Worship Beyond Nationalism - Rob Hewell

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href="#ulink_3294eb29-0a29-5481-bcce-d2d6d22017fb">27. Ibid., 345–349.

      2 / Worship Against the World for the Sake of the World1

      The first followers of Christ learned to live out their faith in an imperial age when assigning the title of lord to anyone other than Caesar was to commit a radical act of sedition. To concur with Jesus’ claim that God’s reign was preeminently and ultimately sovereign over all creation was to deny that role to any other entity. Rome, and more specifically Caesar, was accustomed to a transcendent place in its world; to assign ultimacy to any other was to diminish Caesar and to relegate the authority of Roman rule to lower standing. Yet these Christians used precisely that language in declaring their fidelity: Jesus Christ is Lord.

      Challenges to Rome’s hegemonic impulse and Caesar’s rule were nothing new. The Romans took on all challengers, always confident of their ability to exert their will. All claims against them were summarily rebuked with force, generally with great success and even greater fanfare. Any victorious refutation of a calculating challenger or a rising rebellion made for useful propaganda across the imperial domain. Rome’s story was legend, its power mythical, and its heroes divine. Force was also used against these who followed this new king Jesus the Christ, and within a few decades the hints of decline for Rome’s rule would become evident.

      Jesus’ life, ministry, and teachings offered a vastly different view of the beginning, course, and ending of history. Christ’s proclamation of God’s coming reign over all creation ultimately would demand acknowledgement from Rome and its supposedly divine Caesar. The post-resurrection, post-ascension followers who aligned themselves with a new community, born in the sweeping Spirit-event of Pentecost, were bound together under a new allegiance to an eternal Sovereign.

      From the outset, these new followers of Christ found themselves at odds with the prevailing culture of their day. Their understanding of the source, meaning, and end of life was radically different. Their identity evolved within a larger, even diverse, society. Yet they were not capriciously radical, at least not in the way revolutionaries historically assail the establishment. This new Way was radical to the core of all things, energized by a conception of reality distinct from Rome’s. “[R]adicalism arises because [of an] understanding of the very meaning of the world [that] differs, often sharply, from the understanding of the dominant culture.”2 The Way of Jesus Christ was a rival for the prize of determining the ultimacy of meaning to all things, not for control of the empire. Revolutionaries tend to covet the opportunity to reinvent the reality within which they live. These new Christians were living a radical new reality, not merely a reinvention of the existing one.

      Standing ahead of Christ’s followers in the matter of resistance to imperial claims of ultimacy was a long heritage of Jewish culture and history. This was the story of Israel, whose covenant heritage with the Creator-God called for the formation of a nation. An element of the character of this covenant was that Israel was to be distinct from all the other nations on the face of the earth. That the journey of this nation, which was to be light to all other nations, had taken a divergent path from its original establishment did not diminish the high calling to a distinct way of being in the world. In the narrative of the first testament the Jewish nation was to be forever allied intensely with the Lord God, in whom its liturgical and political identities were inextricably bound.

      Jesus’ radical claims about a new kingdom were prefigured by a long-standing anticipation that God would send a Messiah to restore the vibrancy of the Israelite nation. Jesus’ life and ministry on earth developed in a hotbed of zealotry. Resistance to Roman rule was evident, as was opposition to co-oppression by elite Jewish citizens and even the temple leaders who lorded it over the common folk of Judea and Galilee.3 Resistance to worldly sovereigns of any sort—Roman or otherwise—was not easy, nor was it always deemed appropriate. Yet resistance found a source of encouragement in Israelite understanding that God and God alone was king, a concept well delineated in the Mosaic covenant and the historic governance of these people.

      For Israelites who attempted to honor the Law faithfully, worshiping this God properly meant refusing deific standing to any other god or gods. In like manner, for these new people of God in the first century, attention to God in Christ challenged their allegiance to all worldly entities and persons. “Properly understood, worship of God, and of Jesus as the unique divine Son of the one God, also involve[d] withholding of worship and unqualified obedience from any other who may claim it.”4

      The temptation to serve other gods adored by other nations haunted Israel from its earliest beginnings. The nation’s collective infidelity was idolatry with political as well as religious implications. This was “a nation seeking security from . . . pagan god[s], rather than from Yahweh.”5 In one sentinel example of the nation’s tendency to refute its true identity, the elders of Israel asked Samuel, “Give us a king to govern us.”6 The Lord clarified to Samuel that the people were rejecting the Lord as their sovereign. The people were unconvinced by God’s cautionary explanation about the likely consequences of such an arrangement. The people were adamant in their refusal to hear Samuel saying “‘No!’ but we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like all the other nations . . .’” (emphasis mine).7 Ancient Israel’s desire to “be like all the other nations” led to a catastrophic period in their history. Their idolatry in this instance was not that they chose to be political rather than non-political. It was, rather, that they chose to trade the politics of their national identity as the people of God for the political modes of nations that did not follow the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

      The Judeans and Galileans among whom Jesus lived were acquainted with an established, if not always successful, tradition of anti-imperial patterns of action. Yet Christ’s followers would come to a completely different comprehension of the ways and means of life. That comprehension exhibited itself in their manner of living, speaking, and relating to all persons and entities around them. They accepted their new minority status willingly, stepping to the margins of the prevailing society in order to follow Jesus. Ironically, they became a force that required response. Their quiet refusal to affirm the religious status quo served notice of their fidelity to this new communal identity. These Christ-followers took exception to Rome’s imperial narrative of the past, present, and the future of the world. They chose to follow Christ in a radical engagement of the world as defined by the Roman establishment, the culture it engendered, and of formalistic Judaism itself.

      The centerpiece of world domination prior to, during, and for three centuries following the life of Jesus Christ was the Roman Empire. At the Empire’s core was the imperial cult—for all intents and purposes what might be called a state church—which represented the sum total of Rome’s values and essence bound up in the identity of Caesar. The cult’s stories, celebrations, and symbols combined to create a sacrosanct myth designed to reinforce Roman rule. To the extent that rule could be kept by captivating the imaginations—and thus the lives and loyalties—of the people, Roman rule could be relatively peaceful and benevolent. To the extent that peoples’ imaginations—and thus their lives and loyalties—were resistant to the myth, Roman rule was willing and capable of being coercive and cruel, in deadly measure if necessary.

      Caesar’s identity was highly venerated in as much as the imperial cult had religious as well as political dimensions. Messianic language was not uncommon in honoring even Caesar since he was acknowledged as the source of security and peace. It was not uncommon for Caesar to be called savior and lord.8 The act of proclaiming that anyone other than Caesar was lord was, therefore, not just an act of treason. It was also a statement of religious disloyalty. To acknowledge there was another king, one named Jesus, was beyond doubt a daring act.

      Any attempt to understand Jesus apart from this political milieu results in an abridged notion of the fullness of Jesus’ life, teachings, and ministry. It is necessary to understand that “early Christian reverence of Christ was at the same time a religious act and also one with profound political connotations and consequences.”9 The political climate of Jesus’ day, as well as that of his followers in the early years of the ekklesia, provides us a proper context for hearing the teachings of Jesus with their political connotation

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