We Were Punk

We were kids. I was anyway. Some of us were young adults, but we didn’t have a vote or any sort of representation. More importantly, we didn’t make or control the world. We didn’t have any sort of wealth or power. We were outsiders simply because we were kids. We watched the generation of kids that had rejected the premises for war in the 60’s, the ones who had “tuned in, turned on, and dropped out” grow up to be yuppies who not only bought into the system, but profited from it. And they told us the story of a vast evil empire in the east with a nuclear arsenal that could end every life in America in a matter of moments. They told us that our only recourse was to assemble an even greater, more menacing, nuclear arsenal of our own so that we could ensure that all of the enemy lives would also be ended if this possibility became a reality. They taught us in school to duck and cover if we saw a flash in the sky. At the same time they told us that a nuclear war between the USA and the USSR would likely end all life on Earth. Then they taught us the pledge of allegiance and the national anthem and they told us to be proud. But we weren’t proud. We were naturally scared. As fear turned into anger we began to come to the conviction that all of this was ridiculous, that our parents’ generation, with their shirts and ties and fake smiles and hair spray, were completely full of shit, that the basic premises of our society were stark naked stupid. And so it was completely natural for us to want to do the opposite, to call the bluff. It was as natural as breathing to raise a middle finger to our parents, to the flag, to the cold war and to everything that represented that status quo which had brought us to the brink of annihilation. So we put a sneer on our face, we dyed and spiked our hair, and we played raucous music. We were punk.

The Punk Gospel

The Punk Gospel

The question or accusation still arises from time to time as to whether or not Craig’s Brother is a “Christian Band”. Whether it be Christians wanting to know if our music is safe, or punks wondering if we are really punk,  the question continues to follow us and usually with some negative connotations, in spite of our attempts to lay it to rest.  

When we first started we definitely called ourselves a Christian Band, but we quickly realized that there was a problem with the label. As a Christian Band we played Christian shows which were attended almost exclusively by Christians, and though they had surprisingly good turnouts, the music was generally second rate.  The shows were all around awkward. Bands were pressured to preach, which led to these often forced sermons where a guy with tattoos, who 30 seconds earlier had been screaming his head off, is now saying “… and like if you accept Jesus into your heart and stuff then you don’t have to go to hell bro.” Perhaps worst of all, music was seen as secondary to the message, which perhaps explained the lack of quality, and gave even the “good bands” an air of propaganda.[1] The whole scene made us uneasy, and so in 1997 we made a decision that we would no longer call ourselves a Christian band.  We felt that we were called by God to play punk music for punks, and that the description “Christian Band” implied that we were something else, that we were Christian propaganda for Christians. We were a punk band because we liked punk. For us, punk was the sound and attitude that best expressed the frustration of growing up in 80’s suburbia. We couldn't help but relate. We didn't believe punk was wrong. We weren’t out to trick punks into listening to Christian music by disguising it with power chords. We were Christians, but we began to feel that the most Christian thing we could do as a punk band was just be a good punk band. Just as you wouldn’t judge a plumber on whether or not he was Christian, bands also should not be judged by the faith of their members.  

15 years later I think we can say that we have been faithful to our goal. Craig’s Brother records have been called some of the best punk albums of all time, and we have successfully cultivated an audience that is composed of not only Christians. That said, our thinking on the relationship between our faith and our music is not something that stopped developing 15 years ago, and I think it is time we revisited the issue with some fresh insight.  

We’re not just punks because we like a certain style of music. If that were the case we would have had no reason to not be a Christian Punk band. We’re punks because we believe in punk. We believe that there is something seriously wrong with the status quo justifications of power and social hierarchy, and that Punk is a refreshing and honest attempt to call the bluff on those justifications. We believe that our outlandish style and raucous music are not just a “look” or a “sound”. They are a statement of radical politics, a flat out rejection of the establishment. 

There seems to be some confusion, however, about how a band can be punk if they are espoused believers in Jesus. Somehow in the 2000 year history of Christianity, the story of Jesus has become tightly wrapped into the story of the status quo, and the justification for government. It is as if people forgot that Jesus was a radical who was executed by the government for being a revolutionary, for challenging the status quo to its core. People forgot that Jesus is punk. With that in mind, I am writing to explain why we Christians in Craig’s Brother are inspired to be punk. I am writing to explain that the Gospel, the story of Jesus’ work on earth is as radical and punk as anything ever.

Some of the earliest writings that we have about Jesus are the letters of Paul of Tarsus. Paul’s understanding is that Jesus’ death and resurrection represent a radical challenge to the status quo notions of power and authority. The idea is essentially this: All governments are established upon the fear of death. The right to kill, and the authority to direct an army are essentially what makes government, government. This was an overt reality in Jesus day as criminals, and revolutionaries were crucified publicly on the roads, but is no less a reality today. The story changes from time to time. In the 20^th century communists were out to kill us. In the 21^st, religious extremist terrorists are out to kill us, but the conclusion is the same, we need the U.S. military to protect us. The fear of death is what justifies the government, and lest we forget, cops carry guns. For Paul, the death of Jesus and His resurrection 3 days later, represent an irrevocable victory over the power of rule by death.  The Roman authorities were not mistaken in crucifying Jesus as a revolutionary, as one who challenged their right to rule, they were mistaken in thinking death could stop Him. Being victorious over death, Jesus demonstrates that he is the rightful King of a new society, one that rejects fear and death as motivating forces. 

