins, 1986), 256-57.
