1
Writing Christology is an awkward art. That is true even if one sets out most directly to write (and thus read) of only a small corner of that vast field. To think “Christ,” “the Messiah,” “the anointed,” is from the beginning to think a whole tradition of thought, or rather a bundle of traditions; and it is to think that history before and after the quite particular event that one might be forgiven for thinking and imagining as grander than historians are inclined to hold that a particular event can be. Writing of this particular event is especially awkward, however, because its grandeur takes shape concurrently with its historical elusiveness. Though one is hard pressed to find honorable historians who brush aside as a phantasm the Christ to which Christologies gesture, a phantasm, say, of some peasants in first century Roman occupied Galilee, the one to whom this title is most attached—let us boldly call him Jesus—hardly left tracks, certainly not as many or as deeply as we’d expect an apparent world historical individual to leave. Further, if we may be permitted to attend to what is most loudly proclaimed of him by his followers, his life came to a particularly demeaning end, one neither he nor his advocates (try as they sometimes might) have ever gotten beyond.
Jesus vs. Caesar is a Christology in a restricted sense, of course. It is more obviously a Christologically inclined ethical/political study. Indeed it is written for a lay audience, pulling back when its prose might otherwise have gotten too much for the uninitiated, narrowing the range of issues addressed, supplying discussion questions at the end of chapters, etc. It is a hundred and fifty pages of clearly articulated and deceptively simple ideas. It is by no means an “easy” text, however. It asks everything of its reader. But, then again, perhaps one would expect this of a text in the traditions both of theologies of liberation and of John Wesley’s “practical divinity,” a text that leans on the labors both of black churches in white supremacist America and to a lesser extent the Wesleyan Holiness tradition.
It is because of the way the labors of those bodies have from time to time situated themselves and the way it has situated itself in the mutilated body of Jesus that this little book resonates so well with the matter of this conference and may be thought of as the first evening and morning of a Christology, in the the theologically expansive sense of that term.
What is at play here is a pneumatological Christology. Were it possible still in our thoroughly monetized world to use Melanchthon’s never entirely helpful characterization, we might say that it concerns the “benefits” of Christ, the way the accounts of Jesus above all in the gospels engage the injustices especially (but not exclusively) of 21st century America. The question it explicitly asks is a decisive one: How much longer can the God to whom Jesus gave himself be so widely confused, e.g., in churches, with the God empires hawk in their sacred texts and technologies of crowd control? Its subtitle is, “For People Tired of Serving the Wrong God.”
Who is the God of empires? He is the virile God of power, of greatness, of success, of victory; the God who owns, who keeps, whose impassible will excludes and includes and concludes; the coldly competitive God who overpowers His enemies and walls off His conquered Kingdom; the God of propriety and property, the proper God; the God perfect in strength, devoid of weakness, the originary singularity of all perfections—“that than which no greater can be conceived” (117).
“Jesus,” on the other hand, “embodied the opposite of everything that characterized divinity in the Roman Empire: death on a cross . . . , birth into a family of day laborers in construction, head-on challenges to dominant interpretations of rules and laws and sometimes the rules themselves, and resistance to dominant authorities such as the temple in Jerusalem . . . .” The Jesus of the earliest gatherings of his followers is the Anti-Caesar. They flirted with treason in calling him, “lord and savior,” the very titles that signified Caesar’s “political and economic” benefaction to the Empire (20). That is, Jesus was no ethereal spiritual caretaker of disembodied, troubled human souls. Jesus was a full-on affront to the power claims of the Empire, a challenge to its authority. No less than it, he stood at the boundary of life and death. His authority was earthy, political and economic, but altogether different than that either of Roman or of Judean interpreters and enforcers of the law (cf. Mk 1:22).
If instead of hearing the New Testament with a sensibility nurtured by a lazy reading of the Creed of Nicea, we might come to hear the Creed of Nicea with a sensibility disciplined (as were the martyrs’) by a sighing—metanoian—reading of the New Testament account of Jesus, then “God’s power [might be] understood not in terms of empire-like omnipotence but in terms of how Jesus wielded power, namely in resilient service and in deep solidarity. In this case, there is now a radical edge to the doctrine of the Trinity. Not only is Jesus diametrically opposed to Caesar, but God is too.” (25)
It is not, however, a kind of aesthetic or romantic attachment to flesh and blood life that fuels this text. The Christology at work here has looked into the eyes of the poor and has seen in them the fading light that was extinguished, according to the gospel, when the Galilean peasant Jesus finally succumbed to bloody asphyxiation on Good Friday. That is, this text hears the gospel proclaim its good news to the poor among whom Jesus lived and died, in their hunger, exhaustion, disease, and societal abasement—the poor within a network of judgments enacted by the agents of the might both of the Roman collaborating Judean temple and of Rome itself. In a world of powers panting for more, status quo violence determined—as it determines still—whether the future of a person, a household, or a village might be foreclosed or open. Jesus is a “No!” to all such schema (cf. 1 Cor 7:29–31).