And so when Paul writes in his letter to the Christians in Rome, the city of Ceasar, that “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, for the law of the spirit of life in Jesus has set us free from the law of sin and death“, that “you did not receive a spirit which makes you a slave again to fear”, and “… we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered… in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither life nor death neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future nor powers, neither height nor depth nor any other created thing shall be able to separate us from the Love of God.” he is making the case that the old system of rule by death has no power over followers of Jesus, that Rome is no longer in charge. For Paul, the Gospel , the Good News of Jesus’ death and resurrection, is a radical announcement of a subversive new kingdom, one that supplants all previous systems of power. For Paul, the statement “Jesus is Lord”, carries the implication that Caesar is not. 

For many it will come as a surprise that Paul was so anti government. I would like to suggest that this is because we have been trained to read a false dichotomy between politics and spirituality into the letters of Paul.  Phrases like “The Gospel”, “The Kingdom of Heaven”, and “Jesus is Lord” have come to refer to spiritual truths or the afterlife, when in fact they carried radical political implications for Paul and his audience. To demonstrate this I would like to focus on the radical undertones in Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome.

Paul writes this letter to the Romans circa 58[i]. It is Paul’s longest letter, and the most developed description of his theology.  He describes his mission in 15:23-33. He has been traveling in Macedonia and Achaia where he has taken a collection of donations for the poor Christians in Jerusalem. After traveling to Jerusalem it is his intention to travel to Rome and he is writing this letter in advance. The letter is essentially an argument for Paul’s version of Christianity which stands in contrast to a more traditional conservative version of Christianity, which taught that Christians were essentially Jews (the first Christians were Jews, Paul desire to include Gentiles was a seen as a radical innovation) and that converts to Christianity needed to follow Torah, the laws of Old Testament Israel.  After his intro Paul launches into a description of those who are lost without the law (1:18-32). Having gained the attention of his detractors he then flips the table on them. Jews, even though they have the law, break it and so are not better off. His conclusion is that no one is made righteous by the law (3:20), or to put it another way, rules do not make good people.  Instead Paul argues that justification, which is a word that could be described as the process of becoming a good person, happens by faith in Jesus. This is a strange statement that deserves some explanation. Paul argues from the story of Abraham in the Torah that righteousness is actually a gift (Romans 4). Rules can only help us by showing us where we have gone wrong, and so evil or sin is a reality that is entailed by rules (5:20). The consequence of evil is death (6:23), but the fact that Jesus has risen from the dead, means that death is defeated, and consequently the law is superseded as it is in matters of death, (ie marriage 7:1-3) and sin now has no power. Having defeated sin, righteousness is now a gift that can be received by all who believe in Jesus (6:23). If we are recipients of Jesus’ victory over death, argues Paul, then we have no fear of it, and there is consequently no power that can defeat us. (Romans 8). He then goes on to defend his ministry describing how God’s plan to take the Gospel to the gentiles is really just a continuation of his plan in the Old Testament, that it was always about God’s sovereign choice, and not about being Jewish (9-11:24). That said, God still loves the Jews and will save them (9:25-36). The conclusion is that love should be the governing principle in all things, (12:9 13:9), he forbids vengeance arguing that evil should be overcome with good, (12:21) hence we should submit to governing authorities and we should not let matters of practice divide us (14). We do all this because we know that God is fulfilling his promise in scripture and here Paul quotes several passages ending with a quote from Isaiah. “The Root of Jesse will spring up, one who will rule over the nations.; the Gentiles will hope in Him.” (15:12). Paul sees his ministry as a fulfillment of these promises and he describes his plan to take the message to Rome and ultimately to Spain (15). He ends by sending a list of greetings.

Recent scholarship on Paul has focused on the growing popularity of a “Caesar cult” in the mediteranean world at the time that Paul was writing[ii]. This was a powerful combination of religion and politics which worshiped Caesar as God. Much of what we consider the basic language of Christianity seems to be borrowed from this cult. NT Wright points out that Rome claimed to have brought justice or righteousness to the world, and that as such the birth of the emperor was considered good news. The emperor who demanded allegiance from his subjects was called Lord, and part of Augustus’ claim to authority was that he was the son of deified Julius, a god. Paul opens his letter to the Christians in Rome, the city of Caesar by using his own language against him. Paul is an apostle set apart for the good news… of God’s son, Jesus Christ our Lord, and he is not ashamed of the Gospel because in it a righteousness from God is revealed. Pauls intro to the book of Romans uses Caesar’s own language to suggest that Jesus is the real king. Paul’s conclusion is no less subversive. By quoting the scriptures he does , by claiming that Jesus is the “Root of Jesse” who will rule over the nations, he is implying that Jesus is a replacement for Rome, the current ruler of the nations.

The question then is how does Paul’s anti Roman government stance affect our understanding of his message to the Romans? Does understanding the Gospel as presented in Romans as an answer to the Gospel of Caesar change anything? I think it does. Caesar’s gospel claimed to have brought peace and righteousness to the world, but how exactly did Caesar do this? He did it through brutal tyranny. Peace and law and order were preserved by the constant threat of death, hence the cross. For Paul to argue that righteousness comes by faith, then, was to propose that in fact Caesar’s law did not create righteousness, that at best it kept people in line through fear of death.  True righteousness, according to Paul, comes from fealty to the new king Jesus, a king who does not rule his subjects by fear of death but instead treats them as sons (8:15). This then implies a new society, one in which power is not understood as the ability to wield coercion, fear and death. 

