Preaching Peace

So What?

Jurgen Moltmann referred to the Eucharist as the feast of freedom. Intimately connected to this freedom is the relational term of friendship. The Christian community has the rare opportunity to live non-mimetically, to become free from the restraints and constraints of negative mimesis. In a sense, the church is where we practice mercy, love and forgiveness, so that when we take our relational game into the world we know what to do.

Genuine peacemaking is really all about becoming friends. We do not say ‘making friends’ as though friendship was an ideal to be sculpted. Rather we become good friends by practicing the skills we are taught: mercy is better than sacrifice, love one another, forgive one another. Practicing these skills is more difficult by far than mastering the history of Western philosophy. These skills are constantly being put to the test, and how frequently we find ourselves seeking solace in our guilt and shame when our skills fail us.

These skills and others are essential for the 21st century church to develop and nurture. If history records that a future ‘war against Christians’ left Christians bloodthirsty, retaliatory and vengeful, then it will be said that Christianity missed its own point.

Many are the relationships in which we can always be practicing our ‘love’ skills. We are, however, commanded to do so in the context of our Christian community. We are not speaking of an ideal but the reality given us in the Lord Jesus in whom we live and move and have our being. Either we are about being friends with God and each other or we are about why some people are our friends and others aren’t. If we are the latter, we are not following Jesus. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” not those who harbor justification for their anger and retaliatory projections. Blessed are those branches on the vine that live in love.

2006:

American Christianity is torn in two. It is becoming more and more difficult for folks on the right and the left to be friends with one another. We can see this in our ‘Christian’ politicians. Many of them attend church on Sunday, and spend the rest of the week stabbing each other in the back. And then they all attend soirees together. Go figure.

One cannot speak of befriending enemies in America today. To do such is to ‘aid and abet terrorism.’ Recently, the work of the Christian Peacemaker Teams has been called into question, for here are people who go to great lengths to make friends with those who are deemed enemies. Why would they do this? Because Jesus called them to give their lives as friends. Tom Fox died in March, not as an enemy but as a friend. His witness to us today is in stark contrast to the Christian preachers whose call to arms cuts off any hope of true friendship.

I wonder if has Christianity lost its capacity to make enemies friends? Thank God, Jesus didn’t or we would be up a creek. We are called to imitate Jesus today, not George Bush or Dick Cheney or Condeleeza Rice, not Tony Blair or Jack Straw or bin Laden or Zawahiri. Jesus alone is the standard by which we are to know friendship. Can we do this before it is too late to make friends with our enemies?

Jeff adds:

I wonder if it’s possible that Jesus commended a way of life (loving one another as we have been loved) that isn’t possible. Somehow, I doubt it. In other words, in this world of division and more division, where love of enemy seems a world away, we are reminded this week that it is entirely within our ability!

I often use the tried and true “law/gospel” structure for my sermons, and this would seem to be a week in which it would work particularly well. We can view Jesus’ words here as potential commandments, as “law” and inspire in our listeners a certain dread, almost despair as the love he shows (if described accurately) seems well beyond our feeble reach. Then, when we recognize that Jesus does not tell us what to do here, but what we are now, through him, ABLE to do, what we can do by (first) imitating his desire/love for his Father, we open to our listeners a vista of possibility, a view of the eschatological present. Now, that sounds like Gospel to me.

Anthropological Reading

Observing that Girard has said very little about positive mimesis, Willard Swartley ‘consider(s) this a neglected area in Girard’s work and in writings on Girard.” (Violence Renounced) One of our interests at PreachingPeace.org has been to discern the parameters of such a venture. We believe that the Gospels give us two sides to positive mimesis, both of which are essential for understanding the other. Positive mimesis is expressed in the Synoptic tradition, in every type of narrative and saying. Something consistent is going on here in the life and person of Jesus related very specifically to the (re)ordering of our relationships. Healings, teachings on forgiveness, exorcisms, our relationship to God (and temple, Torah and land) are all re-valued in Jesus. Gandhi and Dr King saw this. What is revalued has to do with violence, violence structured relationships.