The contrast closest perhaps to the heart of this text is between the consequences for the poor—and thus for everyone—of loyalty to one or the other of these two vastly different Gods. One yields malignancy, the other flourishing. One enlivens, the other kills—concretely, bodily, here and now. Thus, when Mark has Jesus declare, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (12:17), there is no bifurcation of the economic from the spiritual. The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus lays claim to all things, all aspects of human life, all of creation, economics notwithstanding. If unjust, and therefore deadly, political and economic institutions coerce the poor into complying with their demands, the gospel would have them for the sake of life, in subtle or coarse ways, to disrupt “the very structures that create, force, and demand compliance” (37, Miguel De La Torre’s words). “Caesar is to be resisted everywhere” (39). It is because it kills that “Jesus rejected top-down power altogether” (49). “What made Jesus so dangerous to the Roman Empire and its powerbrokers that they finally had to execute him was that he was not merely a radical preacher but rather someone who embodied the power of God in alternative ways” (50).
2
Perhaps the greatest danger of the formal language of classical Christology is that it tempts us to think Christ abstractly. That he is the concurrence of two natures—one divine, the other human—in one person, or that his “substance” or “being” or “reality” or “essence” is the same as the “substance” or “being” or “reality” or “essence” of God the Father or us, would strike anyone familiar with the cultural history of Western Civilization as an invitation to think the subject of Christology within the metaphysical traditions that grow out of sixth century Greece. The language is above all reminiscent of the work of Aristotle.
If, however, one thinks first of the earthiness of Jesus in the New Testament’s portrayal, those apparent abstractions take on texture, weight, timbre, and color. They become metaphors inextricable from a day of labor and its fruit, inextricable from the work and rest of extended households and tiny villages and precarious childbirths and familiar, all too familiar, deathbeds—as well as the powers that concurrently pile on them pain upon pain. Let us listen with this sensibility to the Definition of Chalcedon:
Following, then, the holy fathers, who unite in teaching all . . . to confess the one and only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. This selfsame one is perfect [teleion] both in deity [theotēti] and also in human-ness [anthrōpotēti]; this selfsame one is also actually [alēthōs] God and actually man, with a rational soul [psychēs logikēs] and a body. He is of the same reality as God [homoousion tō patri] as far as his deity is concerned and of the same reality as we are ourselves [homoousion hēmin] as far as his human-ness is concerned; thus like us in all respects, sin only excepted. Before time began [pro aiōnōn] he was begotten of the Father, in respect of his deity, and now in these “last days,” for us and on behalf of our salvation, this selfsame one was born of Mary the virgin, who is God-bearer [theotokos] in respect of his human-ness [anthrōpotēta].
[We also teach] that we apprehend [gnōridzomenon] this one and only Christ—Son, Lord, Only-begotten—in two natures [duo physesin]; [and we do this] without confusing the two natures [asunkutōs], without transmuting one nature into the other [atreptōs], without dividing them into two separate categories [adiairetōs], without contrasting them according to area or function [achōristōs]. The distinction of each nature is not nullified by the union. Instead, the “properties” [idiotētos] of each nature are conserved and both natures concur [suntrechousēs] in one “person” [prosōpon] and in one hypostasis. They are not divided or cut into two prosōpa, but are together the one and only and only-begotten Logos of God, the Lord Jesus Christ. Thus have the prophets of old testified; thus the Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us; thus the Symbol of the Fathers [N] has handed down [paradedōke] to us.