This has some radical implications. Follow me if you will on a punk thought experiment. Most punks when asked what their preferred form of government is, would reply none at all. We espouse anarchy as the most punk system of human organization. But what do we mean when we say this? What we don't mean is that we think it would be good for someone to punch us in the face, or steal our stuff or kill us. What we mean is that we have a strong intuition that we could get along just fine without cops and government getting involved in our lives, without social hierarchies, without attempts to influence each other through coercion and power. This kind of anarchy precludes punching someone in the face, stealing or killing because these are simply individual acts of government.  If we are truly committed to anarchy then, we are in a position of being committed to the well being of other people. In fact the only way we could possibly maintain a system of human organization that did not involve coercion and power would be for every member of that society to be radically committed to the well being of the others. I would like to suggest that this is the lifestyle that Paul is describing in Romans 12-15:6. We are to love one another, and we are not to take vengeance or repay evil with evil, and we are to bare with those whose faith is weak not allowing debates to divide us.

It is in this context that Paul makes a statement that has been historically twisted to argue that the Gospel as understood by Paul is supportive of government. In Romans 13 Paul tells the Roman Christians to submit to the governing authorities, that there is no authority that has not been established by God, and that the government holds no terror for those who do good only those who do evil. The first observation I would like to make is that Paul is either wrong in this statement or he does not mean it the way it sounds at face value. Clearly Paul is aware that Christians are facing death for their faith. He even says this in chapter 8, and in chapter 15 he seems to acknowledge that his own life is at risk. The point is not that the authorities are good guys but that the gospel is not an excuse for criminal behavior or riots. The second observation comes from NT Wright who observes that the presence of this statement at all implies that readers were likely to understand the radical implications of the gospel.  Paul had to include this section so that Christians would not take his message as advocating  revolution by force. Another observation is that the chapter break was not in the original text. The chapter break creates the impression that Paul is starting a new section but it should be noted that Paul is continuing his argument against vengeance. The sentence immediately preceding the command to submit to authorities, is an argument that we do not defeat evil with evil.  In this light the section seems to be arguing Christians do not overthrow the government because this would simply be an attempt to defeat an evil system with its own evil methods. We do not defeat a system of rule by death through killing and destruction, rather we render it obsolete through life and love.

I would like to suggest that when modern readers read the word righteous we read it with a post Pauline understanding. That is, we think of righteousness as a character quality that leads to right action. Paul seems to think this way too, but we should be aware that his audience does not. Prior to Paul (or Jesus) righteousness would have been thought of as right action, not necessarily a character quality, so when the Caesar gospel claims to have brought righteousness to the world, it is not saying that it has made people good. All it is saying is that it has enforced good behavior, or law and order. Society under Rome was relatively functional, the economy flourished, intellectual activity was rampant, things were relatively civilized. When the Roman Christians read Paul's announcement of a righteousness from God, that is by faith, they would have understood that word righteousness to imply ordered civilized society, but unlike Roman righteousness, or law and order, which was kept in place by a brutal government and the ever present threat of death, the righteousness from God by faith is founded on love and is maintained through a radical commitment to the well being of others before our own (12:10). 

All this is to say that Paul was a radical who saw Christianity as a replacement to Roman authority. He understood Jesus' death on a Roman cross and subsequent resurrection as the defeat of Rome. Having conquered death it’s self Jesus has rendered government by death obsolete (8:2). Paul saw his mission as that of traveling the world establishing communities of people who were loyal to the new King (15) and who practiced a new form of civilization, not organized by rules backed up by threats, and social hierarchies but motivated by love and life and self sacrifice. 

The natural question then is how did American evangelicals become so conservative and supportive of government? This a long story that is beyond the scope of this paper, but it should be noted that one of the more successful strategies of the Roman Empire was to allow religious freedom so long as subjects also recognized Caesars authority. The fact that Christianity remained illegal for 300 years is a testament to how subversive it really is. Never the less we shouldn’t be surprised that eventually Rome caught on and ended up incorporating Christianity into its narrative. Nearly every leader in the western world has claimed Christianity since. Perhaps more importantly it is being recognized that there has been a long standing trend among scholars to depoliticize Paul[iii]. The argument has been that righteousness by faith is an inward spiritual reality. Christ’s work on the cross makes us into good people as individuals, but we still need government for matters of public policy. The result is we have a faith that helps us deal with guilt and feel better about ourselves, but does not actually change anything in terms of the world’s power structures. This is exactly what Paul was worried about.

In Apocalypsis and Polis: Pauline Reflections on the Theological Politics of Yoder, Hauerwas, and Milbank, Douglas Harink observes a continuity between Stanley Hauerwas' thought in Against the Nations, with Paul’s ideas in the book of Galations, an earlier version of the arguments expressed to the Romans. Paul’s concern for the Galatians is that they are failing to recognize that God is One and Universal, by attempting to follow Torah, they are reducing God to another localized deity. If God is the God of all nations, indeed of everything, then forcing Gentiles to follow a culturally specific agreement He made in the Torah is a failure to recognize His universal authority, and is essentially a different and false Gospel. American evangelicals are similar to the Galatians, not in that we want to be Jewish, but in that we have failed to recognize the Universal nature of God's authority. We have separated spiritual matters from political matters and we have said that Jesus is the answer in all matters spiritual but that American liberal democracy is the answer in political matters. This is a different and false gospel then the one Paul taught.

We in Craig’s Brother see no conflict between the Gospel as practiced by Jesus and understood by Paul, and our punk beliefs. The cross is not just a spiritual reality that brings forgiveness of sins, it is also a political reality that directly confronts the power of government, which is rule by violence. The gospel is punk in that it recognizes all governments as false gods. There is only one King. His name is Jesus, and he does not rule through fear. The result of this message is that those who believe form a new society, one that looks very much like the punk ideal of anarchy, one where coercion and violence have no place, and instead order is maintained through faith, love and respect for one another. 

