A Political Messiah?

The principal weapon of our warfare against the powers and principalities of this world is not counter principles or propositions or political platforms or “Christian” legislation or electing the “right” political officials. It is Truth . . . and we seem more concerned about implementing the social implications of the gospel than the gospel itself, the fruit of which is to create a kingdom community that will demonstrate God’s rule on earth.

Christians have a lover’s quarrel with the world. Too many Christians want to change the world, not because they love the world but because they hate the world. The test of love’s radiance: does it both transcend and embrace the world? We do not suggest as some do that the church’s “justice mantras” are little more than socialist nuggets honeyed with Christian sweetness. But we do suggest that the widespread hunger for perfect justice is a reflection of the longing for lost meaning that can only be found in the One who “fills all in all.” Our “hunger for justice” is best turned into a hunger for the Just One, and going deeper in Him and in relationship with others.

The Holy One’s public ministry began only after He faced and outfaced three temptations. The most tantalizing of the three was the temptation to turn the kingdom of God into a political program. Jesus shook off the lure of political theology by stiffarming it with these words: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

What if Jesus had given in to the devil’s temptation and accepted the riches, the kingdoms, the power? What would He have been today? A great king? A president? The head of the UN? Jesus’ revolution was not about politics: He was not a political revolutionary. His revolution was a relational one in which He Himself would be Sword and Shield. Jesus didn’t choose the primacy of the powers of religion/politics or the powers of the individual; He chose a third way—His indwelling presence experienced and displayed through a community of followers who embody the kingdom of God in their corporate life together.

This is why the Jewish establishment rejected Jesus’ messiahship then, and Jewish scholars continue to critique his messianic claims today: the Messiah was supposed to gather Jewish exiles in Judea, overthrow the Roman oppressors, and establish a just kingdom on earth. Jesus did none of these things. To accept Jesus was, according to Paul, to admit that Jewish law was obsolete and that a “new covenant” with God was possible.

While Jesus wasn’t political in the modern sense of the word, He was political in this sense: Christ was the beginning of the change of the world. He inaugurated a new creation. And He showed us how prayer might set us on the right road to peace before politics.

As John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas have pointed out, among other authors, the church is a new polis. It is a God-created community that embodies a new politic and new definitions of leadership. The church, therefore, is a colony from another realm, representing the rights of its sovereign Lord. So our politics are embodied in the life that we’re called to live out together as God’s people—as the church.

In this sense, the church is the new order. We are the beginning of God’s kingdom that is already happening in the midst of the old order. If the church is operating properly in a given locality, the kingdom of God is seen. Justice, peace, love, mutual care, and giving, are made visible. Christ is seen on the earth again.

The church’s claim on the future, therefore, is not a political one. If we are going to have a world at peace, we will need more than politics. We will need the Prince of Peace living through a community that embodies His nature. Again, the church is the true polis intended by God for all of humanity.

For that reason, a social order based on justice and peace cannot be established by human effort alone. Perfect peace and justice are works of divine grace in the hearts of those who respond to Christ’s love. The kingdomization of any political platform is a form of uniting church and state, with unhealthy consequences for both. When the Spirit of Christ lives in you, you seldom end up following the political categories of any power structure, as if there were only a single “God’s politics” or the church were “God’s party.”

In politics, everything is played out in the moral register—in the language of right and wrong. In faith, everything is played out in the relational register—in the language of vine and branches, living and dead, members and the dismembered. The final goal for anything new is not justice; it is life. Does this deserve to exist? Does it promote beauty, truth, goodness? When you stop dreaming for yourself and you start dreaming for God and the gospel, then “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Disciples of Jesus are troubled but not taken unawares by human depravity.

Conclusion

At the Italian Eucharistic Congress in Bologna in 1997, Cardinal Ratzinger fought having Bob Dylan sing before the pope. In his 2007 book John Paul II, My Beloved Predecessor, Ratzinger says he “doubts to this day whether it was right to let this kind of socalled prophet take the stage.” In Christmas 2009, both Dylan and the current pope went head to head on the charts for their Christmas albums. Geffen Records released a collection of litanies and chants sung by Pope Benedict, and Dylan released his first Christmas album.

But what John Paul II did was not so much to feature Bob Dylan but to use Dylan’s music to make a point: he chose “Blowin’ in the Wind” and said this: “You ask me how many roads a man must walk before he becomes a man? I answer: there is only one road for man, and it is the road of Jesus Christ, who said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life.’”