Welcome back to the Facebook podcast. Today, we are starting a new series, and this series is going to focus on the politics of Jesus. If you've been around the issue of nonviolence much at all or if you've listened to the first season of this podcast on nonviolence, then you have probably heard the name John Howard Yoder quite a bit. And you've if you've heard of Yoder, you've almost certainly heard of his famous work, The Politics of Jesus. This work is referenced a lot for a good reason because it is just a a doorway to really having things click.

I've spoken with a number of people who who point to his work as being inspirational for them and transformative. And that certainly was the case for me. That is the book which just unmasked my, the the my formation of Jesus into my own image. And it was the first book that really helped me to be able to see Jesus for who I I truly think he was. Because growing up, I mean, Jesus wasn't radical.

Like, he he was killed because he had to make a transaction with with God to save us. There there really wasn't that much of a reason that people killed him. They just didn't like him. They were kinda they were kinda mean and and touchy. But Jesus wasn't really revolutionary.

John Howard Yoder helped me to start to take Jesus seriously on some of the things that he said and did, and then I really saw how crazy revolutionary Jesus was, and in turn, how crazy revolutionary that means my life ought to be. And people in the in the first century were just like baffled by Jesus. But me and my community, we we never were baffled. We always kind of thought, well, yeah, that's just what Jesus said, I mean, and and just kind of took it because the way that we took it was, we were able to turn the really crazy things into metaphors and nice ideas about the age to come or something like that. I mean, we we mess around with with that a lot.

And so Yoder's book kind of unmasked that for me. It helped me to see my consequentialism even though he doesn't really talk about consequentialism all that much in in this work, and he specifically calls it out in some of his other works. The politics of Jesus really just helped me to see how I really didn't have this objective morality, but that morality was something that was shaped conveniently for me. It was something that kind of, my morality by and large was shaped by the things that, my community liked to do wrong. We were able to excuse and the things that my community wanted to hold over other people's heads, we were able to make the, the prime focus of morality of the Bible.

So why talk about Yoder here if if what he's really focused on in this book is Jesus. And not specifically non violence, in fact, I think, I don't think he really talks about non violence at all. He does mention Romans 13 and he has a good a good section discussing that. But non violence isn't isn't really the crux of this book. Well, the reason we'd wanna talk about the politics of Jesus is because Jesus is pivotal for understanding a position of nonviolence.

In fact, it it really is the position. I mean, you you can't really argue for non violence on its own from the Old Testament. That's very difficult to do, if not impossible on its own. And there's there's not much biblical reason to believe in non violence apart from the life teaching and work of Christ. Christ is the the biblical linchpin for non violence.

So if you see Jesus Christ as kind of maintaining what seems like the status quo from the Old Testament and just kind of making lots of metaphors and things or or living in a particular way that doesn't apply to us, then you're not gonna see nonviolence. Whereas if you view Jesus Christ as the true representation of God, the true human, the individual who brought the kingdom and lived the kingdom here, and somebody who fulfills the Old Testament law, not just in the sense of keeping the Old Testament laws, but showing us the perfect and complete intent, then that's going to significantly influence how you perceive non violence. Yoder is really important to me and I think that he is probably going to be really important for everyone in terms of making a foundation for Jesus nonviolence. Before we dive in, I do want to say that I have created these episodes moving back and forth to Romania and such. I don't have the politics of Jesus on me, but when I read it, I I took very copious notes, and and summarized things.

So this is actually, I read it, I guess, five years ago or so. So this is, there might be some things that have crept in here from some of Yoder's other books, that in my mind are kind of a part of the Politics of Jesus and or maybe from some other learning that I've done along the way. So I do want to kind of forewarn you that if you're kind of reading the Politics of Jesus right after this or alongside of it, you might be like, I don't remember Yoder saying that. So certain things may have crept their way in and I'm sorry if that's the case, but I think this will largely follow Yoder's book. The other thing to note is that I'm not going to get into everything that's in Yoder's book.

I'm probably covering like half the material, but I'm focusing on the main case and the big ideas, the ones that I think are particularly pertinent to the case for nonviolence. So, if you read his book you're going to find a lot of stuff that we're not going to mention in this series. So without further ado, let's go ahead and jump in. Yoder has two main goals, I think, in this book. And it seems like the the first goal is to show us that Jesus is applicable for today.

