A farewell to mars - pt. 3 (crowds, scapegoating, believing in jesus is hard)

I am continuing on with my highlights from Brian Zahnd's fantabulous little book 'A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor's Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace.' Part 1 and Part 2 are linked respectively.

Today I will post from chapters 3 and 4 (and there is a lot in here relevant to today):

Chapter 3 (Christ Against the Crowd) highlights:

"Among the important things my dad taught me was this jewel of counterintuitive wisdom: the majority is almost always wrong."

"My father, as a judge and a man of politics, knew that one of the responsibilities of a just democracy is to protect the minority from the majority. And why? Because the majority is not as interested in truth as it is in power — and power in the hands of a crowd is often used for revenge and scapegoating. The disturbing truth is that a crowd can too easily become a lynch mob, whether literally or metaphorically"...

..."Of course lynch mobs never think of themselves as such - instead they imagine they are simply good people committed to truth and justice, taking a stand against a great evil. The crowd is incapable of entertaining the idea that IT may be a great evil."

"A crowd under the influence of an angry, vengeful spirit is the most dangerous thing in the world. It is closely associated with the essence of what is satanic. The unholy spirit (think mood or attitude) of the satanic is the inclination to blame, accuse, and recriminate. (The words satan and devil both mean to accuse and blame.) When the satanic spirit of angry blame and accusation infects a crowd, a perilous phenomenon is born. The crowd abandons truth as it searches for a target upon which it can express the pent-up rage it feels. I say “it” because the angry crowd takes on a life of its own. The crowd is now in search of a scapegoat, whose role it is to bear the sin of the crowd. It works like this: When a group of people perceive themselves to be slighted or wronged, displaced or threatened, they can metastasize into a vindictive crowd. When a group of people becomes an angry, fear-driven crowd, the groupthink phenomenon of mob mentality quickly overtakes rational thought and individual responsibility. The mob takes on a spirit of its own and the satanic is generated. The mob becomes capable of evil that would be unthinkable for most people as an individual. It can be as spontaneous as the Rwandan genocide or as systematic as the Nazi’s Final Solution. The vindictive crowd is now possessed by enormous negative energy. This negative energy has the potential to turn the crowd against itself."

[Lots of great stuff about scapegoating here - too much to share - everything from playground bullies all the way to Jesus himself being the ultimate scapegoat for us all]

"I insist that a crowd under the sway of an angry spirit is the most dangerous thing in the world. Massacres, slaughters, crusades, pogroms, genocides, and the Holocaust are what can happen when people follow an angry crowd in search of a scapegoat."

"As Kierkegaard said, “To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions.” [maga]

 

"So what do we do with this? How do we go about renouncing the sinful system of projecting blame onto a scapegoat? We might start by turning off the radio when the manipulative talk-show host tries to agitate the listening crowd into the evil of scapegoating. We might refuse to follow religious leaders who gain a following by the rhetorical lynching of the usual scapegoats. We might decide to stop practicing in our adult lives the juvenile playground politics of scapegoating the easy targets. We might tattoo our mind with these three transformational truths: 

- The majority is almost always wrong

- The crowd is untruth

- Scapegoating is demonic

 Chapter 4 (It's Hard To Believe In Jesus) highlights:

"We forget that "the worst day in history was not a Tuesday in New York, but a Friday in Jerusalem when a consortium of clergy and politicians colluded to run the world on our own terms by crucifying God’s own Son.” We forget that when we see Christ dead upon the cross, we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies. We forget all of this because the disturbing truth is this — it’s hard to believe in Jesus...

...When I say it’s hard to believe in Jesus, I mean it’s hard to believe in Jesus’s ideas — in his way of saving the world… What’s hard is to believe in Jesus as a political theologian. It’s hard because his ideas for running the world are so radically different from anything we are accustomed to. Which is why, I suspect, for so long, the Gospels have been treated as mere narratives and have not been taken seriously as theological documents in their own right."

"We believe in Jesus theologically, religiously, spiritually, sentimentally … but not politically… If we were tasked with framing a political theology drawn only from Jesus’s words, what would it look like? It would probably look like something we don’t much believe in. Why? Because when it comes to political models for running the world, we find it hard to believe in Jesus. 

