The Relevance Of Our Irrelevance (And Vice Versa)

by Chris Haw

So, how can a people actually proclaim, “we have no king but God”? Ironically, the Christian claim is that the best place to look is the King of the Jews, the Messiah. This is the ultimate ironic reversal. This title had been in operation since the compromise for a king described above. Jesus saw his whole people’s history; he saw the places they had missed the Abrahamic plot, and he knew the prophetic heartbeat that had kept Israel true to its roots. And thus he began a radically imaginative path of embodying the upside down blessing of God’s people. He would “enter the promised land” but not with the pompousness of conquerors like Alexander the Great, but proclaiming that only the meek inherit the land. In the midst of the entire Mediterranean population looking to great power to centralize trade and protect the world, Jesus prophesies, “the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed” (Matthew 13:31); and only as a seed dies does it offer life. Of the political liturgy of inauguration and enthronement that all peoples have grown to salivate over, Jesus would make a mockery, riding a donkey and regarding the demonic theatrics of rulers as vastly inferior to the power of washing feet.

In all of this, Jesus wasn’t just a luminous individual, but the pinnacle of a great, tiny people, a people that, in following the pattern visible in the likes of Abraham and Sarah, are the salt of the earth, the light of the world. It’s like a microcosm of all that is good.

In [Jesus] all Israel is gathered together. In fact, all Israel is the faithful servant and beloved Son through whom God is now definitively acting in the world for the fulfillment of the divine plan, but here again God must begin with an individual as once God began with Abraham. Now everything depends on Jesus. He is the representative for all Israel.¹¹

Christians, then, are the people who call this Jesus their sovereign, their guide to all things on heaven and earth, their “Christ.”¹² He is their king, their president, their prime-minister, their Caesar. This word, Christ, is directly related to the position of David, the King of the Jews, the Messiah, the anointed one who restores and rules the Israelite Kingdom that had fallen apart by the hands of Assyria and Babylonia centuries prior. But this “restoring” and “ruling” is unlike any of the kings of the Gentiles. This king proclaims that the greatest should be the servant of all.

In light of this, Christians then, are those who are grafted into the people modeled in Jesus, to a people cultivated in the tradition of “no king but YHWH.” For these people Jesus would sit on their throne as “King,” mocked and crucified. He is the unking King. As Gentiles we look at the sardonic sign hanging above Jesus’ beaten and bloodied head, reading “King of the Jews,” and in response proclaim, “truly this is the Son of God!” For in this suffering love we truly see the nature of God — contrary to the more relevant and successful “Sons of God” in Jesus’ era, from Philip and Alexander the Great, to Caesar Augustus. But indeed, the Father of which Jesus is Son is very peculiar. To say that this God sends rain to water the crops of the just and unjust is not apparent to all the peoples of the world! This God is Love. Who is Caesar’s God?

FEARLESS DIFFERENCE

In our book, Shane and I try to illustrate dozens of potent embodiments of this creative critique of the patterns of so-called “civilization.” As we admire the example of that nomadic Aramæan couple, it is the extensions of that Spirit that should give us hope. But they are hard to find — as, by their nature, they are the underbelly of civilization, not its zenith. Some examples we find are the Amish and various neo- Anabaptist movements. We should let their peculiarity and prophetic choices make us uncomfortable.

One story I love to share is how a community of farmers in Belize have developed a very powerful culture. Once, when faced with a devastating act of theft, they found the thief and built him a house. They are in engaged in radical economic sharing, taking clues from economic forms of the Exodus tribes. They work together to design their own sustainable agriculture and work patterns. Groups like these are among the few cultures left (in Western civilization at least) that salt the world, keeping it from imploding into a singularity of mammon, spectacle, and imperial centralization. They have more integrity than I, and I will allow my conscience to be troubled by their presence in the world. Cultures like these have not subjected themselves to the rationale that to bless the world one must fit into it, that to shape culture one must provide a Christian version of YouTube.

There is a slew of lazy logic about “engaging culture” out there. It entails an oversimplified dualism: you either hole up as a sectarian tribalist or you “get involved.” You hear it everywhere: “you can’t just give up on the world, you have to make a difference.” The reality, I propose, is that that there exists a whole world of alternatives and practices in between these two apparent opposites. Not only that, but in operating under this dualism, the now popular Christian “engagement of culture” is in danger of failing to offer “culture” anything new of value. John Yoder, writing about the radial political nature of the Abrahamic people, puts it well,

[I]f in order to ‘be involved’ you commit yourself to values less clear or less imperative than your own, which are more acceptable because the ‘public’ out there already holds them, then your involvement adds nothing to the mix but numbers. Joining the majority on grounds that others already committed to, in favor of policies which others already support, winds up paradoxically having the same effect as abstention; it lets the values of the others be decisive.¹³

As stated from the beginning, the blessing trajectory of Abraham is for the whole world, but its mode of existence is through tiny peculiarity, not a “big solution.” Similarly, when I see an Amish person waiting at a stop light in a horse and buggy, I consider their fearless difference keeping the world (ever so slightly) from turning into the slothfully opulent denizens that the prophet Amos loathed. Their philosophy is not troubled with the questions, “Is everybody going to catch on?” “Is this the direction society is headed?” “Does this act of integrity make a difference?”¹⁴ Among the countless virtues of the biblical tradition, we should know by now that any act of integrity is good, regardless of whether it “changes the world.” It is by considering small pockets of integrity that we can interpret the offensive violence of Sodom and Gommorah: if we can manage to salt the world with just a few people of integrity, it might not all go up in smoke.

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Comments

Tim Leonard

My understanding of Jesus is that he was of Israel, the Northern Tribes, not Judah, the southern tribes that insisted upon a King and a temple. Israelites, as I recall, tried to be faithful to the desert, where God was -- exemplified in the feast of Succoth. When he entered Jerusalem on an ass, it was guerilla theater shining a light on the fact that Temple Worship and the corruption of the priests would destroy Israel. Some Jewish friends of mine understand the current State of Israel in the same way.

The Torah, then, written during the period of and within the culture of Judah is an admixture of justice, peace and bellicosity. (Kind of like Irish Catholicism.)

After 75 years of unprecedented peace with the indigenous tribes of Pennsylvania, the French and Indian War broke out, and the Pennsylvania Assembly was under pressure to join in. The Quakers who had dominated the assembly until that time withdrew, and became a people "apart." And yet, they did not abandon their commitment to the gospel, educating girls, blacks, and Indians, and writing tracts that eventually caught the attention of the British Parliament to abandon the slave trade.

Being in the world but not of the world is far from easy. Individuals and communities need to sort out how to resist the Powers -- how to be Israelites, as was Jesus.

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