Jesus is God’s politics.
By that I mean, Jesus is God’s king. This is, by the way, what the title, Messiah (or Christ, in Greek) means. Though many of us have been trained to think of Jesus as an a-political figure, a teacher who concerned himself with “spiritual matters” and remained above the political fray, the truth is, Jesus is the political figure, the true “King of kings and Lord of lords.” No reading that ignores this can do justice to Luke-Acts.
The Politics of God’s Kingdom
I’m using this term, politics, in the following senses.
- The structures of power that bring together and hold together a group of people. These structures are powers of governance and oversight, of judgment and of service, and they belong to the “natural order.”
- The decision-making processes in which theses various power structures engage themselves.
- The struggle for access to and control of these powers.
In brief, politics is about power – the getting and spending of it. When I say, then, that the kingdom of God is political, I mean that God reigns by the exercise of a certain kind of power, which happens to stand in judgment of all others forms of power. It is the power of love.
The Power of Love and the Power of Death
Jesus taught his disciples that power is not about strength and force. It is not something we wield over others. God’s power is the power of life and love, not the power of death; it is power exercised only for others, never to exact something from them, and only in service of them.
Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all (Mk 10.42-44).
St Paul, reflecting on the meaning of Jesus’ sacrificial death, goes so far as to speak of the “foolishness” and “weakness” of God! I do not think Paul is being ironic. I think he means to say that God’s politics are so strange to us, so beyond us, that they inevitably seem weak and silly to us. That is the scandal of the cross.
As I said above, politics refers to those structures of power that bring together and hold together a group of people. Christians are those people who have been gathered together and find their identity in God’s weakness as it is revealed in Jesus. This means that Christians are people who are weak toward one another, or, to put it another way, it means that we are vulnerable before one another. To put it still another way, it means that we love one another, because God in Christ has loved us!
Love is God’s power. And by human estimation it is weak. Death and hate are stronger than life and love. At least, they are stronger in the sense that they overpower the latter. But as we now know through Christ, God’s politics are victorious. Love is stronger than death, because it possess the power, the capacity, to absorb death into itself, to embrace it, and thereby to lead it to destroy itself.
