Psalm 85; Mark 8:27-38
September 13, 2009: Peacemaking Sunday
We don’t know exactly what the lives of the Jews were like at the time of Jesus. We can make guesses because of their religion, professions and geographical location as well as the political realities of the day. But, that only takes us so far. How poor they were, how oppressed, how bad or good their lives were can’t really be known completely.
But for me it doesn’t really matter. They were human beings living in a world of human suffering – if not theirs then the people around them. That’s all it takes for me to relate to them. Our world is different, the problems are not the same, and we are more like Roman citizens than we are like the disciples in terms of social location. But we too are humans living in a world of human suffering, and if we are paying attention at all it is impossible not to want that suffering to cease immediately and for good. And we call Jesus our savior, so if he were to come now, I certainly would be tempted to believe he would help us bring about that end to suffering – he would bring reversals of poverty and oppression. Faced with our world today, part of me wishes Jesus would come and use his power to fix things right, no matter what it would take.
Likewise in Jesus’ day, many Jews had great Messianic hopes. Supported by their scriptures and God’s promise for a new world order, they were waiting for the messiah to come and fix things right – the messiah that Elijah talked about and that the prophets wrote so eloquently about. And after generations of waiting, John the Baptist comes along and tells the people that the Messiah had come! Jesus was the one. Jesus was a culmination of history. Hope was high and people were anxious to be saved from their present situation by this messiah.
But Jesus disappointed many of these hopeful people – including, it seems, Peter. “Who do people say that I am?” he asks. And the disciples say people believe he is another great messianic thinker: he’s the new Elijah, a new prophet, and the next John the Baptist. And then Peter, when he was asked directly who he thinks Jesus is, thought he knew where this was all going: he called Jesus the Messiah. Peter knew Jesus was not just another messianic prophet – he was the one they all pointed to. But we see in Jesus’ rebuke of Peter that he didn’t quite get it right. He misunderstood what the Messiah would be.
Elijah, some of the prophets and John the Baptist envisioned a day of judgment, when God would send the messiah to inaugurate the “divine cleanup of the world” as one theologian put it. They saw God coming to wipe out the unfaithful and corrupt, leaving a pure, restored nation of Israelites, ruled by this Messiah, who would be like King David. Those who would escape judgment were the ones who suffered most and the ones who followed God’s laws, caring for the poor and the stranger, healing the sick, and working for justice for the oppressed.
And Jesus certainly fit this last part. This was exactly what Jesus was doing: caring for the poor, healing the sick. But it turned out he completely rejected the first part, the part where he would bring God’s judgment and destruction of the peoples’ oppressors. And that was disappointing – to say the least – for people who had rested their hopes on such a Messiah. They would not be saved – not by this Jesus. Not in the way they imagined…not in the way they wanted.
Instead Jesus came as the enactor of God’s justice, but it was a justice that embraces peace. What does this kind of justice look like? This is a question that many people have wrestled with throughout history, and certainly we see the authors of our scriptures wrestling with this question as well. For some, the only possibility for justice was vindication – a very short step away from vengeance. They expected punishment for those who had for so long gone unpunished for their actions and violations of God’s laws. In fact, at times it seemed the oppressors were rewarded for their behavior. Justice would be served when these people got what they deserved.
Some of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible use graphic language and paint violent scenes to describe how they think God will deal with these people. There were, however, prophets that challenged this vision; we can see one such prophet in the early chapters of the book of Isaiah. This prophet saw the messiah coming in peace to bring a reversal of the social order – not through violent judgment, but through service and lowliness. Isaiah talks of the “suffering servant”. It was counter-intuitive, and it probably didn’t really “catch on”. Truth be told, we still have great difficulty trusting that the world could be changed by that kind of messiah – a suffering servant.
But it is exactly that messiah that we have all chosen to follow in Jesus. And he was the Messiah who believed redemption, salvation, healing came when justice and peace embraced.
And when justice and peace embrace it precludes the idea that a violent coming of justice is necessary before peace is possible. Instead, peace and justice are one and the same thing; we can’t have peace without justice, and we can’t have justice without peace.
In how he lived Jesus showed us we cannot have peace without justice. Compare his life with the empire into which he was born. Rome kept the peace for a long, long time: Pax Romana. But, despite this term, one of the ways Rome kept the peace was to quickly and decisively quell any rebellions or movements that threatened Roman rule. They kept the masses, most of who were living right at the edge of poverty, in their place with local rulers who collected taxes, took over the people’s land, and watched for any deviation from what was expected. In short, Rome kept peace by oppressing the people. This is peace without justice. Pax Romana worked for many. But the folks at the bottom, the ones who paid for the armies through exorbitant taxes and slave labor, they suffered injustices of the worst kind. And some, like Jesus, were killed for the sake of Pax Romana. Peace gained while some suffer is not peace.
In contrast with this, Jesus came to bring peace by addressing these basic injustices. He brought good news to the oppressed and poor, the ones who were sick and left to suffer on their own, the ones imprisoned by the Roman system. This was the path to the peaceful kingdom that Jesus took. And there was no place for injustice even if it was expedient in securing some kind of short-term peace for some people.
