Who Will Be A Witness

Igniting Activism for God's Justice, Love, and Deliverance

Drew G.I. Hart

• Publisher: Herald Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781513806600
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Churches have begun awakening to social and political injustices, often carried out in the name of Christianity. But once awakened, how will we respond?

Who Will Be a Witness offers a vision for communities of faith to organize for deliverance and justice in their neighborhoods, states, and nation as an essential part of living out the call of Jesus.

Author Drew G. I. Hart provides incisive insights into Scripture and history, along with illuminating personal stories, to help us identify how the witness of the church has become mangled by Christendom, white supremacy, and religious nationalism. Hart provides a wide range of options for congregations seeking to give witness toJesus' ethic of love for and solidarity with the vulnerable.

At a time when many feel disillusioned and distressed, Hart calls the church to action, offering a way forward that is deeply rooted in the life and witness of Jesus.Dr. Hart's testimony is powerful, personal, and profound, serving as a compass that points the church to the future and offers us a path toward meaningful social change and a more faithful witness to the way of Jesus.

1

TROUBLE WON’T
LAST ALWAYS

How long, O Lord, will oppressors prosper? How long will empires crush vulnerable people? How much longer will transnational corporations exploit the poor? How long must we wait, O God, until military powers no longer destroy civilians and create orphans to fend for themselves?” If the writer of Psalm 13 lived in North America today, their prayer might sound something like this.

It seems like mass incarceration, the military industrial complex, and policies that promote mass poverty and an enormous wealth gap are a permanent part of life. When we check in on world news we are overwhelmed by the suffering around the world, with ongoing reports of ecological devastation and disparities in health, education, and housing, as well as a lack of access to healthy food and livable wages for so many of God’s beloved. These things seem like fixtures of our world. Sometimes people respond and claim that all these things are appalling, but that’s just the way the world is, which suggests we ought to occupy our mind with other things. So is there no hope?

These questions haunt most of the world, even while those who are comfortable continue to maintain concentrated social, cultural, political, economic, and even religious power through the control of the policies and institutions that devastate poor people’s lives. The United States of America, despite its myths claiming national innocence, exceptionalism, and divine favor, has played an enormous role in creating human suffering within and beyond its national boundaries. Nationalist propaganda implies that the United States as we know it will be permanent. That it is here to stay, and that it is not changing in any radical fashion. The social order and the current institutions that prop it up, we imagine, are fixed and unchangeable in the way that most people think about God. They tell us that the USA represents justice, equality, and freedom, while erasing the testimony of those who have experienced its structural violence, white supremacy, and poverty. Imperial permanence is the daydream of the elite and the haunting nightmare of those who are trampled upon by the wheels of empire.

However, the United States is not the first empire this world has seen, and the prison and military industrial complexes are not the first institutions that have destroyed lives on massive scales.¹ In fact, the gospel accounts in the New Testament testify that without anyone noticing, an anointed One was born under another empire, and that empire also believed that it was permanent, along with its institutions that propped up the social order. It claimed to be the promise of peace and security to the world as it conquered territory after territory. Under the expansive control of the Roman Empire, a poor Jew was born. Throughout his life he heard about nearby towns destroyed by Rome because of Jewish resistance. He witnessed poverty and exploitation throughout Galilee, and the cooperation of Roman powers and the Jerusalem establishment, which maintained the status quo. According to the gospel writer Mark, “the beginning of the good news” began under these circumstances (Mark 1:1). From Galilee (the ghetto of that ancient society, and away from Jerusalem’s centralized power) came Jesus, a man who was baptized by John the Baptist and understood that he was the anointed One whose life gave God great pleasure. He did not come to find fans filled with religious sentimentality, but followers committed in solidarity to a revolutionary movement that bore witness to God’s coming reign and new social order that was flipping everything upside down. There the first will be last and the last will be first.

Two thousand years later, the delivering power and presence of Jesus continues to “show up” and “make a way out of no way” for people cornered by the powers and institutions of our world. And the appropriate response to the presence of Jesus is discipleship. The call of Jesus is really quite simple, despite how complicated we have made it by obfuscating that basic Christian vocation. Follow after the way of Jesus. Certainly, there are some more challenging and difficult things to understand in our faith, but their significance pales in comparison to the simple call to follow Jesus in our everyday lives. In fact, the entire New Testament points us in that direction, to the call of discipleship to Jesus Christ. The gospel accounts frequently use the language of “following after” Jesus and of “discipleship,” indicating that Jesus’ legacy is an invitation to come and follow. The same idea is conveyed in other ways as well. We are told to imitate him, to walk in his footsteps, to live as he lived, to participate, or share, in the life of Christ, to die and rise with Christ, to be in Christ, and to have the same mind that Christ had. We are also told to follow the way of the Lamb, to hear and follow his voice, to let Christ live in and through us so that it is no longer us who lives but Christ himself who is made visible in our bodies. And of course we are told become like him. There are many admonitions to imitate Jesus and God’s characteristics and actions: to love because he loved, to forgive because he forgave, to show mercy as we have been shown mercy, to be perfect like God by loving our enemies. It is clear that there is no Christian vocation more vital than the call to become Jesus-shaped through discipleship to the Jesus story and his living presence among us. If we are to overcome the troubles of life when they come, we must firmly plant ourselves on the rock of Jesus’ teachings according to the Sermon on the Mount and the four gospel accounts.²

