A counterculture gospel for the people

For those who follow Jesus’ way of love and nonviolence, these are difficult times.

Both major parties in the United States boast of their nationalism and their machismo enthusiasm to hunt down “terrorists.” The corporate and Wall Street elite maintain a stranglehold on our political system, and we, the people, find ourselves virtually shut out of the political process. The greed-based Mammon economy, long the scourge of the poor, now threatens to destroy the very planet on which we live. More than ever we need the good news of God’s counterculture wisdom.

John’s Gospel proclaims, “To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of a man, but of God” (1:12-13). These verses proclaim the good news of a counterculture gospel. They powerfully mark off the counterculture community of God’s people and elevate the status of the common poor who follow Jesus, declaring them God’s children.

In many societies of the ancient world, the ruling classes were thought to have the blood of the gods; they were the children of the gods; only their opinions mattered, and they controlled politics, economics and religion. Over against this ruling class mythology and domination, the Hebrew Scriptures asserted that the common people are made in the image of God; in ancient Israel, the people, not just the rulers, were God’s children.

Not long before Jesus was born, the propaganda of the Roman Empire proclaimed the Roman emperor “the Son of God.” One inscription from Myra reads, “Divine Augustus Caesar, Son of God … Benefactor and Savior of the whole world.” Horace sang of Augustus, “Thine age, O Caesar, has brought back fertile crops to the fields … has wiped away our sins and revived the ancient virtues.”

The New Testament writers countered by proclaiming that Jesus is the Son of God with the power to take away sin and that all who follow him are his brothers and sisters, children of God, endowed with the same power to forgive and to heal.

Biblical writers lifted up the common people as God’s children, having power and authority to heal, forgive, judge, rule and speak for God.

John’s Gospel uses the metaphor of rebirth and stipulates that the common people who follow Jesus are born “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of a man, but of God.” The three ways John states that this new community of Jesus-followers is not born point to the counterculture wisdom and practice of the early church.

Born “not of blood,” refers to the nonviolent ethic of the community. The Greek word for “blood” is actually plural, “bloods,” a Hebrew idiom used in both the ancient Hebrew and Greek versions of Israel’s holy texts to mean “violence” (see Micah 3:10, Habbakuk 2:12, Hosea 4:2, 1 Kings 2:5, 33, 2 Kings 9:7, 26).

The children of God are not children of violence. The Gospel of John goes on to illustrate the nonviolent practice of the community: Jesus stops Peter from using violence to defend him and instead declares that his own nonviolent martyrdom will be the means by which he will drive out “the ruler of this world” (12:31-33), the spirit that inhabits all oppressive systems.

Born “not of the will of the flesh” refers to the transfamilial, transtribal, transnational nature of the church. Those “born of flesh” are born into particular families, particular tribes and nations, but those born of the Spirit are no longer bound by the categories of the fleshly or biological birth. The reign of God is transnational. Nationalism, tribalism, racism and the like have no place in this new community.

Born “not of the will of a man” refers to the break with the patriarchal system. (The Greek word for “man” is necessarily male; it cannot be made inclusive by the NRSV.) The ancient Mediterranean world was highly patriarchal. The Roman Empire was structured and largely held together through interconnecting pyramids of familial patriarchies with the emperor conceived of as the grand patriarch at the top. To be born of God, according to John, was to break with this whole patriarchal system and its patriarchal values. The ethos of the new community was to be an ethos of mutual love and service, demonstrated in John’s Gospel by Jesus when he gets down on his knees and washes the feet of his disciples.

Scholars have noticed that Jesus’ teachings often inverted the male honor code of his day. This ancient code honored the powerful, men able to subjugate others to their will.

Jesus turned this honor code on its head; he declared that the servant, not the one being served, is the honorable (“blessed”) one. This inversion of the male honor code might be understood as the promotion of a female honor code. The New Testament consistently declares that Jesus is the Wisdom of God (e.g. 1 Corinthians 1:24; Matthew 11:19), a female figure in Proverbs, Sirach, Wisdom and Baruch that scholars call “Lady Wisdom.”

Nowhere is the portrayal of Jesus as Lady Wisdom stronger than in the Gospel of John, where Jesus consistently talks and acts like Lady Wisdom, sometimes all but quoting her (compare John 7:34 with Proverbs 1:28-29; and John 6:22-59 with Proverbs 9:5 and Sirach 24:19-21).

This female aspect of Jesus’ persona does not lead, as some might fear, to a meek and passive Jesus. Lady Wisdom is nothing if not assertive and loud, even brash, much like Jesus in the Gospel of John. Jesus as Wisdom gives us a strong, assertive, nonviolently aggressive, “feminine” champion of the outcast and the common poor.

Our current culture, shaped by capitalism and empire, celebrates the rich and the powerful, those who are able to establish the greatest dominance over other people and the earth. Our culture is still caught in the grip of a “masculine” domination way of thinking and acting. This ethos has fueled the military, economic and environmental crises of our times. The wars waged by the United States constantly multiply. The economic crisis continues to hang over our heads, threatening our homes, jobs and retirements. Global warming, species extinction and other environmental developments threaten the global ecosphere that sustains civilization as we know it. We desperately need a different wisdom.

The gospel provides us this different wisdom in Jesus the Messiah. He incarnates for us, and through us, a counterculture way of living that turns the dominant culture way of life upside down. He provides us an assertive, nonviolently aggressive wisdom that can drive out the spirit of violence and domination, so that we can establish a new heavens and a new earth through the way of mutual love, cooperation and a reverence for God’s creation.

There was a time when we in the wealthier and more privileged classes of the world could merely look to this different wisdom as an ideal to be reached sometime in the future. The havoc wreaked upon the world’s poor by the systems of oppression and domination did not usually touch us. The current global environmental crisis is quickly bringing that era to a close. Scientists tell us that if the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere grows greater than 350 parts per million (ppm) we enter the danger zone, putting our world on a path that threatens civilization as we know it. We are far past 350 ppm and are quickly closing in on 400 ppm. A recent study, published in the science journal Nature, predicts that we could cross the tipping point for global ecological collapse by 2025. The wisdom of Jesus is no longer a matter of theoretical inspiration; it is now a matter of our own survival.

Bert Newton is a member of Pasadena (Calif.) Mennonite Church and author of Subversive Wisdom: Sociopolitical Dimensions of John’s Gospel (Wipf and Stock, 2012).