Somebody that we should follow directly, not just kind of some distant Messiah that's off doing his own thing that he needs to do. That's gonna be important because we're going to model our lives off Jesus. Second thing is that Yoder wants to show us that Jesus was indeed political. What he did was political and therefore our politics today ought to be shaped by Jesus. And when I say that second part that Jesus should shape our politics, that doesn't just mean like what party you vote for if you vote.

What that means is the way that you go about doing politics. And that will hopefully become clear in future episodes. But those are things that Yoder's gonna argue or at least that I'm gonna pull out that are important for our discussion of nonviolence. It is important to know that Yoder's book actually preceded the rise of the moral majority. I believe this book was written in the early seventies, maybe even based off of documents from from earlier than that.

But and the rise of the moral majority was really late seventies into the eighties. So, Yoder isn't what I would have thought when when reading this was I thought this was a response to kind of the rise of the moral majority, but it wasn't. This was something that I don't know if Yoder could kind of sense stirring in the waters or if it was was just people had these certain political sentiments before the rise of the moral majority. It just wasn't kind of unified at that point. I don't I don't know.

But this is not a response to the moral majority as far as I could understand, but it actually preceded that. So we'll begin by noting that Western Protestants, Yoder's going to argue, have turned the Gospel into the cross, into substitutionary atonement, and that's pretty much it. And I'm gonna I relate to this a lot. I mean this is the when I was growing up, it's you pray this prayer and get saved because Jesus made this transaction on the cross and you just kind of sign the agreement and your sins taken care of. And that's Christianity.

I mean, it's really good if you're I mean, you're gonna be in the church and you wanna show your face in front of people, it's good if you lead a good life and that that's something that you should do. But honestly, our my life for a lot of my my earlier years was largely just kind of resting in this substitutionary transactional atonement of Jesus Christ. Everything everything was about the cross. Jesus' life meant pretty much nothing. I mean, they told good stories and they they told us how we ought to live and how one day God would save us to live.

But it was really just the cross. The cross, the cross, the cross, the cross, the cross. And not that the cross isn't important, but Yoder is going to say that we have we have just tossed to the side everything else. And the thing that blew me away, absolutely blew me away, and maybe it wouldn't blow me away if I was just coming to non violence today because I have heard more people talk about the kingdom, that's becoming a more trendy word. But Yoder told me that the gospel is not that Jesus died on the cross.

And that almost made me stop reading the book. Was like, this heretic. And he said, no. I mean, the gospel is the kingdom of Jesus Christ. And when you look in the gospels, the kingdom is preached not as some future thing but as something that is at hand right now.

Like Jesus Christ brought the kingdom of heaven. Yes. Of course, is there going to be a a future culmination in in the creation, the establishment of the perfect kingdom? Like, it gonna be perfected? Sure.

But Jesus Christ brought the kingdom of heaven. And Mark, you can see this the clearest, I mean, in in every single book of the Bible. But Jesus brought the kingdom and in fact, he he sends, I think it's the 70, he sends the 70 out to proclaim the gospel. This is well before his death and resurrection. And you're like, oh, I thought the gospel was the cross.

And yeah, surely after Jesus died and resurrected, the message of the gospel became clearer and fuller, and we could explain it in more detail. But the gospel is the kingdom of God. And we could spend a long time discussing just what the kingdom of God means. I'd recommend listening to or reading some Leo Tolstoy, Crabill Daniel Crabill David Crabill something. The Upside Down Kingdom was was really helpful to me.

Well, whatever. But the kingdom of God is a is an extremely important concept. So rather than the gospel being this just this business transaction on the cross, the gospel is a more full view of not just the method by which we're saved, but what we're saved unto. And so rather than a business transaction, we have a restoration, a full restoration of relationship. How we're brought close to Christ, how our sin is dealt with, what it looks like once our sin is dealt with, and what our lives look like, what the kingdom looks like, how people live in the kingdom.

I mean, it's just a full view. The Gospel is a very full view of what occurs and what things look like. My view growing up was not a full view, it was extremely lacking. So a good exercise for you to do right now just to see this is go take a look at Matthew. Just look at the first five chapters.

