More Like Prayer 4

Was Jesus political? Was his mission to form a “political body”? Was he withdrawn from society forming a conventicle? Was he out to transform the powers? How do you see these questions?

John Howard Yoder’s last book, published posthumously on the basis of his lectures in Warsaw (Poland), Nonviolence – a Brief History: The Warsaw Lectures , devotes a lecture to “Jesus and Nonviolent Liberation.”

Some think Jesus’ vision was shaped by the imminent end of history, others that he was much more personalistic — to the one-on-one relations of life, others that he came with a singular focus on setting the stage for dying for our sins, and yet others are so overwhelmed by his deity that he only seems human in these issues and questions.

Yoder does something in this chp that, I am quite happy to say, strikes a chord with me in that he maps what I have called the “Lukan thread” of a socially-shaped ecclesial body, a vision of the church as a kingdom politic. So he looks at the Magnificat in Luke 1:46-55, John’s words in Luke 3:10-14, the magi in Matthew 2, the temptation of Jesus where “Son of God” means “king” (of Israel, the world), the synagogue sermon in Luke 4:16-30, the blessings and woes of Luke 6:20-26, John 6’s words about bread and then his “hard words,” and bearing the cross in Luke 9 and the Last supper where in Luke he speaks of deconstructing the sense of power and kingship among the Gentile rulers … to the temptation in the Garden, where he was not tempted to withdraw but “to lead a righteous revolution against the pagan empire” (90).

Jesus rejected that temptation in favor of forming a new people. The church, then, is both political and social — a kingdom politic in this world.

But not all agree, and Yoder addresses the false alternatives:

1. Choose between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of dogma. He is one and the same.
2. Choose between the prophet and the institution. The kingdom is an order, an institutional arrangement of the kingdom.
3. Choose between the catastrophic kingdom and the inner kingdom. It is both.
4. Choose between the political and the sectarian. And here is quintessential Yoderian theology: Jesus did not say “You can have your politics, and I shall do something else more important”; he said, “Your definition of polis, of the social, of the wholeness of man in his socialness, is perverted.”
5. Choose between the individual and the social.

On this Good Friday, let us remember that One who died on the Cross both forgives us and unleashes a cruciform politic among us.