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[1] Admittedly Christian music has gotten way better. Many of the best Hard Core and New Metal Bands out right now are Christian. I would like to think that we were at the forefront  of that trend, but that’s beside the point.

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[i] [i] Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church 1411-1412

[ii] NT Wright Paul and Caesar Originally published in A Royal Priesthood: The Use of the Bible Ethically and Politically, ed. C. Bartholemew, 2002, Carlisle: Paternoster, 173–193 retrieved from http://ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Paul_Caesar_Romans.htm

[iii]  Douglas Harink Apocalypsis and Polis: Pauline Reflections on the Theological Politics of Yoder, Hauerwas, and Milbank retreived from http://web.archive.org/web/20020613130524/http://home.apu.edu/~CTRF/papers/1999_papers/harink.html#_ftn23

By Their Fruit

We live in a time of mass confusion. The election of 2016 has led many to the realization that their sources of information are not as reliable as they believed. This world of targeted ads and funneled media has left us in an echo chamber of our own opinions. We now wrestle with concepts like “fake news” and “alternative facts.” How are we to decipher truth from lies in this strange new world?

In the book of Matthew Jesus has advice for just this situation. He says

“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thorn bushes? or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.”

What Jesus means is that you can recognize the liars by who they are. Instead of judging a source of information by the content of its message, you should look at the character of the person or organization who is bringing you the message.

Why would Jesus say this? Because Jesus is aware that the most evil among us are going to claim to be good people, even Christians. Of course they would. It’s not like they are going to walk in and say “Hi! I’m about to screw you over.” Jesus wants to protect us from liars, by teaching us to listen to a person’s character, not their words.

This means no matter how much someone may support the positions we stand for, we should never trust them if we know they are not good people in their personal lives. This may seem obvious, but the church has failed to listen to Jesus on this one over and over throughout history. The most notable example in recent history, being the German church’s endorsement of Hitler.

How did a whole nation of Christians end up supporting one of the most evil men in history? Because people had the idea that faith and politics were not related. People believed that you had church and spirituality to deal with the afterlife, and politics to handle in the meantime. And that, while the blood of Jesus cleanses you of your sins for the after life, in this life you have to deal with politics and that means getting your hands dirty, making compromises, and working with bad people to get a good result. Jesus knows we will be tempted to think this way so he tells us “Don’t be fooled! A bad tree cannot produce good fruit.” You will never get good results by trusting an evil person.

In this time of confusion and misinformation, it is especially important that followers of Jesus pay attention to his words. Leaders will come to us asking for our support and they will claim to be Christian and they will support whatever causes we support, but if they are hateful, if they are divisive, if they are jealous, if they are prone to fits of rage, if they are narcissistic, power hungry, and self satisfied, you will know them by their fruit. They are not to be trusted. They are not to be followed.

The Death of American Evangelical Christianity

That special American brand of Evangelical Christianity that once had such a strong grip on our culture is dead. Sure there is plenty of it still around but these are just echoes. The original sound is over. The movement has stopped growing[i], and what we are experiencing is not just a slump. It is a beginning of a mass exodus.

I can say this with confidence because we have lost our voice. How this happened is a long story but suffice to say we have been assimilated. The gay marriage issue is just a tell-tale example of this. It’s not that we did or didn’t support the rights of the LGBTQ community. I personally feel that the rules regarding non-heterosexual relations in the Bible belong in the same category as the food laws or other parts that are generally ignored by Christians, but that is an issue for another time. The evidence that we have lost our voice is that we deferred to the government to define a God given institution like marriage.

When the Church needs government to define what is rightfully hers she is pointless. Our whole claim is that Jesus is Lord of all. If this is true then why would we go running to the government crying “mommy!” when things don’t go our way.  What we have done is essentially admitted that we don’t really believe Jesus can do anything, and reduced ourselves to just another political interest group, a particularly pathetic interest group that clings to conservative values without any basis since we clearly don’t believe our own claims about Jesus.

Say what you will about the Catholic Church, she knows her place with regard to governments. She scoffs at them. She’s seen so many come and go. In her adolescent years she played them like pawns. In spite of her issues she stands as evidence that Jesus is really King because no government can stop her. We will probably see a lot of evangelicals converting to Catholicism in the next 5 to 10 years, but this won’t bring our voice back. The Catholic Church has never had the influence on American culture that Evangelicals once had.   

Those days are over and I don’t believe we can do anything to bring them back. The culture at large no longer listens to us. Our own children don’t really care. Evangelical churches should expect to see declining membership in the next 5-10 years.  In 50 years people will be trying to figure out what to do with all the old abandoned churches.

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[i] You can read the Pew Forum stats here: http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/. Christianity offers a rebuttal here http://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2015/may/american-christianity-is-dead-not-so-fast.html but it doesn’t really matter. I am not saying Christianity is dead, my point is about Evangelicals’ ability to speak to our culture which we have lost. 

Watch out for other agendas!

We've all seen the virus. It tells a saccharine story of a boy who died and saw Jesus and his grandpa or something. Doctors resuscitated him, or something, and now his story is offered as proof of Christianity's claims. It ends with a threat. Those who truly love Jesus will share this.

Most of us are internet savvy enough to ignore memes like this, but when my son got his first Facebook account I found he would often share these posts. When I asked him about it, his explanation was simple. He loved Jesus so he had to do it. He was too young to evaluate the claim before him so he just took it at face value and did what it told him. I explained to him that sharing a post on Facebook had nothing to do with loving Jesus and that the person who invented this post was creepy and the whole thing was probably made up anyway. I am not sure he understood, but he did stop sharing those sorts of memes.

