The politics of Jesus: why did he not condemn the imperial oppressor?

In a lengthy Theopolis essay entitled “Pentecost and the Gift of a New Politics,” Alastair Roberts asks why Jesus had so little to say about the evil empire in their midst. “Jesus declares the coming of the kingdom of God: should not such a kingdom have involved, at a bare minimum, the defeat of the Romans?” It’s a question worth asking today as the world waits with bated breath to see whom Americans will entrust with supreme power.

The politics of Jesus and the power Pentecost

Much of the essay is a general exposition of his new politics, but Roberts begins with an account, grounded in the work of Oliver O’Donovan, of the “politics” of Jesus and of the empowerment of the church as a “political” community through the Pentecost event.

These are the main points that I picked out:

• Jesus’ confidence in the coming “order of the kingdom” marginalises the clash with Roman imperial power. He “felt no need to adopt an insubordinate posture to the passing powers of the present age.”
• The occupation of Israel by Rome was of much less significance than its enslavement to spiritual or demonic enemies.
• Jesus brought “profound power”—far more profound than anything Rome could offer—to enable enervated Israel to live effectively as a community in service of God.
• If this power had been oriented “chiefly in antagonism to Rome’s,” it would have been misunderstood both by his contemporaries and probably by the church too.
• Jesus’ kingdom programme may appear “apolitical,” inasmuch as it did not overtly address the “threat of the colonial oppressors,” but this betrays “misguided notions of the nature of true political power.”
• The gift of true power was given to the church at Pentecost:

The Spirit gives power that, while not narrowly focused on overcoming Rome as the supposed obstacle, is by no means apolitical. The power of Pentecost establishes the fundamental realities upon which effective political community depend.

• Pentecost may be understood as a political event because it transformed and renewed “the speech and the broader communication of God’s people.”
• The Spirit empowers the church as a “political body” to “declare the effective judgments of God, binding and loosing.”
• The Spirit establishes the unity and common life of the people of God. The Spirit liberates people from “guilt and shame,” from servility, and “gives hope that saves societies from despair.” The Spirit in manifold ways “overcomes the fracturing of human society and grants a sure unity and confidence by which it can act.”
• The Spirit supplies the wisdom necessary for the good governance of society.

The gift of the Spirit at Pentecost is the gift of the positive means by which political community can be formed and the power by which to act with confidence in history. Rather than power operating through and grounded in coercion, fear, enmity, and death, the power of the Spirit is liberating, energizing, uniting, and living.

The rest of the essay is much more of an exercise in political theology. Roberts’ concluding paragraph will give a pretty good idea of where he is going:

Even while being politically involved, we need not play a zero-sum game of politics, becoming fixated upon wresting power from our opponents: there is power the rulers and children of this age neither know nor understand. We see the shrinking and the exhaustion of power in our politics, an increasing dependence upon the weak and enslaving forces of fear and coercion, and the strife and confusion of tongues. Despite all this, we can find confidence in the gift of the Spirit, grounding and investing ourselves in a new kingdom of which the Church, anointed at Pentecost, is a promissory initiation. As the life of this new kingdom flows out, we can seek his reviving and empowering of the common life and the rule of our societies.

I will not try to follow him, but we will get to the “new kingdom” motif and my reasons for thinking that it not only gets “kingdom of God” wrong but also hampers the church in the West today in its struggle to reposition itself.

It’s Israel that’s the political problem, not Rome

Jesus’ political analysis and criticism are directed not towards Rome but towards Israel. He continues John the Baptist’s campaign against the “brood of vipers”—the Pharisees and Sadducees who hoped to “flee from the wrath to come” but who would have to give account of a day of judgment (Matt. 3:7; 12:34-37). It is a classic prophetic stance.

The presence of Satan and unclean spirits in Israel was not somehow other than or more significant than the presence of the unclean and destructive occupying force. In Jewish apocalyptic, there is a very close association of Satan or Belial and the pagan oppressor. Satan is the sinister power behind the divine ruler cults. He proposes to take from Caesar government of the oikoumenē and transfer it to Jesus, on certain conditions: “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. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours” (Lk. 4:6-7). The New Testament answer is that Jesus will gain this government by other means (Phil. 2:6-11).

It seems likely, therefore, that the rash of unclean spirits in Israel is a manifestation, in some respect, of the desecrating and corrupting presence of unclean gentiles in the land.

The man from whom a “legion” of demons had gone out is left “clothed and in his right mind,” but Jesus knows that the unclean spirit of domestic madness will return, find the house “swept and put in order,” and will bring “seven other spirits more evil than itself,” and they will trash the place (Lk. 8:30, 35; 11:24-26). I take this to be a metaphor for the disintegration of the state into chaos in the build up to the war.

