Authors: Karen Armstrong
Fields of Blood (26 page)
These peasant communities may have voiced their opposition to Roman rule in terms of their egalitarian Jewish traditions, but they were neither crazed by their fervor nor violent or suicidal. Later popular movements failed because their leaders were less astute. During the 50s CE a prophet called
Theudas would lead four hundred people into the
Judean desert in a new exodus, convinced that if the people took the initiative, God would send deliverance.
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Another rebel leader marched a crowd of thirty thousand through the desert to the
Mount of Olives, “ready to force an entry into Jerusalem, overwhelm the Roman garrison, and seize supreme power.”
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These movements had no political leverage and were ruthlessly put down. Both these protests were inspired by the
apocalyptic and perennial belief that activity on earth could influence events on the cosmic plane. This was the political context of
Jesus’s mission in the villages of Galilee.
Jesus was born into a society traumatized by violence. His life was framed by revolts. The uprisings after Herod’s death occurred in the year of his birth, and he was brought up in the hamlet of
Nazareth, only a few miles from
Sepphoris, which
Varus had razed to the ground; the peasants’ strike against Caligula would occur just ten years after his
death. During his lifetime, Galilee was governed by Herod Antipas, who financed an expensive building program by imposing heavy taxes on his Galilean subjects. Failure to pay was punished by foreclosure and confiscation of land, and this revenue swelled the huge estates of the Herodian aristocrats.
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When they lost their land, some peasants were forced into banditry, while others—Jesus’s father, the carpenter
Joseph, perhaps, among them—turned to menial labor: artisans were often failed peasants.
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The crowds who thronged around Jesus in Galilee were hungry, distressed, and sick. In his parables we see a society split between the very rich and the very poor: people who are desperate for loans; peasants who are heavily indebted; and the dispossessed who have to hire themselves out as day laborers.
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Even though the
gospels were written in an
urban milieu decades after the events they describe, they still reflect the political aggression and cruelty of
Roman Palestine. After Jesus’s birth, King Herod slaughtered all the male infants of
Bethlehem, recalling Pharaoh, the archetypal evil imperialist.
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John the Baptist, Jesus’s cousin, was executed by Herod Antipas.
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Jesus predicted that his disciples would be pursued, flogged, and killed by the Jewish authorities,
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and he himself was arrested by the high-priestly
aristocracy and tortured and crucified by Pontius Pilate. From the start, the gospels present Jesus as an alternative to the structural violence of imperial rule. Roman coins, inscriptions, and temples extolled
Augustus, who had brought peace to the world after a century of brutal warfare, as “Son of God,” “lord,” and “savior” and announced the “good news” (
euaggelia
) of his birth. Thus when the angel announced the birth of Jesus to the shepherds, he proclaimed: “Listen, I bring you
euaggelion
of great joy! Today a Savior has been born to you.” Yet this “son of God” was born homeless and would soon become a
refugee.
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One sign of the acute distress of the population was the large number of people afflicted with neurological and psychological symptoms attributed to demons who came to Jesus for healing. He and his disciples seem to have had the skill to “exorcise” these disorders.
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When they cast out demons, Jesus explained, they were replicating God’s victory over
Satan in the cosmic sphere. “I watched Satan fall like lightning from Heaven,” he told his disciples when they returned from a successful healing tour.
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So-called spirit possession seems often linked with economic, sexual, or colonial oppression, when people feel taken over by an alien power they cannot control.
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In one telling incident, when Jesus cast out a host of
demons from a possessed man, these satanic forces told him that their name was “legion,” identifying themselves with the Roman troops that were the most blatant symbol of the occupation. Jesus did what many colonized people would like to do: he cast “legion” into a herd of swine, the most polluted of animals, which rushed headlong into the sea.
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The ruling class seems to have regarded Jesus’s exorcisms as politically provocative: they were the reason
Antipas decided to take action against him.
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In Jesus’s mission, therefore, politics and religion were inextricable. The event that may have led to his death was his provocative entrance into
Jerusalem at
Passover, when he was hailed by the crowds as “Son of David” and “king of Israel.”
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He then staged a demonstration in the temple itself, turning over the money changers’ tables and declaring that God’s house was a “den of thieves.”
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This was not, as is sometimes assumed, a plea for a more spiritual style of worship.
Judea had been a temple state since the
Persian period, so the temple had long been an instrument of imperial control, and the tribute was stored there—although the high priests’ collaboration with Rome had recently brought the institution into such disrepute that peasants were refusing to pay the temple tithes.
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But neither did Jesus’s preoccupation with imperial misrule mean that he was “confusing” religion with politics. As he upturned the tables, he quoted the prophets who had severely castigated those who ignored the plight of the poor but whose religious observance was punctilious. Oppression, injustice, and exploitation had always been religiously charged issues in Israel. The idea that faith should not involve itself in such politics would have been as alien to Jesus as it had been to
Confucius.