I mention this story because it is an obvious example of Jesus' name being used to advance an agenda that is not his. In this case it is a simple goal: spread the virus. Most of us realize that Jesus is not really concerned with whether or not we share a meme. We are not so clear, however, when it comes to more important issues. How should we eat? How should we dress? How should we vote? We feel our faith should inform us with regard to these questions so we come to Jesus looking for answers. The problem is Jesus does not really address these issues because they were not really a concern for him. Still we are convinced there is a right answer and whatever that is must be Jesus' answer because Jesus is always right. So we go to whatever scripture we can find, we build our case, and then we say with confidence that Jesus supports us, and we wind up with statements like "Jesus doesn't want you to wear yoga pants.", "Jesus doesn't want you to eat gluten." or "Jesus wants you to vote republican."

As innocent as it may seem, this tendency to come to Jesus with our own set of questions is actually a narcissistic desire to control the conversation. At the core we still believe that it is all about our agenda but we desire Jesus' stamp of approval so we come to him asking the questions that we feel are important. When Jesus encountered people like this during his ministry he quickly dismissed them (Matt 8:22, Matt 19:16-22) because they really had no interest in following him.

Jesus warns Christians that his name will be attached to all sorts of agendas that are not his (Matt 7:22-23). This should be one of the more frightening warnings for Christians because Jesus is essentially saying "A lot of you Christians have actually completely missed the point." Apparently these Christians are all about Jesus, they all do all kinds of great things in his name, but they are advancing an agenda that is not God's and so he does not consider them true followers at all.

Of course at this point most of the Christians he is talking about will respond with a resounding "Amen!" and then go on to continue following whatever other agenda they have and assume it is Jesus'. In my high school youth group we believed that the best thing we could do for Jesus was convince as many people as possible to say the sinners prayer before they died so they wouldn't have to go to hell, so we went around with a little gospel comic and we shared it with people, and we were convinced that we were doing Jesus' work. As good as our intentions were, this still was not what Jesus was talking about.

So what was Jesus talking about when he said "Not everyone who says to me 'Lord, Lord' will enter the Kingdom of Heaven but only those who do the will my father in heaven." What is the will of the father? and why isn't Jesus more clear about it? In fact he is clear. He follows this statement by saying:

24 “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. 26 But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.” 

These are the concluding words of his longest and perhaps most well known sermon in which he describes his ethics at length. He is clear. Doing the will of the Father means following the commands in the sermon. You can read it for yourself. Its Matt 5:1 - 7:27. It describes a relentless, self sacrificing, commitment to justice, and offers some commands that western Christians have generally ignored like the rejection of wealth (Matt 6:19-24) and the admonition against judging others (7:1-5). It says nothing of same sex marriage. It says nothing about how the world was created. It does not mention drugs or alcohol, and it does not give any advice as to the media that should or shouldn't be consumed by Christians.

All this is to say: Watch out! Beware of other agendas! As good as they may seem they are in fact worse than not following Jesus at all because they fool a person into believing they are following Jesus when in fact they are on another path. Truly following Jesus does not mean using him as an answer to all of your questions, it means allowing him to set the agenda, allowing him to determine the questions that are being asked, and being willing to live out the answers he provides.
  

The Perpetrator's Gospel

The gospel of forgiveness is a perpetrator's gospel. Forgiveness is good news to those who have perpetrated injustice because it offers them redemption and allows them to change, but it is not enough for victims. Offering forgiveness to victims is just insulting. Victims need justice and a gospel that fails to offer justice is no gospel at all.

Perhaps the biggest problem with our current system of justice is that it can only act after the fact. We are not very good at preventing crime from happening, we only know how to punish it later. To recognize and address crime after the fact is better than nothing, but it can never replace preventing the crime in the first place.

Jesus was not in the business of selling fire insurance. He had no time for those who desired his seal of approval but were unwilling to practice justice now (Luke 18:18-21). The idea that the gospel is all about what happens in the afterlife is actually a slap in the face to everything Jesus ever taught and it reflects a genuine insincerity of faith. What if I told my fiance that I was incapable of being faithful and I still wanted to marry her but was concerned about whether or not she would forgive me after the fact? I would essentially be telling her I had no intention of being faithful. Forgiveness is important but to focus on forgiveness over justice is to say essentially "I have no intention of doing the right thing."

Jesus, Government and Taxes

Jesus, Government and Taxes

Often when discussions of Jesus and government come up, people will point to Luke 20:25 where Jesus says “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” as evidence that Jesus had an attitude of acceptance toward government and taxes. While it is true that Jesus does not discourage his followers from paying taxes or from submitting to rulers it is inaccurate to conclude that he views government or taxes in a positive light in any sense. What Jesus actually does is far more subversive and illegal not to mention effective, than simply telling people not to pay taxes; Jesus intentionally disrupts the tax system, reversing the flow of money so the overtaxed poor actually receive their money back.

If we want to fully appreciate Jesus’ perspective on taxes we must understand the context he was working in, particularly the Roman system of taxation. The Roman tax system in the first century was brutally excessive. Historian Ramsay McMullen notes that “The Romans wrung ultimately from the provincial peasants all that could be economically extracted.”[i]Not only in Judea, but across the Roman Empire the policy of maximum taxation was systematic. Neil Elliott quotes Nero’s instructions to a newly appointed governor regarding taxes “You know my needs. See to it no one is left with anything!” The system was held in place by violence and terror, and the chief agent of Roman terror was the tax collector. Philo describes how the Romans intentionally appointed as tax collectors the most ruthless men they could find, gave them the means to over tax the people, and the immunity of being government agents[ii]. The result was government sanctioned extortion, enforced by tyrants who were free to take as much as they wanted by any means possible, including kidnapping, torture, execution of family members, even the mutilation of deceased loved ones. This is the tax system that Jesus is said to have endorsed.

