Today is another dose of my highlighted sections from Brian Zahnd's swell book, 'A Farwell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor's Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace.'
You can find Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 linked respectively. And, let me once again remind you, none of these contain any type of "review" but are simply the word-for-word sections I highlighted in my reading. I have added some commentary here and there, but not much. If these highlights interest you, I highly recommend buying and reading the entire book. There is so much more I could have highlighted but, then, that would basically be the entire thing. So... enjoy.
Chapter 5 (Freedom's Just Another Word For...) highlights:
"For Jesus, freedom is liberation from sin — especially the particular sin of collective killing ."
This was quite shocking. Jesus had just told a group of prospective disciples that they were actually looking for an opportunity to kill him! Why? Because collective killing is the sin Jesus told the crowd they were enslaved to and needed to be set free from. …For the crowd, freedom was just another word for having the power to kill their enemies. The crowd said, “We’re talking about freedom,” but Jesus said, “No, you’re talking about killing.” Jesus was unmasking what lay behind the crowd’s euphemistic use of words like freedom. Jesus was telling them a truth about themselves that had long been hidden from them — a truth they really don’t want to know. …It is not a popular truth that Jesus was offering … but if you can receive it, it will set you free. …[From John 8] The truth that Jesus was trying to show the nationalistic crowd of Judean disciples is that freedom attained and maintained by killing is another name for slavery! Let that sink in. What they think makes them free actually enslaves them. They are slaves to their practice of collective killing for the sake of power and they self-deceptively call it freedom. For the crowd, freedom was just another word for killing. For Jesus, freedom was another word for love.They answered him, “Abraham is our father.” Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing what Abraham did, but now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did.” (John 8 : 39–40)
"If Abraham is the father of monotheism, Abraham is also the father of the abolition of human sacrifice. When Abraham laid down the knife on Moriah and offered a ram instead of his son, humanity took a huge step in the right direction. (A thousand years later the Hebrew prophet Hosea would announce that God does not desire sacrifice at all — something Jesus twice affirmed. See Hosea 6:6, Matt. 9:13, and Matt. 12:7.) In other words, Abraham abandoned the idea of killing in the name of God. This is what Jesus was talking about! This is what Abraham did! This is why Jesus told the crowd that if they were truly Abraham’s children they would do what Abraham did and not seek to kill in the name of God."The freedom that comes from God is not power to kill, but the choice to love. For Jesus, freedom is another word for what Abraham did when he laid down the knife and chose not to kill his son.
We really do not want to hear that God is calling us to rethink what it means to be free.
Jesus knows that most of the time, most people cannot bear to be told that killing in the name of freedom is just another word for being a slave to systemic sin!
Jesus boldly told the Judeans that in holding to a false violence-based freedom instead of true love-based freedom, they were of their father the devil. They were not children of Abraham or children of God; they were, sadly, children of the devil.
The satan was present in the Cain and Abel story — stirring up rivalry and accusation, instigating violence and murder, and lying about it. With satanic ideas crawling around inside his head, Cain thought he couldn’t be free until he imposed his will upon his brother. Cain, the tiller of the ground, could not share the land with his brother, the tender of flocks. Something had to give. Cain had to be free. Free from having to love his brother, free from having to care for his brother, free from having to share the land with his brother. Doing the will of his satanic father, Cain reclassified his brother as an enemy. Cain killed Abel. Cain lied to himself about it. Then Cain went forth with hands full of blood and a head full of lies to found human civilization.
When your city is built upon violence, freedom is just another word for killing your brother. But when your city is built upon love, freedom is just another word for being your brother’s keeper......Jesus brings us the truth that will set us free. The truth is that God is love and light. The truth is that our enemies are really our alienated brothers. The truth is there is no “them” — there is only us. The truth is that freedom is love, not power. The truth is there is another way to arrange human civilization than what we have known. The truth is that the way of war is a lie. It comes from the father of lies, the father of murder.
Do we have the courage to embrace the truth that will set us free? Or would we rather keep throwing rocks at those who tell us that the way of war and violence is a lie that keeps us enslaved to sin and Satan?
We want the freedom to arrange the world in such a way that it serves the interest of our own self or our own group. But that is not freedom. That is the way to slavery and self - destruction.Do you really think the only way
to bring about the peace
is to sacrifice your children
and kill all your enemies?
— Larry Norman
Jesus sets us free not by killing enemies but by being killed by enemies and forgiving them…
Chapter 6 (The Things That Make For Peace) highlights:
But I actually don’t claim the label of pacifist for this reason: pacifism is a political position on violence. It’s a position one could adopt apart from Jesus Christ — as for example, the great writer and humanist Kurt Vonnegut did. But I am not a political pacifist. What I am is a Christian. And as a Christian, we can talk about how Christ informs humanity on the subject of violence.
I’ve come to understand that to live gently in a violent world is part of the counterculture of following Christ.