Just as we can’t have peace without justice, so there can be no justice without peace. Of course people must be held accountable to the law. As Christians, we submit to God’s laws – which at times coincide nicely with our civil laws, and at other times do not. Jesus summed up these laws in the commandments to love God with all your heart, soul and mind, to love your neighbor as yourself, and to love your enemies. When laws are violated so is God’s creation and intention. If people aren’t held accountable and justice is not done, the same vulnerable people, the victims of injustice, will be hurt again and again and again. The laws are meant to protect the vulnerable, the minority, the outcast. Violating them creates injustice and justice is a key element in the Realm of God.
But how do we hold people accountable? We cannot hold people accountable without embracing peace along with justice. If the path to justice does not follow the principles of peace, the justice may well balance the scales in some civil sense, but greater injustices will emerge.
I think, when I look at the world, this one is a bit harder to understand and live out. Justice can only come embraced by peace. It was hard for many of our faith ancestors, and it is hard for us. Jesus lived this principle, and in doing so he disappointed many, many people and messianic hopes. Peter was deeply disappointed when Jesus explained what the messiah would do, or rather wouldn’t do. The messiah would not fight Rome with the tactics of Rome. The messiah would not use violence to assume the throne as a just king ordained by God in order to finally liberate the victims of injutices. Violence and peace are diametrically opposed. The messiah would not clean up the world in one fell swoop, punishing those who had oppressed the Jews for so long. Instead, Jesus tells Peter that the messiah would be the one to undergo suffering and die.
That choice, to always couple his work of justice with peace, would mean he would sacrifice his own life instead of prying justice and peace apart in order to avenge the centuries of oppression of his people. When Peter expresses his disappointment in what Jesus says, Jesus rebukes him; “Get behind me Satan!” These are extremely strong words. It was that serious. The difference between the messianic expectations that included violence and the kind of messiah Jesus would be was that important.
As you know, today we take our peacemaking offering. The Presbyterian Church is committed to projects where peace and justice embrace. One such project the peace offering has supported is in Amman, Jordan. An interfaith group from Indianapolis went to Amman to build a house. Members of this interfaith community had learned by participating in Habitat projects here in the United States that coming together to build a house with a neighbor can be a wonderful way to find common bonds and celebrate differences at the same time.
This group dreamed of building a house in the Middle East, an area of the world where so many have been made homeless through war and occupation through injustices. So in the summer of 2008 a group of seventeen Jews, Muslims, and Christians, including an imam, a rabbi, a high school student, three college students and other adults, traveled from Indianapolis to Amman. There they helped build the first interfaith Habitat house in the Middle East. “We were there building walls to tear down walls,” said one of the participants from the Presbyterian church in Indianapolis.
Compare this to the prevailing wisdom in that region. Injustice is not in short supply. Yet the way people seek to balance the scales invariably includes violence – it is as if justice can be forced. That is not the justice of our Psalm. The word is tsdeq – which is also often translated righteousness. Or, I think even better, deep rightness. It has to do with relationships between people – righteousness means our relationships reflect God’s relationship to us. Right relationship is the goal, and we can’t be in right relationship with people we are killing and displacing and dehumanizing. Look at the figures on our new banner: They are embracing each other and embracing God’s creation. They are a vision of this righteousness – a deep rightness in all our relationships. That’s tsdeq – that’s justice.
Yet there are some in Israel that believe they can only ever be safe if they keep the Palestinians in check through occupation and the threat and use of violence. And there are some in Palestine that claim justice will come through, quote, “wiping the Israelis off the face of the earth.” But they’ve got it wrong and the small interfaith group from Indiana has it right.
For justice to be restored it must embrace peace: Houses must be rebuilt not demolished; land must be redistributed not hoarded; people must be held accountable for the deaths and suffering of others they have caused yet vengeance cannot be the means to that end. If justice is sought through more violence, more occupation, more encroachment, more oppression, and more war then true justice will never come, because peace will always be absent.
Another way we support justice and peace embracing as a congregation as to give 25% of the peacemaking offering to a local Grinnell ministry. The session voted this year that the money would go to the Mid Iowa Community Action Center – or MICA. I have spent time over the last few years with people at MICA, both staff and clients. In my experience these are all people who understand the relationship between peace and justice. They see and experience the violence of poverty and recognize the injustices that often make and keep people poor. If you work to address the injustices, lives become more peaceful and so they address these injustices with food, help with housing, help with emergencies and they walk with people as they overcome the challenges in their lives. At the same time, the people who work at MICA have persistent compassion for the chaotic nature of some people’s lives, and that compassion can offer a moment of peace – but it will slip away if there is no attempt to address the injustices.
There is a promise – that God will indeed come and “clean up” this world. And the end result will be the visions and images of the prophets and Jesus. But for Jesus, this time is not just some distant, dramatic future event. This promise is always at hand, and it comes in bits and pieces. It comes in those moments where justice and peace embrace. The Psalmist sees this embrace in the future; Jesus, knowing it is the intended future of God, lived this embrace with his life. We are called to do likewise. Amen.