Given the vicious nature of Roman tax collectors, it is not surprising that people were so perplexed by Jesus’ willingness to associate with them. These men were not just backsliders or moral failures. They were truly evil people. They were the sort who would hold your grandmother hostage for money, and yet Jesus’ reputation for associating with them is so well known that it practically becomes his title: Jesus, a friend of sinners and tax collectors (Matt 11:19). We will get to the answer to why Jesus spends so much time with these monsters presently, but for now let’s just observe this: If tax collectors were a regular part Jesus’ audience, then it is appropriate to ask how Jesus’ message would be heard by tax collectors, and to what extant did Jesus actually tailor his message for tax collectors[iii].

In order to answer these questions, we first need to understand what it meant for a Jew to become a tax collector. For anyone to become a tax-collector in the Roman Empire of the first century, it meant being unpopular, but for a Jew to become a tax collector it meant being a traitor and a heretic. For first century Jews the Roman occupation of Judea was a problem not just because it meant economic and political servitude, but because it cast serious doubt on the validity of their faith. If the land was given by God, then Roman occupation meant that God was possibly angry with Israel, or perhaps that he had abandoned Israel altogether. The faithful, however, believed that God was simply waiting for the right moment to deliver them. Stories of the Maccibean revolts against the Selucid Empire, including the Chanukah story, as well as the numerous stories of Israel’s victories over greater enemies in scripture fostered a popular belief that God would rescue 1st century Judea from Roman oppression by sending his anointed one, or messiah, to lead Israel to political freedom[iv]. All the Jews had to do was remain faithful in spite of circumstances by keeping the Old Testament commandments[v]. In particular the first commandment, which forbids the worship of other gods, meant that faithful Jews could not be loyal to Caesar as Caesar’s claim to authority was that he was divine. So even if a Jewish tax collector was not the sort of monster described above, he was a heretic because he served another god, and he was a traitor because it was Jews serving other gods that caused God to get angry in the first place. For the faithful, tax collectors weren’t just tyrants who made their lives miserable, they were contributors to God’s anger and therefore part of the cause of the occupation.


Now imagine yourself in the shoes of the tax collector for a moment. You are rich, you are powerful, and everyone hates you. Being hated is nothing new for you, because that’s part of why you got the job. You were a jerk to begin with. Nobody ever really liked you very much and the feeling was mutual. You are probably short, ugly, and definitely mean. The closest thing to friends you have are your fellow tax collectors, but they are just as mean, spiteful and shifty as you are, so they’re not much for companionship. With access to almost unlimited power and wealth, your only real motivation to do anything is vengeance and avarice which means getting the contract to collect taxes is the best thing that ever happened to you because now you have the power to finally stick it to all those jocks and popular kids who made fun of you your whole life. The only problem is you are a miserable wretch. You are lonely and depressed. Nobody loves you. You’re probably an alcoholic, and the truth is, you know you’re a jerk and you don’t like yourself too much either. Perhaps worst of all, if you are Jewish, you are in a heaping pile of steaming excrement with God. Not only have you broken the first and greatest commandment by choosing to serve Caesar, but the Old Testament makes clear that anyone who goes around using their power and strength to oppress the weak, is going to have to answer for it one way or the other. All this is to say, if you were a jewish tax collector in the first century, you were likely unhappy, self loathing, lonely, and worried about the state of your soul.

So how would the tax collectors have heard Jesus’ message? There is probably not a facet of Jesus’ teaching that would not have had a specific meaning to the tax collector but for now I would like to focus the concept of Jubilee. According to Jewish law (Leviticus 25) every 50th year was to be honored as a year in which all debts would be forgiven. For Jesus the forgiveness of debts is not just a financial reality it is also a spiritual reality and the two are inextricably connected. That is, one may obtain forgiveness from God, but only if one also forgives their debtors. Perhaps the clearest statement of this is in his teaching on prayer where he tells us to pray “Forgive us our debts as we forgive those who are indebted to us.” This may sound strange because we are used to hearing the word “debts” translated as sins or trespasses, but the word that Jesus uses in the Greek is opheilema which literally refers to financial obligations [vi]. For tax collectors there would be very little doubt about how they could obtain salvation. They were in the unique position of being in a heap of debt with God, but also having literally everybody in debt to them. If they wanted to resolve their situation with God they simply had to forgive the debt of those who owed them money.


In case there is any chance the tax collectors might miss his point, Jesus actually tailors his message by putting into terms that the tax collectors can understand. Keep in mind that the tax collectors job was essentially that of a collector of debts. While he had the advantage of having everyone as his debtor he also had a boss, a chief tax collector, to whom he was essentially in debt. Now we know that these men were chosen as tax collectors because of their ruthlessness, so it is fair to assume that those who rose to positions of management in this field were the particularly ruthless. So if you were a tax collector you had the advantage of being able to be as greedy as you want and take everyone’s money, but you had the disadvantage of having an even greedier more evil boss who kept you in constant fear and was always accusing you of stealing. Jesus tells a number of stories that tax collectors would have understood very well, the primary example being the story of the wicked servant (Matt 18:21-35). In this story a man is forgiven a huge sum of debt only to turn around and refuse to forgive a small debt that is owed him. When the master who originally forgave the debt finds out about this he has the servant thrown into prison. Jesus makes clear that this is how God will treat people who don’t forgive. The tax collector was generally wealthy and may not have had too many debts that he could not pay but he did have one: his debt to God. If he wanted any hope of that debt being erased this story makes clear that he could not go on collecting taxes.


