Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?
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Jesus and the Violence of the Domination System
Two hundred years before Jesus, Judas Maccabees rode into Jerusalem after conquering the "heathens" and purifying the temple (2 Macc. 10:2-3). And as he rode into the city triumphantly, he was welcomed by a crowd waving palm branches (2 Macc. 10:7). This was the start of a dynasty that lasted 100 years.
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When Matthew tells the story (Mt. 21:1-11), a reference is made to Zechariah 9:9. All three of these stories have Jesus riding a colt - the foal of a donkey. But only Matthew explicitly points out the parallel to Zechariah. Often the point of this colt is misunderstood - it has nothing to do with humility, as donkeys were royal beasts (see 1 Kg. 1:33). But rather, the clue as to the message Jesus was sending can be found in Zechariah 9:10 - which mentions cutting off the chariots and warhorses, breaking the bow, and speaking peace to the nations. Jesus is making a triumphal entry and conquering...with peace. King Jesus declares peace before the conquering even starts!
Jesus knew that the way to fight the violence of the Domination System was not through resorting to the same violent methods - this would only result in a violent kingdom that eventually destroyed itself, just as the Maccabean kingdom had done.
The idea of a violent kingdom undermining itself can be illustrated in many ways through America's own politics. For example - indefinite detention of suspected terrorists without a trial violates Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution. But after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America gave in to fear, and have been holding suspects without a trial ever since. And the interrogation techniques adopted in the wake of the so-called “Patriot Act” include acts that even the U.S. has deemed torture - we once had even executed Japanese prisoners of war who were found guilty of waterboarding, and now we've become the very monster we fought! In the wake of the Patriot Act, more than 100 detainees have died, with 25 being ruled by the CIA as homicide. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, read a prepared testimony on June 18, 2008, which read in part:
As I compiled my dossier for Secretary Powell, and as I did further research, and as my views grew firmer and firmer, I needed frequently to reread that memo; that is to say, the memorandum of February 7, 2002. I need to balance in my own mind the overwhelming evidence that my own government has sanctioned abuse and torture, which, at its worst, has led to the murder of 25 detainees and a total of at least 100 detainee deaths. We had murdered 25 or more people in detention.By fighting violence with violence, we become the monster we hate. Lewis Thomas, a medical researcher, compared this to how the body often does more damage in its response to a disease than the disease itself:
All of this seems unnecessary, panic-driven.... It is, basically, a response to propaganda...we tear ourselves to pieces because of symbols, and we are more vulnerable to this than to any host of predators. We are, in effect, at the mercy of our own Pentagons, most of the time.Acts of barbarity that we would have condemned before entering into war are now seen as necessary. Likewise, our prison system does not rehabilitate - but rather, it makes people more criminal than they ever were. Prison fools people into thinking their criminal self is their true nature, and so, in identifying with this persona, they become more and more a criminal. And so prison functions more as a school for crime than a hospital for the mentally ill. And this school of crime does not merely do harm to the students: it turns the teachers of that school - the guards and superintendents - into barbarians as well. In "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil", Dr. Philip Zimbardo writes about how he noticed parallels between the Abu Ghraib prison incident and his Stamford Prison Experiment:
I came across something that froze me. Unbelievable images were flashing across the screen from CBS’s program 60 Minutes II.2 Naked men were stacked high in a pyramid, and American soldiers stood grinning over their prisoner pile. A female soldier was leading a naked prisoner around by a dog leash tied around his neck. Other prisoners looked horrified as they seemed on the verge of being attacked by vicious-looking German shepherd dogs. On and on they went, like a pornographic slide show: naked prisoners were made to masturbate in front of a cigarette-smoking female soldier who stood giving a high-five approval salute; prisoners were made to simulate fellatio.René Girard expresses the nature of this problem well in "The One by Whom Scandal Comes":
It seemed inconceivable that American soldiers were tormenting, humiliating, and torturing their captives by forcing homoerotic poses upon them. Yet here they were. Still other unbelievable images buzzed by: prisoners standing or bent over in stress positions with green hoods or women’s pink panties covering their heads. Were these the fine young men and women sent overseas by the Pentagon on the glorious mission of bringing democracy and freedom to an Iraq recently liberated from the tyrant/torturer Saddam Hussein?
To escape responsibility for violence we imagine it is enough to pledge never to be the first to do violence. But no one ever sees himself as casting the first stone. Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to a violence committed in the first instance by someone else.But Jesus did not fight violence with violence. No, the way Jesus fought was through non-violent resistance.
To give a little context, the historian Josephus writes an account in The Wars of the Jews 2:175-203 of an event that had occurred during Jesus' lifetime - in 26 AD:
As procurator of Judaea Tiberius sent Pilate, who during the night, secretly and under cover, conveyed to Jerusalem the images of Caesar known as standards. When day dawned this caused great excitement among the Jews; for those who were near were amazed at the sight, which meant that their laws had been trampled on — they do not permit any graven image to be set up in the City — and the angry City mob was joined by a huge influx of people from the country. They rushed off to Pilate in Caesarea, and begged him to remove the standards from Jerusalem and to respect their ancient customs. When Pilate refused, they fell prone all round his house and remained motionless for five days and nights.Without harming a single human being, the Jews had conquered. This may be the first recorded incident of non-violent resistance.
