Who’s Really Running the World?
October
31, 2012
By
timgombis
To everyone who has
ears to hear, let them hear:
When read
carefully, none of the biblical apocalypses, from Ezekiel through Daniel to
Mark 13 and John of Patmos, is about either pie in the sky or the Russians in
Mesopotamia. They are about how the crucified Jesus is a more adequate
key to understanding what God is about in the real world of empires and armies
and markets than is the ruler in Rome, with all his supporting military,
commercial, and sacerdotal networks.
Then to follow
Jesus does not mean renouncing effectiveness. It does not mean
sacrificing concern for liberation within the social process in favor of
delayed gratification in heaven, or abandoning efficacy in favor of purity.
It means that in Jesus we have a clue to which kinds of causation,
which kinds of community-building, which kinds of conflict management, go with
the grain of the cosmos, of which we know, as Caesar does not, that Jesus is
both the Word (the inner logic of things) and the Lord (“sitting at the right
hand”). It is not that we begin with a mechanistic universe and then
look for cracks and chinks where a little creative freedom might sneak in (for
which we would then give God credit): it is that we confess the deterministic
world to be enclosed within, smaller than, the sovereignty of the God of the
Resurrection and Ascension. ”He’s got the whole world in his hands” is a post-ascension
testimony. The difference it makes for political behavior is more than
merely poetic or motivational.
J.H. Yoder, The
Politics of Jesus, pp. 246-47.
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