Blaspheming Jesus

There is a video of US Marines worshipping together that has now gone viral. They are singing a worship song titled “In the Days of Elijah.”

I am almost at a loss for words when it comes to a video like this. When I suggested on my Facebook Page that these Marines could not be worshipping the Living Lord Jesus but were instead valorizing the ‘Ba’al Jesus’ I was taken to task for ‘disrespecting our men and women in uniform.’

Let me say this plainly: if you chose to wear a military uniform, you are engaged in a profession that is oriented to war, violence and death. That is what you chose. If you do so out of the best of intentions, I respect that.

But please…do not bring God into it. And whatever you do, do not bring Jesus into it.

Jesus was a pacifist, the recent work of a certain New Testament scholar notwithstanding. Jesus’ followers may have carried arms, but Jesus never did. Jesus never encouraged his followers to use those arms and short of commanding them to give them up as he had done, he modeled for them a way of life that was completely non-violent.

And don’t use the ‘Temple episode’ as a justification for violence. I have dealt with that text earlier this month in a blog here on Patheos. There is no way anyone can use this story to justify that Jesus was ‘violent.’ It is exegetically impossible.

To see these Marines worshipping Jesus to a triumphalist Christian praise song which calls upon the most violent characters of the Old Testament was for me, bordering on blasphemy.

It was Constantinianism, American civil religion, and what Luther called a ‘theology of glory’ all rolled into one.

I know most Christians won’t see it this way. I accept that. I know that many Christians will be irate. I understand that.

Jesus wasn’t executed because he was perceived as a militaristic threat. He was executed because he challenged the sacrificial hermeneutic which undergirded the system of Religious Empire of the Temple (which included those who were ‘zealous for the Lord’ a la Phineas) and the system of Political Empire which claimed Caesar as ultimate authority. It was this sacrificial understanding of life that Jesus challenged and which was the heart and soul of his mission: viz., to reveal the human tendency to ground social community on violence (the generative scapegoating mechanism) and to offer a vision of the Reign of God where forgiveness and love were the basis for all social relationships.

Jesus was not militant. His words were powerful, his critiques incisive, his denunciations robust, but he was never a personal threat to anyone. To suggest otherwise is to make him out to be that which he came to deconstruct or in other words to turn him into an ‘anti-Christ.’

Say what you will about the intentions of those who serve in the military, I do not judge them. Say what you will about those who go to war fighting for ‘freedom’ (when in reality they are almost always fighting for national interests in oil or other resources), I do not judge them.

But I will speak against those who profane the Jesus of the Gospels, the True Human, the Lord and Giver of Life and turn him into some Rambo on steroids, hell bent on the destruction of the enemy other.

If you don’t like it you best ask yourself this: Have you really understood the Jesus of the Gospels? Have you really followed the path of discipleship laid out in the Sermon on the Mount? Are you really willing to take up your cross (and not your AK-47) and follow him to certain death? Or are you more interested in ‘saving your life?’ If it is the latter you may just find that you have already lost it no matter how good a Christian you think you are.