The imprisonment of Satan immediately following the defeat of Babylon the great, which is Rome, confirms the notion of a specific collaboration between Satan and the beast from the sea (Rev. 12:17-13:2; 18:2; 20:1-3).

So Jesus’ eschatological horizon is the war against Rome, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, which will be interpretable as the vindication both of Jesus and of his followers. The expectation is that the current leadership of Israel will live to see the Son of Man seated as judge and ruler at the right hand of YHWH, coming with the clouds of heaven, in the immediate aftermath of the war (Mk. 13:24-26; 14:61-62).

Jesus does not prioritise a spiritual kingdom of God over the worldly power of Rome. From his perspective, the kingdom of God comes as judgment on his own people, and Rome is the agent of that judgment. He is not interested in what will happen to Rome after that.

The reason Jesus does not openly criticise colonial power is not that he has a different notion of political power, it is that his prophetic focus is entirely on the fate of Israel. In the disastrous resolution of the current crisis, political power is wielded as it always has been and probably always will be. The role of the church in this situation is not to model an ideal of “political community” but to bear corporate witness to the future outcome.

The politics of Pentecost

On the day of Pentecost, the church is empowered with the Spirit of Jesus to carry on his prophetic ministry to Israel. The disciples are endowed indiscriminately with a limited set of charismatic gifts; they all become seers:

your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; even on my male servants and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy. (Acts 2:17-18)

And what they will see, when they look into the future, is a devastating day of the Lord from which the current “crooked generation” of Judeans will be saved only by repenting and calling on the name of the Lord (Acts 2:19-21, 38-40). The testimony is politically charged, of course, but the corporate life of the early churches is relevant only insofar as it must sustain the testimony, in the face of opposition and hardship, through to the moment when they are vindicated and delivered from their sufferings.

The same purpose is found in Paul: the life of the apostolic communities is oriented in a thoroughgoing fashion towards the day, in a foreseeable future, when Jesus will be confessed as Lord by the nations. The “hope” held by the nations is not the general confidence that keeps societies from falling into despair; it is the hope that in due course they will be ruled by the Davidic messiah (Rom. 15:12-13), whom Israel appears to have rejected.

This progressive outworking of the kingdom of God, through to a particular moment in history, is “spiritual” in two respects: the kingdom is divine action in history, and the eschatological witness of the church is sustained and directed by the Spirit of God. But there is no “kingdom” in view that somehow supersedes or dispenses with messy, concrete, historical, human experience.

The schēma of the age to come

Paul speaks of the hostile rulers of the present age passing away and of the present “form” (schēma) of the age passing away (1 Cor. 2:6; 7:31). But the assumption, I think, is that the age to come will have rulers who are not hostile towards YHWH and his Anointed and a different political-religious schēma.

In other words, I think the best way to look back on this whole narrative is to suppose that the new schēma was what we call Christendom. It was only the emergence of an ostensibly Christian society, in which Jesus was indeed confessed as Lord by the nations, to the glory of God the Father, that necessitated the development of political theologies—putting the New Testament under considerable strain in the process and fundamentally obscuring the prophetic-apocalyptic character of New Testament thought.

What writers like O’Donovan and Roberts seek to offer is an alternative to the compromised political theologies of Christendom, but retaining the idealised, supra-historical notion of kingdom. That’s a misunderstanding. Kingdom presupposes the continuation of hostility and violence. There will be no need for kingdom in the new heavens and new earth.

The age to come after the age to come

The misunderstanding also makes it harder for the post-Christendom church to define a new prophetic function and vision for itself. In effect, it pulls us back to the comforting idea of a larger redeemed society rather than driving us forward, as the Spirit does, into a difficult and disorienting future.

Roberts is right to say that the call of Abram “occurred against the backdrop of the failure of Babel,” and that “What God would achieve through Abram would somehow provide an answer to Babel.”

But I think that there is a real sense in which the conversion of the pagan oikoumenē through the “qualitatively different” kingship of Jesus (Phil. 2:6-11), constituted the proper historical fulfilment of that storyline.

So again, Roberts is right to say that “the growing presence of a people animated by Christ’s Spirit in the midst of the Empire ultimately led to victory over it.” And, surely, you cannot claim that victory without owning Christendom?

So then what? History continues apace. The political fulfilment has come and gone, we are in unmapped territory, getting further and further away from the land that was promised to us. What we need is not a new politics but a new prophetic identity, I think, which is precisely what Pentecost was all about.