What you're going to see is if you look for king images or king words like, so for instance in Matthew one, Matthew talks about David, Jesus being the son of David. Well that's a kingly reference. Or it calls him the Christ which is the the Greek word for the Messiah and what who who is a king. You looked at you look at Jesus and his basically like his his coronation or like God, his baptism and in the wilderness and God kind of calling him my son and like his his claim to kingship, right, being the son of God. And then he starts preaching, sharing the gospel of the kingdom.

And then in Matthew five, you get into the Sermon on the Mount and and, you know, this is the kingdom of God. These are what the people of the kingdom of God are like and all that stuff. It's just, it's pregnant with imagery of the kingdom, and and even the gospel that early on. And thanks to my wife for pointing that all out to me. So after you go ahead and take a look at that, if you don't believe me already, then you can come back here.

And Yoder is going to move on and he is going to tell us or start talking about the temptation of Christ. And he's gonna kind of hone in on this and this is gonna be very important for Yoder's, for what Yoder is going to try to show. And he hones in on the temptation of Christ because this event occurs at the very beginning of Jesus' ministry and is going to set the stage for what Jesus is about to do. And it's gonna set the stage for us to understand some of the different struggles that Christ goes through throughout his ministry. Yoder argues that these temptations aren't arbitrary but extremely pointed.

They're a foil that is going to help us to understand more than just, you know, how Satan works. But we're gonna see the ways in which Christ is prone to temptation, for which his ministry and actions will will also be able to uncover. And this was revolutionary to me as well because, I mean, there's there's a lot in the Bible that on its face it just seems like, well, that's kinda silly. Like, I think I mentioned before, Adam and Eve, the first thing when they fell is they realized their nakedness. Well, that's really stupid.

That seems like just some fairy tale edition of of information that just makes no sense. It's it's one of the things like those ancient people did that it's just stupid. There there's no point. But when you understand that prior to Adam and Eve, you know, everybody looked out for everybody else. Adam looked out for Eve, Eve looked out for Adam, Adam looked out for nature, nature provided and looked out for Adam and Eve.

So all of these relationships are outward focused And what you see sin is doing is being this thing that's inward focused. And for the first time Adam and Eve really looked to themselves then nakedness, holy cow. Like just by saying that Adam and Eve for the first time realized their nakedness, that that really short verse uncovers so much truth about what happened that day in Eden and what sin is and and indicating the problems that were gonna gonna be caused. That's just it's beautiful. Well, the same thing kind of happened to me when reading Yoder's explanation of the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness.

I mean, turn stones to bread. I can kinda get that. Like, Jesus was hungry. But, like, these these other things just kinda seemed random and, like, they didn't matter. Like, well, why would Jesus take the kingdoms or jump off of a pinnacle?

I mean, he could go do all these other miracles and ministry and teaching and I just didn't understand. And so Yoder helps to to provide a template or an understanding for us when we look at the ministry of Jesus which is also going to shed some light on the rest of the gospels, the rest of the gospel story. The first temptation that Yoder addresses is the bread temptation. And the bread, Yoder argues, represents economic temptation or taking power through economic means. So Yoder is going to argue that the devil isn't really just appealing to Jesus' immediate need of hunger.

He's not saying, hey, look, I know you're really hungry. Eat this bread. Because Jesus is fast and voluntary. I mean, what does it matter if he ate bread or not? It it's not a big deal.

He's communing with God, and if God wanted to provide bread provide bread for him, great. Whoop dee doo. But Yoder's gonna argue that turning stones, plural, like all of these stones in the desert that are around me, turning them into bread was symbolic of why don't you just appease the masses? Why don't you just feed their bellies? And in feeding their bellies, you'll be able to take control because they'll want you as their king if you can provide for them.

Now, when I heard Yoder say this, I was thinking, don't you think that's a bit of a stretch, Yoder? Like, I mean, I guess, maybe, but that seems a little crazy. And I thought he was taking things too far. I thought he was trying to kind of just prove prove his own point and he was he was stretching things to do that. But then, Yoder says, look, this is kind of our template here.

