Jesus’ Mission and Ours

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost ● September 19, 2021

John B. Cobb Jr. © 2021

You can view the full worship video recording at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qYRGhZteU8

Scripture Reading: Luke 4:16-21 (NRSV)

The texts of the readings are in the worship bulletin linked here.

Good morning, everyone! It is a joy to be a part of the worship service here in this church. I appreciate this chance to re-meet you after last Sunday. Last Sunday, people were asking the question “what does it mean to be a disciple” in a very broad and general way. And I think we saw that to be a disciple of Jesus means to read history from a particular perspective to share the values he taught and practiced. Today, to spell out what that means, we need to ask the question “what was Jesus’ mission?” We just heard a scripture passage which corresponds in Luke to very simple statements in both Mark and Matthew. Jesus proclaimed that the “Basileia of God” is at hand. Basileia has traditionally been translated “Kingdom” and in Jesus’ day most Basileia were ruled by men. But the term does not specify. Indeed, a Basileia need not have a single ruler. After we study Jesus’ teaching about the Basileia Theou, I think we may decide that “Divine Commonwealth” captures his meaning better.

What does it mean that the Divine Commonwealth is at hand? If something is at hand it means if you want, you can choose it. You can enter into it now. Of course, it is not fulfilled in every moment already. It is still something that one is hoping and working for. But one can already adopt the way of life which, if it becomes sufficiently widespread, will constitute the basileia that Jesus is talking about. 

In Jesus’ time, as a Jew, the issue most important was the relationship of the Jews to Rome. Rome was, of course, the empire of that time and the empire controlled Israel as it controlled vast areas around the Mediterranean. And of all the peoples of that world the one that was most difficult for Rome to deal with were the Jews. There was profound conflict between the idea that total loyalty belonged to Caesar and the Jewish notion that loyalty cannot be given ultimately to any one part of the whole. Total loyalty should be to God and God’s Commonwealth. That means to God’s world. And the Roman Caesar does not represent that. Now the Romans dealt harshly, often, with those who resisted obedience to Caesar. There certainly was oppression. The Jews repeatedly revolted. And Jesus saw that these revolts would never lead to political independence of Israel. It would instead lead to the destruction of Israel. So, Jesus was trying to do two things. One was to redirect the activities of the Jews away from their suicidal opposition to Roman rule. The other was to create a climate within Israel that would transform the relationship to Rome. 

One of the stories that Jesus offered is especially suggestive of the change that he was trying to make in Jewish behavior as a way of transforming the relationship. A Roman soldier had a heavy load to carry and he had the right to compel any Jew to carry his heavy load for a mile. They were not allowed to require more than that. So, it was not an extreme oppression, but nevertheless to be forced to go a mile out of your way to take somebody else’s load is oppressive.

So, what did Jesus say? If you are compelled to go one mile, take the load two miles. The second mile is an expression that some of us have heard many times. Now how does that change the situation? In the first mile the soldier is enjoying his ability to be dehumanizing (unfortunately, many men take pleasure out of being able to control other people.) However, when the person carrying the heavy load offers to carry it another mile and does so, that whole attitude is undercut. Either they become cooperative/friendly to each other or the one who is in position to boss is in an uncomfortable situation. The relationship is changed. And Jesus believed if the Jewish people would follow what he was teaching, the kind of world, life, and attitude he was proclaiming, the Roman rule would cease to be oppressive in the way it was.

Now, of course, that is not what happened. What happened was exactly what Jesus foresaw; the Romans got tired of all the revolts and forced all Jews to leave Palestine. The temple was destroyed. The city of Jerusalem was destroyed. So, the suicidal direction of Jewish life continued, and the death of Israel took place. 

When we think of Jesus’s message and Jesus’s commitment in that way, what does that say to us today? I think that the parallel is in some ways remarkable. The biggest difference is that we cannot think of simply one country. It is not that we need to save the United States. It would be very helpful because this country is a very important part of the world. But it is the world that needs to be saved. It is the world that is on a suicidal course. And whereas the suicide of Israel did not mean the end of the Jewish people, the suicidal course we are on now could mean the end of human life on the planet. If we understand ourselves to be disciples of Jesus and we understand the salvation that we are called to bring about to be the salvation of the whole world – then does Jesus’s teaching about how to affect that salvation in his day help us? 

