The Politics of Jesus
The Twelfth Day of Christmas
Tuesday, January 5, 2021
Luke 6:27-31
But I say to you who are willing to hear…
The gospel is not for everyone. It’s just not, for not everyone is willing to hear the teachings
of Jesus, truly hear, and follow.
Very often, in churches, we hear about the “secularization” of America, about the “decline”
of Christianity, and about how awful this all is.
Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas would beg to differ.
“Sometime between 1960 and 1980,” they argue, “an old, inadequately conceived world
ended, and a fresh, new world began.”
They point to one Sunday in 1963 in Greenville, South Carolina, as a key turning point.
That’s when the Fox Theater defied the state’s blue laws by opening its doors on a Sunday,
going “head to head with the church over who would provide the world view for the young.”
As you can imagine, the Fox Theater won.
But Willimon and Hauerwas don’t lament the loss. In fact, the facade of so-called “Christian
America” allowed so many (white) Christians to overlook the incredible wrongs (“it was a
racially segregated world,” they remind us). And so the common view was that “People grew
up Christian simply by being lucky enough to be born in places like Greenville.”
Of course, no one believes that anymore.
“All sorts of Christians are waking up and realizing that it is no longer ‘our world,’” they
observe, “if it ever was.”
And this shift has revealed a truth: “Christians are not naturally born in places like Greenville
or anywhere else. Christians are intentionally made by an adventuresome church.”
This may sound strange, especially given that many (most?) churches have turned towards
a generic spirituality (don’t call it religion!) that tries to convince seekers that they are already
believers.
Maybe we are all spiritual, even if not religious. And maybe we all naturally seek the divine. In
fact, I would not disagree. But this is not what the message of Jesus is about.
“The Bible’s concern,” argue Willimon and Hauerwas, “is not if we shall believe but what we
shall believe.”
As for the content of our belief, they point to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, but since
our gospel reading today is from Luke, we’ll look at the Sermon on the Plain. (I’ll bet most
people didn’t realize that Luke has Jesus come down from the mountain before beginning
his sermon.)
Willimon and Hauerwas note that Jesus begins his sermon with the Beatitudes and “does
not ask the disciples to do anything. The Beatitudes are in the indicative, not the imperative,
mood. First we are told what God has done before anything is suggested about what we are
to do.”
I’m not sure about you, but every sermon I’ve ever heard on Jesus’s sermon has been about
what Willimon and Hauerwas call “moralistic imperatives.”
“Of course,” they say, “we are forever getting confused into thinking that scripture is mainly
about what we are supposed to do rather than a picture of who God is.”
Then we get to our reading for today:
But I say to you who are willing to hear:
Love your enemies.
Do good to those who hate you.
Bless those who curse you.
Pray for those who mistreat you.
If someone slaps you on the cheek,
offer the other one as well.
If someone takes your coat,
don’t withhold even your shirt.
Give to everyone who asks;
and don’t demand your things back
from those who take them.
Do unto others
as you would have them do unto you.
This can be seen as “ethical naivete,” Willimon and Hauerwas accept. “But the basis for the
ethics of the Sermon on the [Plain] is not what works but rather the way God is.”
I remember how mindblowing this was when I first read it. I mean, we’re not supposed to be
concerned with outcomes, with effectiveness?
Nope. Faithfulness, holiness, not effectiveness.
“Cheek-turning,” they explain, “is not advocated as what works (it usually does not), but
advocated because this is the way God is - God is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish.
This is not a strategem for getting what we want but the only manner of life available, now
that, in Jesus, we have seen what God wants. We seek reconciliation with the neighbor, not
because we will feel so much better afterward, but because reconciliation is what God is
doing in the world in the Christ.”
This is all very political. Not red and blue political, not donkeys and elephants, but political as
in how we live together.
First, “we.” Willimon and Hauerwas argue that the sermon “is not about how to be better
individual Christians.” If we’re honest, it’s a recipe for becoming a dead Christian...unless
you have a community that will nurse you back to health after you’ve turned your cheek
and received a beating. You can’t follow this teaching on your own.
And the specific “we” here is important too, for this teaching is not for just everyone. It doesn’t
make sense to just anyone. It never did, really, which is why, after the Fox Theater won the
battle for the youth, those youth left the church and never came back.
But it’s also why Willimon and Hauerwas argue that Jesus’s sermon “is a picture of the way
the church is to look.”
Not a picture of how the world is to look, but how the church is to look.
“Our ethical positions arise out of our theological claims.” And not everyone shares our
theological claims.
The biblical story is clear about this, by the way, for Jesus is not speaking to a general
audience: “Jesus raised his eyes to his disciples and said…”
This is a teaching for the disciples. But this teaching “is not primarily addressed to
individuals, because it is precisely as individuals that we are most apt to fail as Christians.”
And the kicker: “Only through membership in a nonviolent community can violent individuals
do better…,” for “it is as isolated individuals that we lack the ethical and theological resources
to be faithful disciples.”
Hauerwas has famously said, “I’m a pacifist because I’m a violent son of a bitch. I’m a Texan.
I can feel it in every bone I’ve got.” And so he has to keep saying it, to hold himself accountable.
“I create expectations in others that hopefully will help me live faithfully to what I know is true but
that I have no confidence in my own ability to live it at all.”
And so the point of the Christian community is not just being together; that’s just a nice benefit.
“The Christian ethical question,” according to Willimon and Hauerwas, “is, What sort of community
would be required to support an ethic of nonviolence, marital fidelity, forgiveness, and hope such
as the one sketched by Jesus in the Sermon on the [Plain]?”
May we be just such a community.
May we practice the politics of the kingdom.
May we follow the politics of Jesus.
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