More importantly, what these peacemakers saw was political, they both understood and saw with great vision, the power of love expressed as non-retribution, thus recognizing the implicit connection between systems and Powers. The gods are not friends. They may make alliances or form agreements, but they do not lay down their life for the other gods. Walter Wink has done us the great service of interpreting the biblical text as well as our current situation in regard to this (The Powers, Vol 3). The Synoptic active non-resistant Jesus is not a figment of scholarly imagination. Positive mimesis expressed as forgiveness, non-retaliation, love, reconciliation, etc, is shot through these texts.

There is another side to this business of positive mimesis. It is given in the Fourth Gospel. It gives us Jesus’ reflection on his agency, a reflection that essentially comes down to “When I look at myself and how I act and what I think and how I feel, I sense a deep and powerful affinity with my Father.” That is, the language about Jesus’ relationship to the Father does not need to be seen exclusively in philosophical (or metaphysical) terms. Rather, we may see in Jesus’ self-expression an awareness of the unity of spirituality and relationships.

It is clear from many texts in the Fourth Gospel that the notion of agency plays a key role in understanding the sonship of Jesus. It is his ambassadorial function. It is about his relationship to his Father. So much so, that one could say that Jesus “exegeted God” for us (1.18). This is important because it demands that we ask what is going on here. According to the Fourth Gospel how does Jesus exegete God?

Positive mimesis plays a small role in Girard, not because it is unimportant but because Girard is focused on an anthropological reading of the Gospels. Girard works primarily with the events that lead up to and culminate in violence, in the Cross. Positive mimesis is really only possible after the resurrection and the gift of the Spirit. What Girard has observed about mimesis that is essential for our understanding is that desire is imitated Positive mimesis is the positioning or focusing of desire on the only One who can be for each of us and hence for all of us. It is about the imitation of God.

These then, are the two sides of a coin. In the Synoptics it is termed ‘following’, in the Fourth Gospel Jesus is the Way. This Way…. is the way of friendship.

A convenient designation for negative mimesis is rivalry, the process of model/obstacle, the experience of the skandalon. Positive mimesis can best be termed friendship. “Friendship is no passing feeling of affection. It combines affection with faithfulness. You can depend upon a friend. As a friend you become someone upon whom others can depend. A friend remains a friend even in misfortune, even in guilt. For between friends there rules no prejudice that defines one, and no ideal image after which one must strive. Nor is friendship an alliance for mutual advantage, as is the case with so-called business friends. Between friends there rules only the promise to walk with each other and to be there for each other, in other words, a faithfulness that has to do not with acting and possessing but with the individual person and with being.” Jurgen Moltmann (The Passion for Life)

Moltmann puts his finger on two important elements of friendship. First is that there exists no ideal image for which one strives. That is, we do not set up the other as model and thus potential obstacle. Second, Moltmann places together ‘acting and possessing.’ Friendship does not have to do with the act of ‘grasping’ the other, neither is it fake or hidden behind a persona. Friendship is the freedom of presence.

Have you ever been in love? Do you remember just sitting there goo-goo eyed in the presence of another? Do you recall hanging on to every word, every little action? Can you remember how you felt as you were sharing, so free, so unconfined, so heard? The openness of a truly loving friendship is remarkable. This is why our text connects the two, ‘greater love has no one than this, that they lay down their life for their friends.’

The Fourth Gospel gives us a theory of positive imitation, the Synoptics a sociology of positive imitation (although when examined in enough detail it is possible to see the other way around as well). Together, they tell a remarkable story, the story of the visitation of the Creator, who rejoices to call us ‘friends’ and in full union with the Creator we may like Jesus also know and follow this One.

Jeff adds:

Can a coin have three sides?

Positive mimesis seems, in the Fourth Gospel, to have a third aspect revealed as well. Yes, Jesus’ imitation of his Father’s desire for the other, a non-possessing desire that gives itself for the other, is revealed and offered as model, but there is, I think, a deeper healing of mimesis.

At its root, mimesis leads to violence because mimesis manifests itself in imitated, mediated desire. We find ourselves in conflict with one another because mimetic desire inevitably leads to desires that compete for limited objects of desire. There just can’t be enough objects to satisfy desire.

Worse, desire is mimetic (so suggests Girard) because the human agent believes that the object of desire modeled by the “other” brings with it “being.” Possession of the object is thought to grant the possessor a “being” that we all desire and, to some extent, lack.

These are, in the end, inescapable effects of “desire” unless desire itself is redeemed. We cannot imitate Jesus’ manner of relationship, love as Jesus loved, until we heal desire. If we do not heal desire at an elemental level, the imitation of Jesus’ relationships and behaviors becomes little more than a more subtle form of response to prohibition. Don’t own too much, don’t be jealous, don’t, don’t, don’t.