Not in detail. We are not being forced to carry the burden of a soldier. So, it is not that we do the same thing, but it is that we practice love. And we practice love even for the enemy. I think that when you love the enemy, the enemy ceases to be the enemy. So, I prefer to say we love our opponents and then, by loving them, we can create a wider context in which we may still be opponents, but we will not be enemies any longer. If we ask what this means, practically speaking, I think it means a substitution, at a very deep level of our understanding, of cooperation where competition has been the dominant understanding, especially in the modern world. 

In the modern world, we have thought of ourselves as individuals, each of whom wants the best possible for himself or herself. And, therefore, we are all competing. This primacy of competition in our understanding of ourselves begins in theory and it passes, to some extent, into the reality of our relationships. This has been hard on all communities and even within families. 

Economists argue that all economic system is based on this economic theory. It is based on this assumption that we are all in competition with everyone else. But, of course, they know that isn’t quite true. To say that every mother’s relationship to her children is competition – no one can believe that. So, occasionally they admit that families are not, fundamentally, made up of competitors. And then they say, “well we’re talking about family units all being in competition with each other.” 

Now you may say what difference does it make what the theory says. Well, the theory makes a huge difference, and the theory is wrong. If we want to become disciples of Jesus in our day, we cannot accept the fundamental ideas of modernity. The fundamental ideas of modernity are oppositional to the teachings of Jesus. This opposition doesn’t mean that competition doesn’t exist or that competition is inherently always evil. I like to take the example of sports to illustrate the differences that I have in mind. Obviously, when two teams play each other on the field (soccer, baseball, whatever it may be) they are competitors. They are not supposed to be cooperating with each other. That wouldn’t be much fun to watch if each team were trying to help the other one win the game. The competition can be healthy, but good teaching from the very early days puts sportsmanship above victory. And there many efforts all the way through school to teach the children that they should respect the players of the other team. Of course, the games are highly competitive, but they take place in a context of cooperation. All the players are committed or should be committed to good sportsmanship. Otherwise, the whole sport is destroyed. So, in that sense, the goal is not “no competition between people.” The goal is that everyone love those with whom they are competing. Then, we can begin to picture a sustainable world in which human life can go on. I would like to spell that out, beginning with the family and then going beyond.

It is extremely important that the members of a family cooperate with each other. It’s fundamental, really. Of course, children are often competitive and that’s fine, as long as they are committed to the family much more than they are to winning that particular competition. Community can include competition, but competition without community becomes seriously destructive. So, let’s assume that we do have a lot of families that are community, in which cooperation is primary and competition takes place within a cooperative context. That means people love each other. The danger here is each family will be competitive with all the other families. And if they are, the whole larger society will be unhealthy and self-destructive. Again, there are perfectly reasonable forms of competition, but it is far better if one puts the health of the neighborhood first and the competition among the neighbors second. It can happen. It does happen in many places. If a village is divided into two groups whose only concern is to get the better of the other it would be a very unhealthy village, not a sustainable one. But if the northern half of the village competes with the southern half, but they both care more for the whole village than they do the victory over the other half, the competition will not destroy it.

In the modern world, loyalty to one’s nation became the object of commitment and devotion. That’s a wonderful thing that people care so much about the well-being of all the people in their nation that they’re willing to give their lives. I don’t want to put that down. Patriotism is not bad. Unfortunately, in theory and in practice, nations have been competitive with each other without a common loyalty beyond that. So, the competition has been ultimate rather than simply held within the balance. And the history of Europe, the place there the modern world was born, and its primary theories developed, is a history of war. In the first half of the 20th century there were two terrible wars among the European nations. France and Germany were often pictured as the two great powers that would go to war with each other and drag the rest of Europe along. Then, a wonderful thing happened at the end of WW II. Charles de Gaulle (France) and Konrad Adenauer (Germany) met and said, “let’s create a European community.” And they did. The idea of war among the European states is not now easily imaginable. They do not build up defenses one against another.

