I Judge No One

Part 2, His Rejection of Coercive Power

In I Judge No One: A Political Life of Jesus David Lloyd Dusenbury argues that Jesus intentionally eschews the use of coercive power in the establishment of his very strange kingdom. 

To make this argument, starting in Part 4 of I Judge No One, Dusenbury turns his attention to the temptation narratives in the gospels. For my part, I wholly agree with this move. I've always felt that any conversation about faith and politics has to begin with what Jesus rejects in his confrontation with Satan by why of establishing his kingdom. 

So, what does Jesus reject, at the threshold of his ministry, in the temptation narrative? According to Dusenbury, what Jesus rejects in the temptation narratives is the path of the Maccabees, to become the political leader of a Zealot uprising. Dusenbury agrees with commentators who have argued that "Jesus' spectral ordeal in the desert is the first moment in the gospels which dramatizes the gospel-writers' conviction that he is 'no Zealot.'" 

This is the standard interpretation, that Jesus did not come to lead a rebellion against the Romans, and that Jesus' vision of his mission flummoxed Maccabean expectations of a political Messiah. But Dusenbury goes on to sharpen the point. He writes:

On this reading, Jesus' temptation reveals a deep and abiding conflict in his life as it is remembered in the gospels. And I suggest this conflict gives rise to three questions:

(i) Will Jesus compel believers?

(ii) Will he punish lawbreakers?

(iii) Will he resist rulers?

Throughout the gospels Jesus provokes confusion, not only among his critics and judges, but among his disciples. This seems to arise from the fact that he assumes unheard-of authority. And yet he decouples this authority from the power to judge, compel or fight -- the power that makes political order possible. The kingdom of God is a manifestation of power (Mark 9:1), yet it cannot be realized by the normal mechanisms of human power (legislation, punishment, war).

In other words, Jesus seems to announce the presence of a politically hopeless kingdom whose authority is only felt by, and whose power is only realized in, those who live in hope of a kingdom to come. It seems that Jesus' technical term for this confusion, this outrage, is "scandal" (Greek skandalon). And the scandal of Jesus' prophetic life is that he vested himself with authority as the king of a heavenly kingdom. 

What Jesus meant by this is that he lived in Galilee and Judea as the prophetic legislator of a divine kingdom, renouncing all coercive power in the present world-age...

I expect some objections and pushback here. This reading of Jesus goes against the grain of how most people read the gospels today, on both the left and the right. We are very allergic to "over-spiritualizing" the kingdom of God. In our view, the kingdom of God has political implications. And it's our job, as followers of Jesus, to make these political implications a reality in our time and place. We are following a political Christ, and following this political Christ we dutifully engage with the machinery of coercive power -- legislation, punishment, and war. As followers of a political Christ, we will judge, compel and fight. 

Dusenbury's reading of the gospels flies in the face of all this, and he starts his argument by paying close attention to Satan's offer in the wilderness: "And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, 'To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will.'"

As we know, Jesus rejects this offer of coercive, political power. And not just here at the start of his ministry. Jesus continues to reject coercive, political power, over and over again, throughout his ministry, right up to his very last moments when he says to Pilate: 

“My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over...But my kingdom is not from the world.”

Which raises the question, how many progressive or evangelical Christians sound like that guy?