Not only I we see this happen, like it's not just Satan symbolically tempting Jesus, but take a look at John six, John six twelve through 15. Jesus had just fed the masses of people And it says the following, when they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted. So they gathered them and filled 12 baskets with the pieces of five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten. After the people saw the sign Jesus performed, they began to say, surely this is the prophet who is to come into the world.

Jesus, knowing what they intend that they intended to come and make him king by force with Jew again to a mountain by himself. So okay. Satan's temptation, stone to bread, it could be symbolic of economic temptation or not. But quite clearly, it's not an over overreach, it's not stretching things to believe that that's the case because what do we see in the Gospels is that Jesus goes to feed people with bread, he he multiplies bread and what happens? They seek to make him king by force.

And what does Jesus have to do? Well, he could accept that kingship or he could do as he did and he fled from it, right? So we see Jesus tempted to rule through economic means to manipulate and get power and he refuses with Satan and he refuses with the masses. So whether you buy Yoder's argument on the economic means or not, you know, whatever, we'll have two other things to address. But to me, it makes a lot of sense because the other temptations that that Satan gives are clear, grasps of power, especially the kingdom one.

And so it seems a little bit odd that this one is about just Jesus making some bread to eat for himself in an amoral situation. You know, fasting, he can choose to fast or not. It's not a big deal. So I feel like Yoder makes Yoder's explanation makes sense of the big picture a lot better. But nevertheless, we have two other temptations that we're gonna get to.

So the second temptation that Yoda addresses is Satan's temptation for Jesus to throw himself off of the top of the temple and to have his angels catch him. Now, I didn't understand why this is really a big temptation either because Jesus I mean, when Jesus raised people from the dead, when he when he healed people, that seemed like it was it was validating who he was through some extremely miraculous things. So throwing himself off of the top of the temple, okay, if if angels flew around him and caught him, that would be maybe a bit crazier and more visual than than some of the other things that he did he did. But I mean, if I if I knew a guy who had a withered leg for decades and all of a sudden it wasn't, that's pretty cool too. But whatever.

Yoder is gonna argue or so anyway, Jesus didn't have a problem revealing himself through miracles to people. So what's the big deal? Well, Yoder argues that this was a particular act. He he says something like throwing people off of off of the temple was a prescription for those who blasphemed. I never corroborated that.

I don't know if that's true. But anyway, I think the the main idea was that regardless of of if that was a specific if that was a specific consequence for blasphemy and if if Jesus was caught by angels, he'd prove that he wasn't blaspheming. Even if that's not the case, the fact that he would do this miracle very specifically at the temple is something which was Satan tempting Jesus to seek a different avenue of power. So rather than economic means and and feeding people and appeasing the masses through their bellies, Yoder argues that this miracle done at the temple specifically is Satan tempting Jesus Christ to take power through the religious institution. And just like with the bread and the masses and people seeking to make him king, we see this temptation at the temple come around a second time.

We see when Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey and people are shouting Hosanna and, they are they are basically proclaiming that he's king, what does Jesus do? He goes to the temple. He sets up shop. He starts teaching. And then what does he do?

He foretells of the temple's destruction and, basically runs away, right, through his teaching from the people's proclamation. He says, yeah, you say you want me king, here you go. How about this? I'm gonna destroy the or the temple's gonna be destroyed, and then it's gonna be raised up again in three days. Is that what you want?

And, within a week, he has people turn on him and execute him. So, yeah, he he basically flees from this temptation. Again, he does not embrace the Hosanna, your king thing. He kind of he kind of antagonizes things by by teaching really, really crazy hard things to the Jews. So he absolutely refuses to be a king through the religious institution.

Then we come to the final temptation of Christ, which is the one of the kingdoms. And Satan offers the kingdoms of the world, to Jesus, which is pretty obviously national political power. And another side note, which is interesting, for Satan to offer those to Jesus, obviously, those things are in Satan's control. So as we come as we come out of a recent political election and all of this debate around our how we're supposed to be involved in politics, interesting to know that Satan is the one in control of the kingdoms or at least was. Jesus, of course, refuses to give in to Satan and refuses to take political control even though I'm pretty sure the moral majority if they would have been back in Jesus' day would have encouraged him to take political control because think about all of the good that you could do with political control.