What happened was once the red, white, and blue varnish was removed from Jesus and I learned to read the Gospels free of a star-spangled interpretation, I discovered that my Lord and Savior had a lot of things to say about peace that I had been missing. [I love this sentence!]When Jesus wept and said, “If only you had known the things that make for peace,” he wasn’t talking about spiritual peace or inner peace or emotional peace; he was talking about peace from the literal hell that is war.
The point is this: it wasn’t enough for Jerusalem to hail Jesus as the coming king — they did that! They also had to believe in the new way of peace the coming King was proclaiming. Did you catch that? It’s not enough to believe in Jesus; we also have to believe in the Jesus way! (For that matter, I’m not quite sure what it means to “believe in Jesus” without believing in the Jesus way.) If we don’t believe in the Jesus way, we won’t know the things that make for peace. Then we are bound to continue down the well-worn road to Gehenna and Armageddon, to Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Quite simply, it’s not enough to just believe in Jesus. In fact, a reckless assumption that because we believe in Jesus and therefore God is on our side can actually aggravate our addiction to Armageddon. It’s happened before. In America. And it led to America’s bloodiest war.
From 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn':
"I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off but laid the paper down and set there thinking — thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night - time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world and the only he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see the paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” — and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming."Huck Finn had been shaped by the Christianity he’d found in his Missouri Sunday school — a Christianity focused on heaven in the afterlife while preserving the status quo of the here and now. Huck thought that helping Jim escape from slavery was a sin, because that’s what he had been taught. He knew he couldn’t ask God to forgive him until he was ready to “repent” and betray Jim. Huck didn’t want to go to hell; he wanted to be saved. But Huck loved his friend more, so he was willing to go to hell in order to save his friend from slavery...
...Twain did a masterful job of showing us how wrongheaded Christians can be about what constitutes salvation. For Huck to act according to justice, he had to think he was committing a great sin. For Huck to act Christlike, he had to think he was forsaking Christianity. For Huck to love his neighbor as himself, he had to think he was condemning his soul to hell. Think about that a while!
Jesus said that something has hidden the peaceful way from our eyes… and more often than not, it’s a flag. If patriotism simply means the pride of place that inspires civic responsibility, so be it. But if patriotism means “my country right or wrong,” it’s a kind of groupthink blindness that hides the things that make for peace. Unfurled flags of nationalism have a long history of hiding the things of Christ that make for peace. Whether they are Roman, Byzantine, Spanish, French, English, German, Russian, or American flags, when they hide the things that make for peace, they are no longer the innocent banners of a benign patriotism.
The road of nonviolent peacemaking is not an easy road, it’s not a popular road, and it’s certainly not a road for cowards. The road of “God is on our side, and he shall surely smite our enemies” is a wide road. A lot of parades have gone down that road. It doesn’t take much courage to travel that road; just fall in step and follow the crowd. A marching band is usually playing. But it’s also the road that leads to burned villages, bombed cities, and solemn processions of flag-draped coffins. Until the self-professed followers of Jesus are willing to forsake the wide road for the narrow way, the popular sentiment for the unpopular conviction, the easy assumptions for the hard alternatives — Jesus will continue to weep while his disciples shout hosanna.
I wasn’t going to be led onto the path of peacemaking by Gandhi or Rumi — as admirable as those men were. If today I’m trying to walk the narrow path of nonviolent peacemaking, it's only because its where I find the footsteps of Jesus. It’s an uncrowded path, perhaps at times a lonely path. But it’s worth traveling, because I keep catching glimpses of Jesus farther up the road.
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Yeah, so, there is a lot here today. Sorry about that. What I found particularly of interest to me was the bit about not being a pacifist. It's a fine line I have always walked. I've often thought of myself as a pacifist, however, when it comes to being a democrat or republican, I've been fond of saying I was neither - I am a Christian. I'd not thought of it like that with pacifism too.
I would also like to point out - the author makes no mistake about his love for military people, even in spite of his hatred of war. I share this as well. People do what they feel they need to do. You still love them. I do and believe what I feel I need to do and believe.
I remember how every Memorial Day and Veterans Day when I was pastoring was such a chore for me. It seemed so many wanted to celebrate war and war "heroes." I think there is a difference between 'honoring' someone who has made great sacrifices, and 'celebrating' what they've done. I've known many a military veteran who absolutely hated war and everything they did during that time. I have always tried to empathize with them, rather than celebrate the atrocity.
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Anyway, this is a difficult couple chapters for me. I am troubled by war and hate and killing. Of course I'm thinking of it in terms of actual physical acts. Sometimes I fail to see in myself the times I resort to these in my words and thoughts though. Is it enough to not physically cause harm to others, or are there times my thoughts and attitude need a reminder to love and not hate? Yes. Probably. "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."
Peace out folks; and in.
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