The next day Pilate took his seat on the tribunal in the great stadium and summoned the mob on the pretext that he was ready to give them an answer. Instead he gave a pre-arranged signal to the soldiers to surround the Jews in full armour, and the troops formed a ring three deep. The Jews were dumbfounded at the unexpected sight, but Pilate, declaring that he would cut them to pieces unless they accepted the images of Caesar, nodded to the soldiers to bare their swords. At this the Jews as though by agreement fell to the ground in a body and bent their necks, shouting that they were ready to be killed rather than transgress the Law. Amazed at the intensity of their religious fervour, Pilate ordered the standards to be removed from Jerusalem forthwith.
Jesus and Non-Violent Resistance
Jesus creatively teaches on similar methods in Matthew 5:38-41. When he says "do not resist an evil person" (verse 39), the term he uses is antistenai. This term literally refers to violent resistance and is a military term that refers to counteractive aggression, so this is not a teaching about cowardice. Rather, Jesus is teaching his audience how to resist without violence.
It is important to note that if we are to interpret verse 39 as meaning that Jesus' followers are to be doormats, then we have an issue with Ephesians 6:13, which instructs us to resist. No, I do not believe this was a message of passive acceptance towards the dehumanizing Domination System, but rather was teaching how to resist without violence.
When Jesus says (verse 39) "whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also", he leaves us a clue when he specifies the right cheek. Think about how this would work - how can you slap a person on the right cheek? There are only two ways - one would involve using the open palm of the left hand. One problem - in this ancient culture, which did not have such amenities as...ah...toilet paper...the left hand was reserved for unseemly uses. So in this culture, to slap someone with the left hand would have been considered barbaric - it would be seen as a distasteful and vulgar act and you would be seen as morally questionable as a result.
So there was only one other way to slap someone on the right cheek - with a backhand blow.
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| See? Right cheek, right hand. |
Jewish law prohibits the keeping of a cloak as a pledge past sundown (see Ex. 22:25-27, Deut. 24:10-13), but in the time of Rome this was not applied very faithfully, as the surrounding Gentiles did not follow this rule. Also, the Jews were never to take the pledge from a widow (Deut. 24:17) - which is most likely more a representation of a poor person who has no means to better his or her situation. Amos 2:7-8 presents a picture of profanity which includes sleeping on pledge garments to show how callous Israel had become. And the picture of righteousness that Ezekiel 18:5-9 presents includes the restoration of pledges.
In Genesis 9:20-27, Noah pronounces a curse on Canaan, because Ham (who is the patriarch of Canaan) saw Noah naked. Isaiah uses the act of stripping naked as a prophecy of a judgement against Egypt and Cush in Isaiah 20:1-6. For the poor in this desert culture, typically the only other garment they would wear besides their tunic was their cloak - so by removing it (as Jesus instructs in verse 40) they would have been stripping naked, as Isaiah had done. So what Jesus is telling his audience to do is nothing new to them - they would have seen this as a creative way for them to pronounce judgement upon their cruel creditors. He's essentially telling them to pronounce the curse of Canaan upon them. Also, in this culture nakedness would have been a shame to witness. It should also be considered what condition the body of a poor person would be in underneath his/her clothing - it would not be a pleasing sight. So what Jesus is saying is: if someone cruelly demands your only method of warmth, publicly shame them by stripping naked in front of them and revealing what the unjust system is doing to you.
This becomes an unmasking of the unjust system which has rendered an entire people landless, destitute, degraded, and humiliated. But it is also a refusal, on the part of the one who strips, to be humiliated - it is a form of pride that says “though I have been rendered naked by your injustice, I am still a human being, and you cannot take that from me.” It is a refusal to be intimidated by the power of the creditor.
When Jesus instructs his audience to walk an extra mile with someone who has forced you to go one (verse 41), there is also a very rich history behind this commandment. Roman law allowed soldiers to command people from the cultures they had conquered to carry their packs for a mile - this was called angaria / angareia. This was a way for Roman soldiers to assert their dominance over the conquered people - to put them in their place. And the practice was infamous for being onerous to the people - “angareia is like death” complained one source. And you have to consider how much time a mile would take out of your day in this society - time that is precious to those who work in manual labor that pays by your amount of productivity and to those who are burdened by debts they have to pay.
But because this law had been abused too often, the law also strictly prohibited the soldiers from requiring any more than a mile as it had become a point of contention.