Let us say that the language of this statement may be thought otherwise than under the sway of categorical thinking. Let us say that this is the language of a mind in freefall into the concrete, but no less elusive, day-to-day life of a peasant in first century Galilee. “Human nature,” we have been trained to think, is not to be confused with particular human lives, at work at particular times, in particular places. Awake or asleep, we all participate in the same human nature, we think—whether that nature is postulated to be embedded in our genomes or to float in a pristine perfection above the vicissitudes of history. But if the creed has in the church’s baptismal and eucharistic liturgies remembered the Jesus of Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday, the Jesus with hands, feet, brain, and bone, who touched and was touched by the defiled poor of his land, then perhaps we do not abuse Chalcedon by letting its “human nature” emerge not as the extrapolated ideational punch line either of metaphysical speculation or experimental analysis—but rather in the percussion rolling through the crescendos and decrescendos of stories told in little village assemblies, stories of the what and how of all that Jesus did and all that was done to him. Certainly, saying just that much does not guarantee that Jesus has slipped through the fingers of the fist of controlled analysis or speculation. We will—at least in this present evil age—always be tempted to think we have found the tools for managing the iconic artifacts little churches have variously passed on to their children and friends, to sort out what is fanciful from what is more properly, methodically, and dependably to be known. Nonetheless, there is a tenderness in the uncertainty of a trust that—though earthy—does not look for hope elsewhere than among those who work to remember the future with which the news of Jesus resonantly rings—strangely—true and well. The church’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit asks us to trust in this way.
And so, “he is . . . homoousion hēmin, . . . thus like us in all respects, sin only excepted.”
“He” is such a simple little singular masculine nominative pronoun—“he,” the individual who, impregnating his women, sires his progeny, who provisions and guards his household, whose muscle mass adds heft to his implements of the field, the hunt, and the battleground, whose impulses are to be feared, whose blow kills, for whose mercy one is to beg—that is, unless “he,” under the unrelenting threat of Roman and Judean violence, lives on the cusp of death by starvation, disease, and marauders, say, in the subsistence village life of first century Galilee. Even in a nominally patriarchal village of a few households, the desperately poor do not have room for the restraints of formal power hierarchies, of strict gender roles, of more or less value. Everyone living hand to mouth in such circumstances leans hard on everyone else, young and old, female and male, sick and well, competent and incompetent.
In a tiny, isolated, subsistence village of Jesus’s Galilee even the hint of self-reliance would inevitably endanger, not only the one, but even more the many who relied in their precarity on one another. There is in that world no “he” without “we” and “they” and “she” and “you.” That Jesus Christ is “homoousion hēmin” signifies that he is not to be named human without the ones with whom his life is entangled. He is not human alone, a solid mass that displaces a quantity, say, of air or water. He is human the way the one is human whom Gabriel in the gospel of Luke instructed Mary to call “Jesus,” i.e., only in the swirling interactions that occur, as from the manger to the cross he embraces and engages people and they embrace and engage him. To contact him is to contact everyone else in his history. That is how he is “like us in all respects.”
That the “likeness” to us of this Jesus of the gospel might entail his being “sinless” need not build a barrier between him and us, between him, whom we are tempted to imagine as whole, and the rest of us: we who know we are not. As post-Chalcedonian orthodox traditions point out, the carnality of Jesus Christ is “sinful flesh.” His is not pristine, properly perfect human-ness, the human-ness of idealists’ fantasies. His is our human-ness—as it must be, since there is no human-ness about him, but what is inextricably mingled with ours. What makes him “without sin” is simply that he did not fight his solidarity with us, his “sinful flesh,” his weakness, his vulnerability to injury, and the mutilation of his impoverished Galilean body. He simply lived an earthy life, moving without discernible excellence after the way of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God whose “Kingdom,” whose Reign, whose sovereignty, was—concurrently with Jesus’s sojourn—breaking into this world, breaking in fact into the world where poor people have been trained not to expect to flourish. It is Jesus’s faithfulness—in spite of everything—down the path God cut through his world, a faithfulness that lacerates his body, a faithfulness that makes his sinful flesh, makes his “becoming sin with us,” nonetheless “without sin.”
Confessing that the Jesus of the gospel is homoousion hēmin need not contradict that he is “of the same reality as God [homoousion tō patri] as far as his deity is concerned.” These confessions are made here at the same time and in the same manner. It is the way they fall together that he is in the news of the gospel, “lord and savior.” Although this—let us call it—declaration of worship may well entail the simple declarative sentence, “Jesus is God,” it does so without categorical, propositional constriction. The phrases that seem so radically opposed to each other, that Jesus Christ is as we are and as is God, are reconciled in the confession that embraces them, viz., that he is “one person.” What he is on Easter Sunday has not shaken off what he was on Good Friday or Holy Saturday. He is one prosōpon, one hypostasis, one actual, living convergence of weightily, giving persons, i.e., of countenances, of faces—one human, one God—in such a way that there is no confusion of this “human-ness” and “deity,” no transmutation of one into the other, no mutual exclusion of one from the other, no division of labor between the two. “The distinction of each nature is not nullified by the union. Instead, the ‘properties’ [idiotētos] of each nature are conserved and both natures concur [suntrechousēs] in one ‘person’ [prosōpon] and in one hypostasis.”
