The Gift of The Self

The thrust of Jesus’s preaching and teaching was that the "Kingdom of God" was already showing up in what would have almost certainly been seen as un-Godlike, un-kingdomlike ways; to be sure, this kingdom looked nothing like the political or religious power structures of common life in the first-century Roman society. There are many details about Jesus’s ministry that demonstrate his willingness to subvert or work outside of socially accepted evaluations of status or religious inclusion.

For instance, Jesus is depicted in the Gospels as regularly criticizing leaders within his own religious tradition for emphasizing certain markers of religious identity and ritual purity while disregarding their commitment to moral or social integrity. In one instance, he accuses these religious teachers of being ‘blind guides’ who burden their acolytes with mundane religious technicalities while ignoring the needs of their communities, and who instruct others according to standards they don’t uphold themselves. I must point out that Jesus is not critical of identity formation inherent in Judaism or any other religious community; rather, his criticism is leveled at the idea that the safeguarding of this identity should be viewed as a vehicle of self-preservation or status-increase, rather than a means by which God’s ends of wholeness and mutuality should be brought into the community. In another episode, when some of Jesus’s key followers begin to argue about who is higher up in the ranks of their growing religious movement, he admonishes them by saying, “The rulers of the [nations] lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants…it will not be so among you, but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant.” In both of these examples, Jesus questions the currencies of power upheld in the social order of his world, and advocates for a communally dependent way of life which comes into being through compassion, peace, and restorative justice.

These are central themes of Jesus’s teaching and healing ministries, and can even be glimpsed in his love of a good dinner party — he gained a reputation among his detractors as “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” It is important to recognize that in identifying Jesus as the friend of ‘sinners,’ these religious leaders as portrayed in the Gospels are denigrating Jesus for associating with people whose lifestyles or even occupations rendered them ‘impure’ for shared life within their own limited interpretation of the Jewish religious life. Jesus’s friendships with those who lived on the margins of this religious culture were thus consistent with his teaching that “the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the Kingdom of God” more readily than these religious leaders who saw it as their duty to exclude such sinners from fellowship in order to warrant God’s continued favor, an exclusion which they hoped would lead to the liberation of the Jewish people from under Roman rule.

Jesus’s core teachings speak to a different strategy of living as God’s people under the occupation of the first-century super-empire. His famous ‘Sermon on the Mount’ evaluates history in such a way that those who are poor, who walk by the Way of humility and mercy, and who seek restorative justice and peace in their communities are revealed to have been working within God’s kingdom all along, as opposed to those who are wealthy, who have amassed great political influence, and who have sought to administer morally exacting standards and dole out retribution to enforce them by divine right. Jesus asserts that this is not a willful forgetfulness of the Jewish Scriptural tradition, but the deepest essence of those sacred texts, their ‘fulfillment.’ Moreover, his teachings concerning retribution and love for one’s enemies not only question any standing narrative of nationalist or moral exceptionalism among the people of God, but locate this critique by observing God’s very own gift of life for all people: “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” By Jesus’s analysis of the Jewish Scriptures and tradition, an indispensable ingredient in the vocation of God’s children is to become, like God, an enemy-lover.

This brings me to the culminating event in the life of Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospels, his death on a Cross among seditionists. Under accusations of blasphemy by the Sanhedrin which are forwarded to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate as formal charges of treason against the Empire, the execution takes place at the hands of the religious and political authorities of his context. As an innocent victim, Jesus dies in solidarity with all those throughout history who were lynched by such powerful institutions in order to preserve the unjust power structures of society, those framings of value which his life and ministry sought to undermine at every moment. What’s more is that in his refusal to retaliate, and his insistence to forgive his enemies with the last of his breath, Jesus’s death is at the very least a victory in the sense that it completes a life lived in consistency with his conviction that mercy, generosity, and compassion are in and of themselves more powerful than enmity, self-assertion, and cruelty. In a very real sense, Jesus dies for the sake of his enemies, and thus for the sake of transforming the social order such that it should become oriented not around the power of violence or control, but of self-giving love. With this in mind, one does not find Jesus’s death to be a departure from the direction of his ministry, but the near-inevitable outcome of it; that is, Jesus’s whole life is on a Cross-ward trajectory precisely because his Way of self-giving love is in direct dissent to the inhumane way of life manufactured to serve the powers that be.