So when Jesus tells his audience to go an extra mile, he's actually telling his audience to put these soldiers into an uncomfortable situation. You can imagine the soldier thinking: “what is he up to? Is he trying to get me in trouble for seeming to break the rules? Is he insulting my strength and trying to provoke me? Will this civilian file a complaint against me or cause trouble after this?” If you come to the end of your mile, and you keep walking, the soldier has a choice between risking getting into big trouble, or scuffling with you in an attempt to wrestle back his gear! And this struggle would have caused enough of a fuss to call attention to the situation! Jesus is giving his audience a way to protest this practice and recover their humanity - to neutralize the power it had over them.
Jesus taught his followers to flip the system on its head, and to resist evil with good (see Rom. 12:21). Non-violent resistance is not “flight”, nor is it “fight” - it is a third way. Non-violent resistance is not cowardice - as the non-violent resistance expert Gandhi says:
I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.... But I believe that nonviolence is infinitely superior to violence.Gandhi also said:
At every meeting I repeated the warning that unless they felt that in non-violence they had come into possession of a force infinitely superior to the one they had and in the use of which they were adept, they should have nothing to do with non-violence and resume the arms they possessed before.If we try to suppress our anger over injustice, it will plant a seed inside of us which will grow into a violent hatred that will either destroy us, or will erupt in acts of even worse violence - and this dehumanizes us. Jesus understood that we must resist evil regimes like the empire of Rome. But he instructed his followers to do so in a way that did not also dehumanize the resistor. Non-violent resistance seeks to turn our inner warrior into a new kind of warrior - a spiritual warrior - and so utilizes our strength and determination.
Could this be the true meaning of "holy war"? With non-violent resistance, it is not us fighting on God’s behalf, but God fighting on ours - when we engage in non-violence, it is God alone who fights (see Hos. 1:7, Zech. 4:6).
Non-violent resistance seeks to unveil the truth about a Domination System at work. Walter Wink provided a few examples of how this works:
South African archbishop Desmond Tutu walked by a construction site on a temporary sidewalk the width of one person. A white man appeared at the other end, recognized Tutu, and said, "I don't make way for gorillas." At which Tutu stepped aside, made a deep sweeping gesture, and said, "Ah, yes, but I do."
During the struggle of Solidarity in Poland, one group dressed in Santa Claus outfits and distributed scarce sanitary napkins to women as a way of dramatizing the difficulty of obtaining essentials. When these Santas were arrested, other Santas showed up at jail insisting that the others were frauds, that they were the real Santas.
Chinese students, forbidden to demonstrate against government policy, donned masks of the Communist leadership and carried signs reading: "Support Martial Law," "Support Dictatorship," "Support Inflation." (I especially like this one. It has such suggestive possibilities. How about, for example, "Give tax breaks to the rich." Or, "Collateral damage ain't nothin'.")
There is a connection here to the sword of truth in Hebrews 4:12. The sword is double-edged, which might be referring to the way that truth cuts both ways: both for and against God’s people when it convicts them. And this double-edged sword makes an appearance in Revelation (1:16, and 19:15) - and here it is coming out of Jesus’ mouth. Jesus’ non-violent resistance is a “militant pacifism” - it is aggressive in that he relentlessly attacks with the truth (and only the truth). He forces his accusers to either face and accept the truth or silence him. When we understand this, we can see how the scene in John 18:22-23 is actually a form of “turning the other cheek” - when a priest strikes him, Jesus takes the offensive for truth and declares: "If I have spoken wrongly, testify of the wrong; but if rightly, why do you strike Me?"
It is very sad that schools largely avoid teaching the rich history of non-violent resistance. It was only very recently that I became aware of how many non-violent resistance movements there have been, and their successes. Walter Wink lists a number of them in "Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination":
Then came 1989-1990, years of unprecedented political change, years of miracles, surpassing any such concentration of political transformations in human history, even the Exodus. In 1989 alone, thirteen nations comprising 1,695,100,000 people, over 32 percent of humanity, experienced nonviolent revolutions that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations in every case but China, and were completely nonviolent (on the part of the participants) in every case but Romania and parts of the southern U.S.S.R. The nations involved were Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Yugoslavia, Mongolia, the Soviet Union, Brazil, Chile, and China. Since then Nepal, Palau, and Madagascar have undergone nonviolent struggles, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia have achieved independence nonviolently, the Soviet Union has dissolved into a commonwealth of republics, and more than a dozen countries have moved toward multiparty democracy, including Mongolia, Gabon, Bangladesh, Benin, and Algeria. If we add all the countries touched by major nonviolent actions just since 1986 (the Philippines, South Korea, South Africa, Israel, Burma, New Caledonia, and New Zealand), and the other nonviolent struggles of our century-the independence movements of India and Ghana, the overthrow of the Shah in Iran, the struggle against authoritarian governments and landowners in Argentina and Mexico, and the civil rights, United Farm Worker, anti-Vietnam and antinuclear movements in the United States-the figure reaches 3,337,400,000: a staggering 64 percent of humanity!
At this point, it is time for another break. In my next post, I will explore the death of the Domination System within.
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Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?
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