The event in which these two “natures” “concur” “in one person” is articulated in Colossians: “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (2:9), a testimony to the glory of the evenings and the mornings of the days that punctuate Holy Week. The deity of Jesus Christ is the the Father’s holy embrace of resurrection. The resurrected body of Jesus is not a reanimated body, a resuscitated body, or a body made whole. It is on Easter Sunday no less dead and broken than it was late on Good Friday or all day on Holy Saturday. What comes forth from Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb is a body, crucified, dead, and buried, a body that is no less carnal, mutilated, exsanguinated, and asphyxiated, than it was the day before. It remains the body that death defeated, the body having reached its finite end. What carries it across the threshold of the tomb and into an eighth/first day is the life—the Spirit—that does not compete with death, that has no finite end, that is in fact, as John says, “eternal life.” It is a life that does not need to replace death to live, to replace injustice to be just, to replace unrighteousness to be righteous, to replace abasement to be exalted, to replace a theologia crucis with a theologia gloriae—but is a “nevertheless” that will not let any of these first terms foreclose its successor.
Whatever else “resurrection” might signify to the philologist, the chemist, the physiologist, or the historian, in the gospel it signifies that this good news is spoken particularly to the poor, that the official forecast or audit that marks their defeat and discouragement, their hunger, thirst, disease, injury, imprisonment, and death, is not the last word, not even on the day it is pronounced. That none of it in the end forecloses the future that with open arms is coming for them.
It is because the poor of the world are only quite fragmentarily served by the good will of prosperous nation states, empires, and tax deductible charity organizations, it is because it is not enough even for those in high places, with all requisitely honed skills and native instincts, those who listen hard to the gospel—that it is not enough even for them to set out to make sufferers’ lives flourish. Of course, the faithful are tasked with working tirelessly or exhaustedly alongside the poor and with them to hope and dream and pray that flourishing might descend like spring showers or rise up like new wheat. It is, however, in the end a flourishing, a well being, a justice, a peace “that passeth understanding”—one that does not look like flourishing or peace—that might open the closed fist of the powers of this present evil age.
That “peace that passeth understanding” looks in the gospel like God’s embrace, not of the corpse, but of the whole sweep of the impoverished bodily history of Jesus, the slaughtered lamb. That is, it looks like Easter Sunday. That is, it looks like the coming of the holy God, the flash of glory, on that day, a coming that saturates every twist and turn, every action and passion, every outgoing or incoming movement that has marked his body his whole life long, that makes his mutilated, defiled, utterly unclean asphyxiated body glow with the light of the God with whom he is homoousion. In stepping into the upper room in the late narratives of the gospel of John—in stepping “unto them”—he is this excessive shalom: “Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.” (20:19; cf. 26)
As “one person”—not a substantial subject or a centered identity—whose short life has been entangled day in and day out with the lives especially of other oppressed Galilean peasants, he is that point at which the glory of God touches them and thus all, beckoningly. His life has so opened to the coming of God’s Reign that there is left of it nothing to obstruct that coming. Thus he empties himself of everything—anhypostatically, one might say—becomes that open place into which flow both the poor and the God into whose solidarity with the poor he has given himself, “to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Phil 2:8). What comes to stand up here—as resurrection—is the vis-à-vis of God and the poor, into which his short life has moved, now as gift and glory, God with us—enhypostatically, one might say.
Of course, one could argue that none of this reaches beyond literary analysis and experimental theological extrapolation. Despite all the words written here acknowledging the place of the poor in the gospel, the gospel does very little until it takes on flesh and blood. The gospel speaks of this move, too, of course. It does so as the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit who makes the gospel flesh, it affirms. Unfortunately, the work of the Holy Spirit is also said to “pass understanding” and there is no unambiguous evidence that might, say, demand a verdict in its favor. Nonetheless, to those who have found themselves called and chosen, unwilling or unable to walk away, who return again and again to these stories and the liturgies that move to their rhythm, the message is not easy to shake. The gospel speaks to the poor and with the poor, asking everything of the poor, what they have and have not, asking that they give to one another, live in gratitude toward one another, love one another in their love for the God the whole fullness of whom is pleased to dwell in the poor, wounded body of Jesus. The gospel also speaks to those who are not poor, i.e., if from the outside they overhear it. However, it speaks to them by calling them out of their self-reliance and resourcefulness and into a solidarity with the poor that will carry inevitably with it a suffering in no way unlike theirs. The promise of the gospel is that there is in such a life a peace that even the most violent unrest cannot take away. The promise of the gospel also knows that such peace makes an appeal to smart investors only if they with Simon the Magician fail to understand it.