Saturday, December 8, 2012

Advent and the Purple Candle of Peace

Because everyone wants to light the purple candle of peace.

Excerpt from Jonathan Martin's, On Israel, the Church, Politics and Jesus.

There are still a distressing number of Christians, many of whom citing Scripture as quickly (and as recklessly) as the micro-machine man Jack Van Impe, who believe not only that Israel as a modern nation-state is especially chosen by God, but that the will of God is for us to stand by Israel in war.  In fact, many of them express a perverse pleasure when there is suffering in the Middle East, because these are mere signs that the end is drawing near.  That end is not defined first and foremost as the reign of the prince of peace breaking into the world with healing for the nations, but the vindication of those on the right side of Armageddon by the heavenly godfather.  The means by which Jesus will come to rule and reign will not be the cross (which failed) but a larger sword than that of the infidels.  “With the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other,” they sincerely and wrongheadedly expect the reign of God to be manifest in human violence.

I do not have time in a short treatment here to say all I’d like to about what’s wrong with these systems.  But at heart is a fundamental misreading of the Book of Revelation.  The apocalyptic language and imagery can easily be misinterpreted.  Revelation is a book about how God overcomes the evil of the world through the cross of Jesus.  It is through the blood of the Lamb that God wins in the end.  His people do not share in His victory by beating their enemies with bigger weapons, but by sharing in the sacrifice of the Lamb, “following the Lamb wherever He goes…loving not their own lives even unto death.”  The subversive victory of love and sacrifice over the forces of the evil make a mockery of the so-called principalities and powers of the world, from the Roman empire to every tyrannical and oppressive empire in our own time.

The cross is not just the message of the kingdom, the cross is the means of the kingdom.  The trouble with a lot of popular eschatology is that it assumes Jesus did not win through the cross and resurrection, and will have to resort to something other than the way of the cross to accomplish His purposes in the world.  There is of course much language of judgment in Revelation.  But judgment does not come through guns—“Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations.”  God will judge His creation by the same means in which He brought it into existence—by His word.

8.  The response of the people of God to conflict in the Middle East is not to take a side but to take up a cross.

Don’t get me wrong: Jesus Himself said that the days to come would be full of wars and rumors of wars.  But the manifestation of the sons of God will not be through us being on the “right” side of any of those wars, but on the side of radical enemy love.  We want to be on the side of the one who, even on the cross, said “Forgive them Father for they know what they do.”  There are no other sides besides the way of the kingdom and the way of the world, the way of the cross and the way of the sword.  There are no middle ground alternatives.

No matter what your persuasion or how you interpret the sociopolitical dimensions of this conflict, all authentic followers of Jesus should be able to agree that “God so loved the whole world that He gave His only begotten Son;” and that God’s desire in and through Jesus Christ is for all people in all parts of the world to be blessed and whole.  I think to simply get the people of God together on these handful of basic assumptions could make all the difference in how we learn to be the Church for the world.

The world tells us to take sides; we are told to take up our cross.  We are called to bear witness to the kingdom of God by living our own lives as peacemakers.  We pray for peace, we work for peace.  We learn as much as we can about our brothers and sisters in the Middle East and we support kingdom work among them–from the preaching of the gospel to caring for the poor, the marginalized, the orphan, the widow and the oppressed.  We refuse any options that are presented to us other than the cross–which means we look for ways to sacrifice our own comfort for the sake of hurting people all over the world.

See the whole article here

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