"Jesus did not merely testify against symptomatic sin — in fact, he spent very little time doing this. Rather, Jesus struck at the heart of the systemic evil that has provided the foundation for human civilization. Jesus didn’t seem very interested in exposing symptomatic sinners — tax collectors, drunkards, prostitutes, etc. Instead Jesus challenged the guardians of systemic sin — the power brokers of religion and politics. Jesus knew that tax collectors were greedy and violent, but he was more interested in focusing his prophetic critique on the foundations of greed and violence that inevitably produce greedy and violent people. Sinful tax collectors were merely a symptom of a sinful but hidden system. The sinful and hidden system of greed and violence is “the world.” Jesus, in his prophetic preaching, was shining a light on the dark foundation of the world: “I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world” (Matt. 13:35)."

"The relentless bloodletting of Homer’s Iliad depicts the foundational evil of the world that Jesus dared to testify against. Homer’s epic poem recounting the Trojan War became a sacred text within the pagan world consistent with the world’s bloody foundation. The blind bard saw more than most and knew what made the world go around — rage and murder. The Spartans needed to hate and scapegoat the Trojans so they could achieve a unity within their own society. They needed to project the anxiety that threatened to erupt into an every-man-for-himself violence onto a sacrificial “them” — an enemy whom they could hate in common and kill with impunity. They needed to kill, but they also needed to believe that killing was good. This is the basic (though hidden) political foundation of the world. It’s also evil. It’s an evil so well hidden that we hardly ever see it as evil. It’s an evil concealed behind flags, anthems, monuments, memorials, and the rhetoric of those who have won their wars. The hidden foundation of hatred and murder is why world history is little more than the record of who killed who, where, when, and what for."

"Jesus’s call to love our enemies presents us with a problem — a problem that goes well beyond the challenge we find in trying to live out an ethic of enemy love on a personal level. How can a nation exist without hating its enemies? If nations can’t hate and scapegoat their enemies, how can they cohere? If societies can’t project blame onto a hated “other,” how can they keep from turning on themselves? Jesus’s answer is as simple as it is revolutionary: instead of an arrangement around hate and violence, the world is now to be arranged around love and forgiveness. The fear of our enemy and the pain of being wronged is not to be transferred through blame but dispelled through forgiveness. Unity is not to be built around the practice of scapegoating a hated victim but around the practice of loving your neighbor as yourself — even if your neighbor is your enemy. Jesus was trying to lead humanity into the deep truth that there is no “them;” there is only us."

"In the light of the cross, our war anthems lose their luster. But this throws us into a crisis. What other alternatives are there? How else are we to arrange the world? The alternative is what Jesus is offering us when he told us that the kingdom of God is at hand. God’s way of arranging the world around love and forgiveness is within reach. If we only dare to reach out for it, we can have it. But we are so afraid. We’re not sure we can risk it. It’s so hard for us to let go of the sword and take the hand of the crucified one. It’s so hard for us to really believe in Jesus."

"It’s hard to believe in Jesus! To believe in Jesus fully, to believe in Jesus as more than a personal Savior, to believe in Jesus without qualifications, to believe in Jesus as God’s way to run the world, to believe in Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount, to believe in Jesus as the unimagined solution for a world gone wrong and not as merely chaplain or cheerleader for our favorite version of the status quo is very hard to do. It also very controversial."

"I learned a bitter lesson. I learned that it is much easier to unite people around a Jesus who hates our enemies and blesses our wars than it is to unite people around a Jesus who calls us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us."

"Believing in a war-waging Messiah is easy. Believing in the Prince of Peace is hard."

  ---

Whew. Yes. Yes, it is.

These were a couple very powerful chapters to me. They have me thinking about a lot. Mostly I regret that I could/did not include more of it. There is so much. So much good meat from biblical history, and some Mark Twain. Ugh. So much I had to leave out. Anyway...

One point to ponder: Am I following the crowd, or am I following the Christ? Trying to answer that about every thought, attitude, and action... That should occupy my mind long enough to keep me from saying a lot of stupid things. If only.

Peace out, folks; and in.