What makes Jesus’ relationships possible is his desire for his Father. We may imitate that desire, turn our desire to that which he had, because in this desire, and in this one alone, there is sufficient object to make rivalry unnecessary. Everyone can desire the Father without competing. What is more, this is the only object of desire that conveys what all objects are intended to covey, “being.”

Loving one another as Jesus loved us simply will not happen until we and the Father are one, were Jesus and the Father.

Historical/Cultural

We wish to play today off of the work of Rudolf Schnackenberg. In his commentary he has a brilliant paragraph on the linguistic cultural background of friendship. He says, “friendship is in fact a theme that played a very important part in the Graeco-Roman world. There is no corresponding word in Hebrew, but the matter is present in Hebrew literature (see, e.g., the ‘bond of friendship’ between David & Jonathan, I Sam 18:1-4). The idea of friendship, however, first appeared in a much more emphatic way in the sapiential literature (see especially Ecclus. 6:5-17). In Judaism, Abraham is depicted as the friend of God (acc. to Isa 41:8; 2 Chron 20:7) and this description appears frequently in the non-canonical writings (Jub 19:9; Dam 3:2; Apoc Abr 9:6, 10:6; Test Abr. 13:6; Philo Mos I, 156; Sacr 130, etc). The Israelites are also given the same honorific title (Jub 30:21; see also the rabbinical writings) as those who are concerned with Torah (Aboth 6:1). John 15:3 with its special reference to dying for one'’ friends, cannot, however, be traced back to Judaism. Jesus himself hardly ever made use of the idea of friendship. We can be quite certain then, in the case of the evangelist, a Hellenistic influence was at work.” (The Gospel According to John , III)

We have several questions we would like to put to this. First we acknowledge that the Greeks and Romans had already explored the concept of friendship and had drawn some conclusions regarding it. Second, we also acknowledge that there is a developing inter-penetration of Judaism and Hellenism in the centuries before Jesus all around the Mediterranean. But, just because there is not a Hebrew word for friendship, does not mean that there is not the ability to be friends. Nor does it mean that friendship is not explored.

Second, Schnackenberg says Jesus hardly ever made use of the idea of friendship. We agree. Friendship is not an idea for Jesus but an intentional way of relating to others. To be certain, we believe the author of the Fourth Gospel had been a native of Jerusalem with some social standing in the Jerusalem community, whether by position or by birth we do not know. Thus, our author would have been exposed to more ‘Hellenistic’ influence than say, certain rural Galileans. But why is it that we think Jesus could not speak even rudimentary Greek? He grew up just 12 miles from Sepphoris and we haven’t a clue as to what he did for his first 30 (at least) years. As can be seen from his teaching, Jesus had obviously thought something through to the degree of an Einstein or a Siddhartha. He was no dummy. If we follow the suggestions of some, like T.W. Manson (The Teaching of Jesus), it would appear that Jesus was familiar to a degree with Hebrew and Greek as well as his native tongue of Aramaic. Children all over the world (except in the United States) are bi- or tri-lingual. We are simply saying that it is possible for Jesus to have had friends of a high social caliber who were acquainted with Greek and that Jesus, on occasion may have used Greek with them. Thus we should not be surprised that Jesus may also have been acquainted, in some respects, with ‘Hellenized Judaism.’

We also would point out that in the Synoptic tradition, Jesus is seen within the framework of the covenant that God made with Israel. As the elect, the chosen, Israel served God. Jesus is also a servant of God. Jesus, in the Synoptic tradition, closely allies himself with the marginalized. He eats with them, expressing friendship through the hospitality of a shared meal. He redefines relationships in terms of mercy expressed, forgiveness proffered, love demonstrated. To say Jesus hardly made use of the idea of friendship may be to miss just how he became a friend to those around him (and thus how we can become friends as well).

What's New:

Acts 10:44-48
Ps 98
1 Jn 5:1-6
Jn 15:9-17

(Acts 10:44-48)
While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter said, "Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the HolySpirit just as we have?" So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they invited him to stay for several days.

(1 John 5:1-6)
Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one that testifies, for the Spirit is the truth.

(John 15:9-17)
As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love,just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.