Receiving the Gospel as a Community

I had a discussion with my pastor Ken today about the challenge of being a disciple of Jesus and working in the world of business. One of the issues I grapple with revolves around the difference between hearing Christ's message as a call to an individual versus a call to a nation or community. I've come to believe that since Jesus was a prophet, and prophets by and large, address nations (and sometimes individual leaders of nations), then our tendency to hear His message as focused on the individual misses much of the point. I'm still wrestling with the implications of this. Clearly we live as individuals within a community and the fact that He spoke to us as community does not minimize the call to us individually. I tend to think the opposite. The call is broader, more inclusive and comprehensive when we hear it as addressed to the community, the town, the nation, even the world.

In any case, this led me to confirm my recollection of how NT Wright wrote about the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) in Jesus and the Victory of God ... "It cannot be generalized into a set of suggestions, or even commands, on how to be 'good'. Nor can it be turned into a guide map for how to go to 'heaven' after death. It is rather, as it stands, a challenge to Israel to be Israel...I suggest that the beatitudes can be read, in some such way, as an appeal to Jesus' hearers to discover their true vocation as the eschatological people of YHWH, and to do so by following the praxis he was marking out for them, rather that the way of other would-be leaders of this time...By following him, by putting his agenda into practice, they can at last be true Israel." (pp 288-289)

Wright then goes on to discuss how "The command 'do not resist evil' (5.39) is not to be taken simply to refer to personal hostilities or village-level animosity...The way forward for Israel is no the way of violent resistance, not the way of zeal that the Shammaite Pharisees would encourage, but the different, oblique way of creative non-violent resistance. A blow on the right cheek is given with the back of the hand, implying insult as well as injury; to offer the left is not mere passivity, but the affirmation of one's own equality with the aggressor." (p 291)

This last point about the meaning of “turn the other cheek” is one I’ve heard before but never quite understood the historical antecedent, so I checked out Wright’s reference. It’s to Walter Wink’s essay “Neither Passivity nor Violence: Jesus' Third Way", in The Love of Enemy and Nonretaliation in the New Testament, ed. Willard M. Swartley. I wasn’t able to find a direct quote but James McGrath, Assistant Professor of Religion at Butler University, Indianapolis appears to draw from Wink in explaining it thus:

“You will probably find that you most naturally go for the left cheek, and yet Matthew specifically mentions the right cheek here. To strike the right cheek, you either had to use the back of your right hand, or hit with your left hand. Both of these actions would be inappropriate in any kind of ‘fisticuffs’ between people of equal status in an ancient Greco-Roman setting. The left hand was ‘unclean’, as it still is in the Middle East today, and a backhanded slap then as now was an expression of insult and superiority. And so we may take this to refer to a blow delivered by a superior to an inferior. It is a slap given by someone who has power to someone who does not, to humiliate that person. The aim is not to injure the person physically, but to humiliate him. But if this is the case, then what happens if the powerless person turns the left cheek? He is not simply saying ‘Please, please, hit me again’. He is saying ‘Hit me again, but hit me as an equal: I’m a human being, just like you’. And so while not resorting to violence, he is taking control of the situation and challenging his oppressor. “

Along the way I also came across a provocative posting by Joe Jones, Professor Emeritus of Theology and Ethics at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, Indiana who writes in an essay Jesus and War:

"If it were the case that our tradition understood in common language that Jesus is Savior of the world and the Lord who truly reigns over all creation and the destiny of the world, then you would think that the character of Jesus’ life, his pattern of acting and teaching concerning the kingdom of God, his crucifixion, and his resurrection would affect how Christians would construe discipleship to Jesus, construe war and violence, and how they would act in time of war.

"Yet here we confront one of the strangest reversals of meaning taking place among Christians in the United States and among Christians in many of the nation-states that have sprung into existence in the last two centuries. All of these nation-states are founded in and sustained by violence. Their borders drip with wars of conquest and wars of self-defense. The reversal is that the Christians in these states regularly go to war as though they are in utter denial or ignorance of how Jesus is relevant to their war-making. Jesus may be a comfort to the soldier and those left at home, but that Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection have some bearing on how Christians should construe the justification of going to war seems utterly denied. When we want to justify our wars, Christians here and abroad repeatedly appeal to some other lord or principle or necessity that justifies fighting war."
...

"Why is it that our citizenship in the church and the Kingdom are not the decisive determinants of how we live our lives? Is it not true, then, that when we make the state the formative power in how we understand ourselves and our enemies we also thereby make the state into an idol—a surrogate god that we revere, adore, and obey and in which we trust to protect us and give us meaning?"