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Following Jesus in nonviolent struggle for justice and peace, we love our neighbors and enemies as God loves us all, becoming a peace church to share in God’s work to save the world.

Jesus, Anthropology and World Religions: Some Good News

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JESUS, ANTHROPOLOGY AND WORLD RELIGIONS
Some Good News

by John K. Stoner

1st of 7.

INTRODUCTION

   Following are some thoughts seeking a genuine interreligious conversation around a question of human consequence posed by Jesus: “Is it lawful in your system to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” (Mark 3)

   Many people have observed that religion plays a role in some of the most intractable conflicts and wars of our time. As a consequence it is not a big jump to conclude that some of the work for peace, perhaps a very central part of it, is to seek peace between and among the religions of the world.

   Given this, it is certainly a good thing that people of faith are initiating conversations between religions. Each faith tradition will certainly try to bring to that conversation the essence of its own best insights. In an effort to contribute something toward that goal I present these thoughts, grounded in the life and teachings of Jesus, with a focus on what he said about human nature and humans living in community--elements of anthropology. Here are some things to say about Jesus in an interreligous dialogue. That there are other ways of talking about Jesus may simply indicate that there is more than one religion called Christianity.

    The following themes are treated in the order shown.
   1. To Do Good or To Do Harm
   2. To Save Life or To Kill
   3. The Primacy of Embrace
   4. How to Deal With Enemies
   5. The Tyranny of Exceptions
   6. The Possibility of Change
   7. The Persistence of Hope

1. To Do Good or To Do Harm

   One can read the life of Jesus as a commentary on how to deal with enemies.

   Did Jesus have enemies? Yes, if “enemies” are what we call “the other” in the most difficult cases, because of experienced hostility and perceived threat from the other. Psychologists, counselors and pastors have written many books on relating to others in situations where the others present challenges and obstacles to an easy relationship.   However, there are not a lot of books on the really hard cases, where the challenges merge into serious threat, even endangering life itself.

   But surely it is in the hard cases that any principle of reconciliation and community is put to the test. A textbook on human relations which treats everything except how to deal with enemies would not be a good buy.

   On the other hand, a book which deals centrally with how to deal with enemies, in our day and age, would be a very good buy indeed.

   In a way the Bible is such a book. But it is not automatically read as such, and indeed there are ways of reading it which teach more of the wrong thing than the right thing, because the Bible contains many voices, and the reader is forced to choose among them.

   It is here that we get help from a life rather than a book. We get help from the life of Jesus, from how he lived his life and what he taught as he lived.   His life was lived, indeed, in the midst of a culture, religion and politics which kept much of its history and thought in a book, but Jesus added insight and energy which surpassed anything in the book. His life and teachings thus became critical for understanding the book and choosing among its voices.

   In the book, briefly summarized, the multiple voices present three major ways of dealing with enemies: annihilation, isolation, and reconciliation. These three are not the same, and they cannot be made compatible with each other, as anyone imaging themselves on the receiving end of the three approaches will readily recognize.   There is neither practical nor moral parity among them. Annihilation is not separation or reconciliation, isolation is not reconciliation, reconciliation is not annihilation, etc.

   All three can be found in the older part of the book, with the heaviest weight (in more than one way) on the annihilation approach, secondly on the separation approach, and least, but impressively and increasingly, on the reconciliation approach.

   What we see in the life of Jesus is a resolute and uncompromising focus on the reconciliation approach. He summarized his view of the matter with the words “love your enemies.” It’s a way that is stark, it is difficult, but if we look at Jesus carefully and take him seriously, we find that it is possible.

   And that is good news for the human project, because what to do about enemies has become synonymous with the question of human survival. If we get that right, we have a chance (shall we say a fighting chance?), and if we don’t we don’t.

   We do not have to just wonder or guess how Jesus dealt, in specifics, with his enemies. The story is clear enough, and it confronts us with a choice. It asks us what we think of how he did it, and would we choose to try it ourselves.

   We can take one instance from the record to illustrate Jesus’ general approach. By way of introduction we can observe that for Jesus the coinage of power was truth, and, to say the obvious, truth is communicated in speech. So for Jesus in dealing with enemies, words were important. Persuasion was the method.

   But a further observation is important. Jesus as a negotiator, or communicator, or persuader, did not necessarily count on changing the minds of his most determined opponents, or enemies, at least on the short term. He was satisfied, it seems, to speak the truth into a situation, and let all who heard it make up their minds. But that was, and is, no small thing. In most critical situations there are far more undecided people than radically committed protagonists, and that majority which can be swayed will be more decisive in the long run than the minority of extremists.

   This brings us to an account from the gospels, found in Mark 3 (and Luke 6), in which the opponents (enemies) of Jesus are pressing him hard. The Pharisees, seeking to discredit Jesus, watch him in the synagogue to see if he will break their interpretation of the sabbath law.   The conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees is intense, and in the course of this confrontation Jesus exposes the fact that they are prepared to kill him if they can. So the starting point for grasping the significance of this story is to know that Jesus is here dealing with his enemies, and he knows he is. How does he deal with them?

   Here is the story::

   “Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.” Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him” (Mark 3).