So, when I call for a community of communities of communities of communities – which means that even the nation-states are a community that are part of a community of communities – this is not totally against the reality of what has happened in human history. We have taken some steps in this direction. We talk a little bit about the community of all nations and, of course, the United Nations suggests that. Yet, in fact, that is not a community. I think there are elements that are promising in the United Nations, but we have not succeeded in developing community at that level. Therefore, we spend enormous quantities of money to build up ways of destroying other people. That is not what you do in a community. In a community no one else is out to destroy you. So, if we can move beyond the community of communities as we have it in Europe to a community of all nations, that would be a wonderful step. 

I believe the most important immediate step we need to be working for would be to create a community of Latin America, a community of Africa, a community of southeast Asia, and so forth, comparable to the European community. Then the global community would be a community of those communities. Is it probable that we can make this kind of radical change from competition to cooperation? No, it’s not probable but I’ve tried to present it in a way that prevents it from sounding merely fanciful.

Communities exist. Communities of communities exist. And all of this means that what Jesus thought of as love is real. There is love among individuals who know one another, but it’s possible to also love people you don’t know. And that means you really try to understand them, to appreciate them. You think of them as potential friends – persons with whom cooperation is possible rather than simply dismissing them. I think you can understand that in our country, we have sometimes had a single community in which opposing parties could work out their differences. Those of us in the south, we remember still quite vividly that we thought, at one point, that we could not do that anymore. But it’s interesting that since we were forced to come back into the union, we have been part of the single community. Patriotism to the US government is strong itself. So, that divisiveness is not the only possible thing. Today, unfortunately, we are falling back into a division that is destructive of the larger community. One gets the impression that the two sides each care more about defeating or even destroying each other than the well-being of the whole. The efforts on the parts of liberals to love Trump and his followers are not being pursued very hard. I don’t hear, even in the Christian community, much talk about how important it is that we, who believe that the U.S. is a multi-ethnic society, should love those who still want it to be an Anglo-Saxon society. That’s one way of putting the difference between the two groups. And frankly, I don’t see much love on the other side – their treatment of liberals.

When we demonize each other that’s the utter destruction of the cooperation and the community-building. So, we are not making progress in the right direction at the present time. Yet, just as two World Wars and awful destruction within Europe led to a new understanding, perhaps we too can come to recognize how important it is to place cooperation above competition, community above divisiveness.

So, maybe the experience we in the U.S. are now having – of once again becoming so deeply divisive and mutually demonized – will lead us to once again try to really understand and to love one another. Not that we would cease to be opponents. I believe that it is possible for us to seriously work at many levels – none of us can work at all levels – to persuade people to love their opponents. We do it in the family all the time – I think usually successfully. I think we do it in many neighborhoods. Many nations do it so they can have intense divisions of opinion and quarrels and arguments and opposition. But the French are still loyal to France. That supersedes all those divisions. It’s not a meaningless goal. And if it has happened in Europe, that is wonderfully encouraging.

What we need today is the primacy of community over competition. That means love over mutual opposition. And that means love of the opponent. And if the voices of the churches could speak loud and clear that today and we liberals (or whatever we want to call ourselves) would stop demonizing those we are opposed to, if we would really listen, would really care for the people who disagree so strongly with us, and would try to hold out the possibility of mutual aid in advancing the true needs of the nation, then mutual love is not impossible.

I have omitted direct discussion of what is the greatest threat. Of course, nuclear war remains a threat of ultimate proportions, but the destruction of the natural environment has joined it as a threat to the survival of the human species. When we treat nature as the other, as an opponent to be conquered, to be controlled, for us to show how great we are – that is just as destructive as when we adopt that attitude toward other human beings. The love of the enemy, the love of the opponent, needs to also be the love of all the creatures with whom we share this planet. The love of the natural order. And by loving it, we can learn how to live in it and with it and as part of it. And if we can do that – learn to cooperate with one another – I think we will be accomplishing for our day what, unfortunately, Jesus was not successful in accomplishing for Israel. But we will be in the succession of those who have been disciples of Jesus. I think Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are the two greatest examples, in recent times, of discipleship of Jesus. They succeeded. It is not impossible – we can learn to love one another and that’s all that is needed. In that sense, the ecological civilization that we need is at hand. We can live in. We can be part of it. By being part of it we contribute to the possibility of it saving us – being our salvation. Amen.