It is no wonder then that the church passed down four different accounts of Jesus’ life, teachings, ministry, death, and resurrection. Each account represents the compiling of the earliest stories and oral traditions about Jesus as they developed in diverse regions in the ancient Greco-Roman world. As the church collected them together, it rejected attempts to harmonize them all into one super gospel, but believed instead that the four gospels altogether were like four legs supporting a table. With each of their individual theological emphases, the four accounts bring depth and width to the person of Jesus and to our vocation of radical discipleship in his way. After a slow and careful study of the four gospel accounts, that doesn’t impose our twenty-first-century experience onto the text, we begin to see a revolutionary Messiah who reigned through a different kind of kingdom, that ushered in God’s deliverance for the poor and oppressed and for anyone experiencing any kind of life-devouring captivity. He spoke truth to power, subverted law and order when it didn’t serve humanity, and was crucified through the cooperation of the powers of Rome and the Jerusalem elite. Yet despite the belief that the nation-state bears the final word over life and death, the early church insists that on the third day after being crucified, Jesus rose again. His disciples spread that world altering news across the known world, risking life and limb to do so.

Matthew’s gospel emphasizes Jesus as a new and greater Moses and a teacher of the law as expressed through the Sermon on the Mount. Luke’s gospel pays special attention to the way God’s reign flips social hierarchies on their head so that the rich are sent away empty-handed and the poor and hungry are filled with good things, and the first are last and the last are first. In Luke’s gospel, we see that the Samaritans, vulnerable women, and the exploited and socially stigmatized are prioritized around the Messiah’s table. John’s gospel tells us that God’s Son came from heaven and dwelled among us in glory. His kingdom is not like kingdoms of this world (if so, they would battle and fight like everyone else), but instead God’s love was freely shared as Jesus laid down his life for us. It demonstrates how we too ought to lay our lives down for one another as we follow the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, as well as abide in the source of life and yield to the Spirit to guide us as we await Jesus’ return. I’ll say more about Mark’s gospel in a moment.

Even though it is clear that Christian faith demands that we become Jesus’ disciples and that we participate in the very life of Christ through the Spirit, sharing in his suffering and death so that we can share in his resurrection, many of us evade Jesus at every opportunity. We have developed a domesticated Christianity in which we are consumed with worshiping Jesus, to the exclusion of a life committed to following him. Our gatherings and celebrations of Jesus are increasingly elaborate productions, while we simultaneously seek to dodge basic discipleship—the gospel of Jesus is just too disruptive to our lives. Jesus is extremely subversive, and we enjoy our status quo lives just as they are. The teachings of Jesus are too radical and hit at the core of who we are, and we prefer our respectable congregational life as it is. The death and resurrection of Jesus have revolutionary implications. We are more comfortable with the belief that Christians in the United States are not meant to actually pursue God’ kingdom on earth as it is in heaven or experience genuine backlash from the social order because of Christian allegiance to God’s reign. Many American Christians are maintaining an unspoken pact: that as long as everyone else remains silent about the radical call of discipleship articulated in the gospel story, we too will not name the contradictions between our lives and the way of Jesus. As a result, “discipleship” now describes anything generically related to our spirituality that results in a safe and entirely uncontroversial faith.

Readers sometimes believe that the gospels of Mark and John are less radical than Luke and Matthew. This perception is false—in fact, one could argue that Mark and John, if accurately understood, are actually more radical. Luke is a nonviolent revolutionary’s dream book because it makes so plain and obvious Jesus’ commitments to poor, oppressed, and marginalized people. Mark has some of those stories as well, but there are a lot of themes people simply miss when reading Mark. Much of the edgy and provocative symbolism in Mark goes over the heads of North American readers. Talking about “pigs” and “legion” being cast into the sea in the first century, especially for Jewish listeners, would have evoked a different reaction than it does to our contemporary North American ears. Jesus’ first audiences would have heard double meanings in many of the stories, just as Brer Rabbit stories or Negro spirituals frequently contained double meanings for enslaved Africans, meanings that frequently went over the heads of white society. Paying attention to the historical, cultural, and sociopolitical context of the first century, and how Greek, Roman, and Jewish cultures constantly overlap in New Testament texts, provides a window into these ancient stories about Jesus, and the profound understanding early church Christians had about their Messiah.