   The Pharisees were accredited representatives of an ancient and honored religious tradition--the tradition of the very people gathered in the synagogue that day. As such they had a de facto claim on at least the deference, if not the subservience, of Jesus. They held power which they were determined not to lose, and they saw Jesus as a threat because of his appeal to the people. They were prepared to take any measures necessary to prevent Jesus from gaining more support.   But in the face of their threat, Jesus was fearless. Luke adds an intriguing comment before Jesus’ command to the man to come forward. He says, “even though he knew what they were thinking, he said to the man, “Come forward.” He was not intimidated by his enemies.

   Jesus could have responded differently. We have no indication that he thought of dealing with them by annihilation.   But it is obvious that he could have separated himself from those threatening him by leaving the synagogue. Without giving up his desire to heal the man, he could have decided to heal him at another time or another place, not in the holy time and space of the Pharisees. In other words, he could have dealt with his enemies by separation. He chose not to do that. It is fair to wonder why.

   Instead, he escalated the tension by staging a confrontation of truth claims. Recognizing his opponents’ claim to be authorities in the law he asked a question about the law. “Is it lawful,” he asked, “to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?”

   But why, there in the holy space of the Pharisees on a holy day, raise a question about killing? Surely that was irrelevant at best, and wildly off the scale of what could be considered appropriate in the situation at worst. But no, it wasn’t, because that question took the confrontation to the place of foundational commitments and ethics. Jesus correctly perceived that his opponents were operating with a view of human nature and social order based on the power of homicidal sanctions. He knew that the Pharisees in the room with him felt justified, in their official capacity as leaders, if not in their personal right as individuals, to kill an enemy of the people. That, ultimately, was their way of maintaining law and order.

   The question which Jesus asked was, moreover, anthropological rather than theological. In that holy space and time, Jesus did not ask the Pharisees, or the assembled people, what they thought about God. He asked them what that thought about their neighbor.

   Jesus considered it important to challenge the Pharisees’ view of authority and notion of power. He chose to make that which was hidden--a commitment to homicidal coercion--public and visible. Hence his refusal to flee, and his escalation of the tension with a pointed question.

   The Pharisees were silent, and their silence moved Jesus to anger, and to compassion. The two sides of his response are exemplary, and should not be missed by critics who think that Jesus was too soft on injustice, or on the other hand, too hard on people.

   But in that synagogue there was a place which was not silent at that moment, and that place was the heart and mind of every person in the room who heard the question which Jesus asked. Without a doubt a response was formed in the heart of every listener, and a hundred voices spoke their own answer to themselves, if not to Jesus. Again, an anthropological process.

   How does human nature at its deepest level, in the best self as created by God, answer the question “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” The instinctive human answer is to say, “It is right to do good, and it is right to save life.” Aware as they may be that their performance does not always measure up to this standard, people are as sure of the right answer to this question as they are that the sum of two plus two equals four. Both answers come from the same place in the human being were truth is recognized--not invented or proven-- just recognized because it comports with the way we are made.

   Jesus knew this about human nature, and so he was prepared to put his question, out of the blue, up against all the teaching and tradition of the Pharisees in a crowded room, confident that given a chance to see the choice, people will recognize the superiority of the good and the life-affirming over the harmful and the homicidal. I said above that Jesus did not expect his enemies to change immediately, but that he was satisfied to help the masses of people, not radically committed to any viewpoint, to consider the facts by giving them the information.   Here he did just that. In his strategy of dealing with the opposition and working for justice, appealing to the common people was vastly superior to the notion of power held by his enemies. He believed in the power of good to overcome evil.

   In conclusion, two observations about this event in the life of Jesus. First, was this a personal or a public confrontation with enemies?   Christian theologians and teacher, ever since the fourth century when the emperor Constantine made his politically and morally dubious claim to embrace Christianity, have worked hard to privatize the teaching of Jesus, saying that his teaching to love enemies has private meaning, but was not intended to speak to public or political practice. But this won’t work. The confrontation of Jesus with the Pharisees was public and political in every conceivable way. The Pharisees held power as public figures in their religious tradition of Judaism, and their religion was practiced under the permission and control of the Roman empire. It is not possible to privatize them, nor is it possible to privatize the way Jesus understood the power confrontation. At stake was the question of who had the right to lead the people--Jesus said once that the people were like sheep without a shepherd. But the Pharisees saw themselves as the shepherds, and Jesus was making a frontal claim to displace them. Jesus was dealing there with what today would be called political or public enemies, and the fate of the people was at stake. In today’s language, the issue was national security.

   Second, a comment regarding the phrase “on the sabbath” in the middle of Jesus’ challenging question. Was Jesus really making a distinction between human obligation (that is the meaning of “lawful” here--what is morally obligatory?) on one holy day of the week and human obligation the other six days of the week? That makes no sense. “On the sabbath” had a much wider meaning.

   With that phrase Jesus gathered up the essence of the religious system of his opponents. He was really asking, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm in your holy system, to save life or to kill?”

   And that is the question which rings down through the centuries. Jesus is honored today because he had the wisdom, the courage, and the compassion to ask that question and that kind of question. He left no religion or faith community out when he asked it. And that is the question which those who start with the life and teachings of Jesus will ask in interfaith dialogue situations.

   Enemies too are people. Do we set out to do good to them, or to do harm to them?

   In your holy system, is it permitted to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill? An anthropological question for every interrelligious conversation.

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