Luke 15 through 16:15 is another section where we can be sure that Jesus is directing his teaching toward tax collectors because it begins by telling us that all the tax collectors had come to hear him. According to the story some experts of the law who were also present had a problem with this and were complaining. Jesus tells four stories that address the concerns of the legal experts, while simultaneously driving home a powerful point to the tax collectors.


The first two stories are essentially the same: a man loses a sheep, and a woman loses a coin. When they find their lost items they rejoice/party with all their friends. It’s not hard to imagine that Jesus got a few blank stares from these two so he tells a story that hits a little closer to home: the story of the lost son. In this story there is a man with two sons. One day one of the sons demands his inheritance and leaves to go squander it another country. Eventually he runs out of money and is reduced to tending the pigs on a farm to avoid starvation. One day he finds himself thinking that the pig slop looks yummy, and he comes to his senses. If he could go back to his dad maybe he would take him on as a hired worker which would be better than envying pigs. So he goes back to his dad, but rather than being taken on as a worker his dad fully accepts him back as his son and throws a party with all his friends (15:29) to celebrate the return of his son. Meanwhile the brother who was a responsible son gets mad and complains about the fact that he never gets to party with his friends.


Jesus' message for the experts in the law is clear. He wants them to know that he is hanging out with tax collectors because God values them a lot, in fact he loves sinners just as much as he loves good people. His message for the tax collectors in these stories includes a little more. It is that they are valuable to God just as much as good people, but also that they are lost, that they have chosen a substandard life when they could have a good one, and that when they come back there will be a party involving friends.


At this point, we can be confident Jesus has caught the interest of at least some of the tax collectors. As mentioned before these men had all the power and money, but everyone hated and feared them. They had no friends, they never got invited to parties, and a good portion of them were well aware of the fact that they hated life and they hated themselves. What Jesus is offering sounds good, but so far it is unclear how exactly a tax collector is going to “come back” and what exactly this bit about partying and friends is all about, so Jesus tells one more story which is aimed at the tax collectors and is in the most concrete of terms so no one will be confused.


The story of the shrewd manager is basically the converse of the story of the wicked servant. In this story a shifty accounts manager is being accused of wasting his master’s assets. He knows he is going to get fired, and he is afraid of unemployment, so he decides to make sure that he will have plenty of friends while unemployed. He does this by making his last act as accounts manager that of forgiving up to half the amount due for all his master’s debtors. In the end even his master commends him for being shrewd. Jesus concludes by telling his audience that they should use their wealth to buy friends so that they will be welcome in “eternal homes”(16:9).


Now it’s tempting to want to say that this parable and the story wicked servant are both really illustrations of forgiveness and matters of the heart, resentment etc., but we cannot do this for two reasons: The first being that Jesus tells us this parable is about finances in 16:9, and the second being that he is speaking to people who are in the exact position of the main character of the story. Tax collectors are accounts managers.


When put in the context of the first three stories Jesus message to the tax collectors is this: You are very valuable to God, in fact God loves you like a son and as much as he loves good people, but you are lost and you have chosen a substandard life. You can come back if you want and you will be fully accepted, all you have to do is give half the money you have collected back to the people you collected it from. Then you not only will be in good standing with God but you will have lots of friends, and be invited to parties and stuff.


Now let’s just think about this for a minute. If verse 15:1 is to be taken literally, if Jesus really had an audience that consisted of all, not some, of the tax collectors then those in authority during Jesus’ time already had good cause to be concerned. Imagine how congress or the president might feel if some outsider suddenly had the entire IRS listening to them. Now think about what exactly Jesus is saying to this audience. In particular the main character of the last story betrays his master by essentially giving his masters money away. This would not have been any less illegal in Jesus’ day then it is today. Were Jesus’ parable a true story we could assume that this manager was punished severely, imprisoned, and maybe even killed for intentionally wasting his masters resources, but in Jesus’ story the master is symbolic of God and so he is pleased with the dishonest manager. Here is where Jesus’ message appears truly seditious: Having gathered all the tax collectors, the purse strings of the state, in one place Jesus is basically telling them that if they want to be fully accepted back into the family of God, they need to betray their human Roman masters and give the collected tax money back.


Again, some might be tempted to say that Jesus is really speaking of a spiritual reality in terms the tax collectors could understand, that he doesn't actually intend for the tax collectors to betray their masters. Luke, however, makes it clear that Jesus is speaking literally because he goes on to tell us of a tax collector who actually does what Jesus is suggesting here. In Luke 19, Jesus is at the height of his career. He has crowds following him and pressing against him, so much so that a short tax collector by the name of Zaccheaus is forced to climb a tree in order to see Jesus. When Jesus sees Zaccheaus in the tree he calls out to him and announces that he will be staying at Zaccheaus’ house that night. The crowds that are following Jesus are somewhat taken aback that Jesus would choose to stay with a tax collector when suddenly Zaccheaus announces that he will be giving half of his estate to the poor and will pay pack four times any amount he wrongfully collected. Jesus doesn’t correct Zaccheaus for misunderstanding his message but instead declares “Today salvation has come to this house.”(19:9) Now Luke doesn’t tell us what happens to Zaccheaus after this point but we can surmise that Zaccheaus went from being very unpopular to being popular. All the poor people who formerly hated and feared him suddenly saw him as a friend and a provider. Zaccheaus probably got invited to a lot of parties. He was also suddenly in very poor standing at work. He had taken government resources and squandered them on poor people.