It is not easy to assess Jesus’s attitude to violence, but there is no evidence that he was planning military insurrection. He forbade his disciples to injure others and to retaliate aggressively.
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He did not resist his arrest and rebuked the disciple who cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant.
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But he could be verbally abusive: he fulminated against the rich;
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cruelly lambasted those “scribes and
Pharisees” who served as retainers;
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and called down God’s vengeance on villages that rejected his disciples.
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As we have seen, the
Jewish peasants of Palestine had a tradition of nonviolent opposition to imperial rule, and Jesus knew that any confrontation with either the Jewish or the Roman ruling class—he did not distinguish the two—would be dangerous. Any disciple, he warned, must be ready
to “take up his cross.”
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It seems that, like
Judas of Galilee,
Jesus may have relied on God to intervene. While she was pregnant with him, his mother had predicted that God had already begun to create a more just world order:
He has shown the power of his arm
He has routed the proud of heart.
He has pulled down princes from their thrones and exalted the lowly.
The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich sent empty away.
He has come to the help of Israel his servant.
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Like Judas the Galilean, Jesus may have believed that if his disciples did not shrink “from the slaughter that would come upon them” and took the first step, God would overthrow the rich and powerful.
One day the Pharisees and Herodian retainers asked Jesus a trick question: “Is it permissible to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Should we pay, yes or no?” Taxation was always an inflammable issue in
Roman Palestine, and if Jesus said no, he risked arrest. Pointing to Caesar’s name and image on the denarius, the coin of tribute, Jesus replied: “Give back [
apodote
] to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”
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In a purely imperial context, Caesar’s claim was legitimate: the Greek verb was used for a rendition made when one recognized a rightful claim.
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But as all Jews knew that God was their king and that everything belonged to him, there was in fact little to “give back” to Caesar. In
Mark’s gospel, Jesus followed this incident with a warning to the retainers who helped to implement Roman rule and trampled on the poor and vulnerable: “Beware of the scribes who like to walk about in long robes, to be greeted obsequiously in the market squares, to take the front seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets; these are the men who swallow the property of widows, while making a show of lengthy prayers.”
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When God finally established his kingdom, their sentence would be severe.
That
Kingdom of God was at the heart of Jesus’s teaching.
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Setting up an alternative to the violence and oppression of imperial rule could hasten the moment when God’s power would finally transform the human condition. So his followers must behave
as if
the kingdom had
already arrived.
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Jesus could not drive the
Romans from the country, but the “kingdom” he proclaimed, based on justice and equity, was open to everybody—especially those whom the current regime had failed. You should not merely invite your friends and rich neighbors to a festivity, he told his host: “No, when you have a party, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” Invitations should be issued in “the streets and alleys of the town” and “the open roads and hedgerows.”
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“How happy are you who are destitute [
ptochos
],” Jesus exclaimed; “yours is the kingdom of God!”
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The poor were the only people who could be “blessed,” because anybody who benefited in any way from the systemic violence of imperial rule was implicated in their plight.
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“Alas for you who are rich, you are having your consolation now,” Jesus continued. “Alas for you who have your fill now; you shall go hungry.”
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In God’s Kingdom, the first would be last and the last first.
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The
Lord’s Prayer is for people who were terrified of falling into debt and could hope only for bare subsistence, one day at a time: “Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive those who are in debt to us. And do not put us to the test, but save us from the evil one.”
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Jesus and his closest companions threw in their lot with the most indigent peasants; they lived rough, itinerant lives, had nowhere to lay their heads, and depended on the support of Jesus’s more affluent disciples, such as
Lazarus and his sisters
Martha and
Mary.
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Yet the kingdom was not a utopia that would be established at some distant date. At the very beginning of his mission, Jesus had announced: “The time has come and the Kingdom of God has already arrived.”
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The active presence of God was evident in Jesus’s miracles of healing. Everywhere he looked, he saw people pushed to the limit, abused, crushed, and desperate: “He felt sorry for them because they were harassed [
eskulmenoi
] and dejected [
errimmenoi
], like a sheep without a shepherd.”
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The Greek verbs have political connotations of being “beaten down” by imperial predation.
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These people would have been suffering from the hard labor, poor sanitation, overcrowding, indebtedness, and anxiety commonly endured by the masses in agrarian society.
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Jesus’s kingdom challenged the cruelty of Roman
Judea and Herodian
Galilee by approximating more closely to God’s will—“on earth as it is in heaven.”
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Those who feared indebtedness must release others from debts; they had to “love” even their enemies, giving them practical and moral support. Instead of taking violent reprisals, like the Romans, people in God’s
kingdom would live according to the
Golden Rule: “To the man who slaps you on one cheek, present the other cheek too; to the man who takes your cloak from you, do not refuse your tunic. Give to everyone who asks you, and do not ask for your property back from the man who robs you. Treat others as you would like them to treat you.”
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Jesus’s followers must live as compassionately as God himself, giving generously to all and refraining from judgment and condemnation.
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