There is no quantitative measurement of a text’s radicalness, but suffice it to say that it is much more revolutionary than most readers recognize. The best book to unveil this, in my perspective, is Ched Myers’s Binding the Strongman, which uncovers some of the political and anti-imperial symbolism packed into Mark’s account.³ For a more accessible text, consider reading Say To This Mountain with others.⁴ Mark’s narration is fast-paced and action-packed, even in the English translation, and much more so in the original Greek language, which uses and or immediately so frequently that they haven’t all been translated. This is a story that should be retold with voice inflection, plot suspense, and twists and surprises as one might tell a story to a child. Subtle changes occur partway through the story. In particular, careful readers will notice what some scholars call “the messianic secret,” which appears in stories that depict Jesus as initially attempting to keep a wrap on his identity to some people. Some have suggested that this is Jesus’ attempt at orchestrating the public perception of his movement. Later in the narrative, as Jesus prepares to go to Jerusalem, his vocation and identity is evident and public. I contend that this initial attempt at containing the news of Jesus’ identity is actually Jesus’ embodiment of a strategic grassroots revolutionary consciousness. Finally, in contrast to the hopeful tone the other three gospel accounts end with, Mark’s gospel, assuming it ends at chapter 16, verse 8, as the oldest manuscripts indicate,⁵ concludes in a manner that appears to communicate uncertainty, fear, or the feeling that it is unresolved. The story, then, is begging for completion and faithfulness through its readers’ own lives.

Readers are supposed to complete Mark’s gospel through their own lived discipleship in the way of Jesus. The fear and uncertainty at the end of Mark’s gospel wasn’t intended to produce despair. My understanding is that Mark’s ending would have resonated with Christians in Rome in particular, and especially if they were communities that survived being targeted by Emperor Nero. They would have understood that suffering and persecution were very real possibilities. Following Jesus required stepping out in faith, understanding that there could be very real consequences for following Jesus and identifying as part of a Christian community. Those first readers would have known that it was important to be very careful, since the way of Jesus was inherently subversive. They would need to discern how to proceed in the public square strategically yet faithfully because God’s delivering presence had broken into the world through Jesus Christ, and as a result nothing would ever be the same. Under the surveillance of Roman power, in the face of its claims of permanence and its propaganda proclaiming Caesar to be the one who brings good news to the world, providing stability and peace—right there, from below, Jesus preached good news, announcing a kingdom other than Rome. This grassroots messianic reign was where God’s deliverance would reach the lives of those desperate for God’s new world to come.

MARK 11:1-7, STRATEGIC PREPARATION FOR HIS MESSIANIC DEMONSTRATION

In Mark’s narrative, the escalating conflicts with the Jewish and Roman establishment climax as Jesus approaches Jerusalem in the eleventh chapter. Mark tells his readers that as Jesus approached Jerusalem near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples ahead of the group into a nearby village, instructing them to find a colt that was tied up and to bring it to him so that he could use it to enter the city. A reader should wonder why Jesus wants them to bring a colt? And why does he seem to have a plan already set that just needs to be executed? One way that Mark illuminates the person and ministry of Jesus is precisely through his strategic messianic theatrics. Jesus could have simply walked into the city with his crowd of admirers, but instead, Mark depicts Jesus intentionally orchestrating a plan that required some strategic preparation. And as we will see in a moment, getting a colt rather than a horse was important for the reign of God embodied in his movement. This was all sociopolitical theater being staged. Mark’s depiction of Jesus is organized; he has come to Jerusalem as Passover is approaching and he has a plan that he intends to execute. In Mark’s telling of the good news, Jesus is a master strategist, carefully executing his messianic demonstration, which begins with obtaining a colt.

Many Christians prefer to think of Jesus as coming to Jerusalem apolitically, solely to die for our sins. Few Sunday schools tell the story in the way that Mark does, unveiling Jesus as a perceptive strategist who is engineering particular responses from people through theatric protest. Nonetheless, that is precisely what we find. Jesus’ strategic preparation places a challenge at the feet of the church.

Too often the church leaves the work of sociopolitical strategy to those with greedy motivations, those in search of more money, more power, more influence, more fame. In the gospel of Matthew, ironically, Jesus actually calls his followers to be “wise as serpents” yet “innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16). We are called to the work of scheming and plotting for good, for God’s delivering presence on the earth, for justice, righteousness, and peace in our world. And we do this while refusing to use the evil means that the powerful employ to accomplish their goals. We remain as innocent as doves by employing strategies of peacemaking and nonviolence, by overcoming evil with good, through radical love and prophetic intervention, and through vulnerable noncooperation with anything that clashes with the reign of the Messiah. We are invited to scheme and plot for God and to engage in strategic preparation in the way of Jesus.

We began this book by considering Dr. King’s faithful witness which led him to put on his blue jeans and get arrested and jailed in Birmingham in an attempt to keep the movement going. But very few people realize that Project C was the brain child of Wyatt C. Walker, a creative strategist who planned to confront the pressure points of Birmingham, especially the business district. We know how the story ends, with the children filling the streets, arrested by the masses, attacked by dogs, and sprayed with water hoses that ripped off their clothes. The evening news footage of these events horrified the nation and led to further civil rights legislation. But those events didn’t happen randomly or coincidentally. They were the result of preparation, planning, and strategy. The goal was to dramatize the structural oppression through creative political theatrics. Often when justice on the large scale occurs, it is because people put their minds together and planned and plotted. Action that leads to victories like these requires intentionality.

Jesus’ orchestrating the colt to ride on was itself central to Jesus’ intentionally creative demonstration, which is why Mark takes so much narrative plot space to describe the disciples be...