The Anti-Christ is Alive and Well in American Christianity

From a sermon on I John 4:1-6 I preached a few years ago (with a few editorial emendations):

Many Christians believe that God is love and rightly so. But they have been told that the non-violence of Jesus is peripheral to his person and his work.  Why? Because it has tacitly been accepted that Jesus believed that God is retributive.  Many believe that God sacrificed Jesus to satisfy holy honor.  God’s love is tempered with justice and honor.  For every divine yin there is a divine yang.  God is not pure Love, God is mixed love in this view.  Loving one minute, vengeful and retributive, even murderous the next. This is a rather dysfunctional God.  If God were to act that way out on our streets, we would have him or her arrested.

What is being revealed in Jesus was the misapprehension of God throughout the history of the people of God, both Jewish and Christian. In the words of the Epistle to Diognetus, ‘violence is not an attribute of God.’  The Hebrew Scriptures are essential for discerning this, for they contain both true and mythic understandings of God.  Jesus, and the early church, made very clear that it is the non-retaliatory character of this God that was key and core of their preaching and teaching.  It is the very theme of ‘forgiveness.’

The God of the Gnostics is above forgiveness, for the dualist God has nothing to do with the material, the real. This God is about the world of ideas and thoughts, of spirit, of non-corporeality. This God will pillage, rape and murder in the name of truth, justice and liberty. This is not the God of Genesis.  That’s the problem.  When we confess God to be the ‘maker of heaven and earth’ we realize the sacred significance of all space and time, tissue and blood, relationships, the gooey stuff of our existence.  God is in everything.  This is what it means when it says, ‘and the Word became flesh.’

Some cling to their retributive God. Some desire justice.  Many are bitter.  But they feel out of balance.  They need a yin for a yang, a tit for a tat, an eye for an eye to get back in balance.  Their God is but a reflection of themselves, they are conflicted, merciless, pitiless dualists.

Some folks have been told that Jesus’ non-violence is peripheral in that his ethic was for an ‘interim period.’ Interestingly both the Dispensationalists and the Schweitzer-Weiss school would agree with this.  Jesus’ apocalyptic ethic belongs in the kingdom it is not for here and now.  For both Jesus was violent or condoned violence.  For the Dispensationalists, Jesus’ turning of the tables in the Temple functions as a warrant for saying Jesus displays wrath or gets angry.  For the scholars who see an apocalyptic Jesus, this apocalyptic is frequently framed in the context of mercenary Judaism and of national or patriotic violence.  A mistake is made when Christians fail to follow Jesus as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr or Thomas Merton or Daniel Berrigan or Pope Francis have followed Jesus.

If God is violent and Jesus is non-violent, one can dispense with Jesus and his teachings. Conservatives and liberals, Catholics, Orthodox and Protestant alike, scholars, laypersons and clergy have all done this.  But if God is non-violent, that is, if God is love and if Jesus is violent then we cannot say that Jesus reveals the Father and rightly so.  But if God does not retaliate and Jesus reveals this in his life death and resurrection then we have the necessary connection between the Father and the Son spoken of by the Johannine community.

The spirit of anti-christ is the spirit of the Warrior Jesus and the Just God. It is the ultimate in idolatry.  Why?  Because we have created it.  Idols are of human construction.  Idols are very bad perceptions, distorted interpretations of revelation.  If you start with the Just God you have to have a Warrior Jesus if you want to assert an identity between the Father and the Son.  If you start with a Vindictive Jesus you will either need a Just God or you will reject any connection between Jesus and the true God.  Either way the Gnostic conclusion has been reached, there are (at least) two Gods.

You see, for the early Church, Jesus perfectly imitated the Father, Jesus desired the Father’s will and only the Father’s will. The Father is the Creator, the Father has everything to do with the creation and with our brokenness.  It is into this ‘flesh’ that Jesus comes to ‘show us the Father’ (John 14).  And it has everything to do with our imitation of him, our following him, our hearing of his voice, our thinking the way he thought, our loving God the way Jesus loved God.  He lives his life in us, through us.  We are recreated ‘through him.’  We become ‘like him’ (I John 3:2).

Now how many of us believe that God is good, that God is love? How many of us are tired of a retributive God, a god of human origin, a Satan in disguise?  How many of us want desperately to believe that Jesus did not believe this of his Father?  How many of us are willing to take the path Jesus took to discover the real, pure unadulterated Love of the Daddy, the maker of everything?  How many of us are willing to let go of violence not only in our theology, but our liturgy, our doctrines, our ethics and our life?

We are faced with many anti-christs today, fake Jesus’ being sold as the real deal across the globe. This is true both within and without the church, but primarily within.  It is time for us to ‘test the spirits.’  It is critical for us to longer keep our heads buried in the sand but to wake up to the good news that is indeed the gospel, the gospel of both ‘New’ and ‘Old’ Testaments.  The gospel is simply the revelation on God’s side, and the discovery, on our side, of God existing as pure Love and Light in whom there is no darkness at all and this is what is revealed in Jesus’ life and can also be revealed in our lives as we follow his ‘true and living way’ (John 14:6).