Now that we understand Jesus’ message to the tax collectors, how do we understand his statement about taxes and Caesar in chapter 20? The answer lies in Jesus’ question “Whose image and whose inscription are on the coin?” but before we can get to that we need to understand the back drop of the question. Matthew tells us that those questioning Jesus had set out to trap him. They may have thought of it more as an attempt to nail him down on a hot button political issue, but the effect is the same. If Jesus were to tell people “Yes pay your taxes” he would be acknowledging the authority of a foreign god and thereby breaking the first commandment. If he were to say “no, don’t pay your taxes”, he would be advocating a tax revolution as not paying taxes brings the populace into violent conflict with the Roman occupiers. More importantly, were Jesus to advocate not paying taxes, those who were looking to accuse him would now have direct evidence with which to accuse him before Roman authorities. According to Luke the men who are questioning Jesus were experts in Jewish law, so Jesus is giving them an answer based in Jewish law. Verse 24 tells us that this coin was a denarius. We have denarii today so we know that the inscription reads “Caesar Augustus



Tiberius, Son of the divine Augustus”. The inscription on the coin pays homage to a foreign god, and is therefore in violation of the first commandment already. The reason Jesus asks them about the image is because he is bringing up the 2nd commandment which forbids making and worshiping or serving of images. The coin is undeniably an image of a foreign god, and the experts in the law implicate themselves as its servants by producing the coin from their possession and by assuming it is desirable and rightfully theirs. Interestingly enough the Greek word Jesus uses for image here is not the word from the second commandment but it is the word used in Genesis 1 when God makes people in his image.[vii]Jesus’ point is that while Caesar makes money in his image and is concerned with who owns the money, God makes people in His image and is concerned that His people remain His. The question for the legal experts should not be to whom their money belongs, but to whom their hearts belong, and their deep concern with money is evidence that their hearts are loyal to the wrong god.


Still it is perplexing that the same Jesus who disrupts the Roman tax system does not advise people to avoid paying taxes when directly questioned about it. Part of the answer to why is in the fact that Jesus, unlike the other messianic leaders of his time[viii], was unwilling to place the burden of changing an oppressive tax system on the victims. Rather than encouraging the oppressed to rise up in a bloody violent tax revolt which would ultimately lead to more misery for the already miserable Jesus works on the hearts of those who are perpetrating the extortion so that they change and give back that which they have taken. Jesus unties the bonds of oppression and eases the suffering of its victims without engaging in a violent destructive uprising.


People often wonder how a nice guy like Jesus who did nothing wrong could be executed by the government. Even Pilate, the Roman magistrate presiding over the trial of Jesus, seems to find no basis for the charges against him. We might be tempted to think that Pilate is a fair judge, but this is really more a testament to his incompetence. Keep in mind that Herod, a Jewish magistrate who had been appointed by Roman authorities, and Pilate become friends on the day of Jesus’ trial. The basis of their friendship seems to be a shared joke about Jesus being a wack job (23:11-12). It’s not that Pilate is sympathetic toward Jesus, he just doesn’t perceive the real threat. The charges against Jesus are that he is subverting the nation, forbids paying taxes and that he claims to be the messiah, a king. The charges are inaccurate in that Jesus did not actually forbid the paying of taxes, and he didn't outright say he was the King, but the heart of them is correct, in that Jesus does believe he is the King, and many in Israel are starting to believe that he is King as well, including many of the tax collectors, the purse strings of the state. Were things to continue the direction they were going Jesus would soon have the local government in a strangle hold by cutting off its life supply, its money. Pilate and Herod joke about it but Jesus’ accusers understand the real threat and know that Jesus has to die.


It’s easy to see Jesus’ statement “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” as fitting nicely into an American understanding of church and state, each with their own non-overlapping magesteria, but we have to understand that no such separation existed in the first century. Politics and spirituality were necessarily connected as is demonstrated by Caesars claim that he is a god. For Jesus to differentiate between what is Caesar’s and what is God’s, is to implicitly claim that Caesar is not God and therefore his claim to authority is invalid. Conversely, the claim that Jesus is Lord of heaven implies that he is rightful King of Earth. Were he to acknowledge that Caesar has a rightful place he would be acknowledging the authority of a foreign God, which was the basis of the trap in Luke 20. Jesus acknowledges no foreign gods and consequently he recognizes no man made government. Instead Jesus actively undermines the empire, attacking it at its weakest point, its purse. He practices his own message, loving the evil men who have betrayed their own to serve Rome, until they change and break loyalty with Rome and undo the oppression they were formerly a part of.











[i] Ramsay, MacMullen, Roman Social Relations 50 B.C. to A.D. 284 quoted by Elliot, Neil in The Arrogance of Nations (pg 91) Fortress Press 2010


[ii] Sly, Dorothy Philo’s Alexandria pg 2 Routledge 2013


[iii] This observation came fromhttp://whatistaxed.com/who_would_jesus_tax.htm an interesting if not scholarly resource. Special thanks for the “data mining” they did regarding Jesus and taxes.


[iv] See Yoder, John The Politics of Jesus pg 83 Eerdsman Publishing 1994


[v] Josephus Antiquities of the Jews 17 chapter 2 Here Josephus describes the Jews association of calamity with the breaking of the law.


[vi] Yoder, John The Politics of Jesus pg 62


[vii] See comment 20 Matt 20:22 Net Notes https://net.bible.org/#!bible/Matthew+22


[viii] Josephus Antiquities of the Jews 17 chapter 10