And you could make just laws and you could punish evil. I mean, it would be fantastic. Think about all the good you could do. But Jesus refused. That's not the way that that power works in his kingdom.

And just as with Satan and running away from Satan in the desert, Jesus did the same thing again. He didn't run away, literally, but he ran away, as far away from that idea of grasping power as he could. We see this in a lot of places. Peter tells Jesus, I'm never gonna let you suffer. Jesus says, get behind me, Satan.

That was obviously a very big temptation for Jesus because that was a rough moment. He said, get behind me, Satan. And, so Peter stopped. We see in the garden that Jesus was sweating drops of blood begging God to take away the cup from him. We see Peter cutting off Malchus' ear and willing to fight for Jesus and Jesus could've Jesus could've engaged in that.

Luke tells us that Jesus could've called legions of angels but he didn't. Pilate gives him an out to to explain things to him and Jesus Jesus doesn't. He refuses to get himself out of that situation. As he's hanging on the cross, people are mocking him and there's a plaque above his head that says he's the king of the Jews, declares him king, but and and people are mocking him saying, hey, if if he's really God, he can get himself down. Or if if he's really the Christ, he can get himself down.

He saved all these other people, why doesn't he save himself? And so all of those temptations, all of those opportunities, all of all of those times Jesus could have been like, alright, that's it, I'm done. Snap his fingers, get down off of the cross, and get those legions of angels and take power and show up Rome, he could have done it. But just as in the desert, he continued to refuse throughout his ministry and even at the hardest point in in his life. Jesus chose to remain willingly powerless, to submit to the means of God rather than the means that seemed the best or the most efficient.

And that what what Yoder explained was extremely insightful to me because I it was really difficult for me to believe Hebrews when it told me that Jesus was tempted in all ways like like we were. But I I couldn't think of one example when Jesus was tempted in the Bible other than these weird temptations in the desert, which the bread didn't seem like it could be a temptation because making bread's not wrong. The pinnacle thing, Jesus showed himself through other miracles. And the kingdoms, okay, bowing to Satan and and taking kingdoms, that seemed wrong only because he was bowing to Satan to do it. But, yeah, that was weird.

That didn't seem like those didn't seem like much temptations to me. Maybe in the temple, when Jesus overturned the tables, maybe he struggled a little with anger there. Right? Maybe he should have calmed down a little bit. But I didn't see Jesus tempted.

So I just trusted Hebrews, knew what it was talking about. Okay. Jesus was must have been tempted somehow. Was a guy so he lusted. Right?

That's what everybody thinks. Or so he would have struggled with lust, with with wanting to. But no, Yoder is saying, look, when you realize that the temptation of Christ was the temptation of of Adam and Eve, it was this temptation to usurp control, to define what's good and evil, to define the means rather than submit in faithfulness to God's means, then Jesus' life is filled with temptations, with opportunities to do things the wrong way, to do things not his father's way, but a way that seems more effective. That revolutionized my understanding of the humanity of Christ because that temptation resonates with me. I mean, we see that all the time in the church.

I see it in my own life. We see it in the world. That is humanity's great sin. We seek to define good and evil for ourselves, and we we explain away morality. We we justify we post justify things.

We we do things that we want, and then we justify why those things can and should have been done. We don't try to figure out what God wants and then stick to that. We we justify. That blew the Bible wide open for me to understand that Jesus' life, his ministry was a ministry filled with struggle. Lots of opportunities to try to take power and do things the wrong way.

But as the second Adam, as the true human, Jesus showed us what we are to do. He showed us the true way to live and he showed us that that faithfulness, may lead to our death, but it ultimately leads to resurrection, and he is the first fruit of that resurrection. In this way, Jesus' story is extremely vital for us. His story isn't just some messianic distinctive, but it's the story of the second Adam in which we're able to find our true humanity. He was tempted with the original sin, the sin of trying to usurp God by defining good and evil for ourselves and taking on the control of the world through the means that we identify as useful and good.

His temptations and struggles are ours today, and we would do well to look to him. So that is going to be a large chunk of what Yoder gets at at first. It's going to be a good base for us to follow-up on. So come back in the next episode and we'll expound a bit more on the politics of Jesus. Hope you enjoyed it.

That's all for now. So peace because I'm a pacifist. I say it. I mean it.