All posts in Jesus

  • November 17, 2017

    Feel the Falseness (An Appeal To Faith Leaders)

    what-is-truth-christ-and-pilate

    Feel the Falseness
    Brian Zahnd

    “The first precondition of being called a spiritual leader is to perceive and feel the falsehood that is prevailing in society, and then to dedicate one’s life to a struggle against that falsehood. If one tolerates the falsehood and resigns oneself to it, one can never become a prophet. If one cannot rise above material life, one cannot even become a citizen in the Kingdom of the Spirit, far less a leader of others.” –Vladimir Solovyov in his eulogy of Fyodor Dostoevsky

    Can you feel it?

    It’s all around you. But can you feel it? The falseness — the falseness that prevails in society. Most are so sedated they never even suspect it. Some sense it, but cannot name it. It takes a prophet to name it. Dostoevsky in his day was well aware of it, which is why he was so much more than a novelist. Dostoevsky wrote his dark, brooding stories because he felt the falseness. What we take for truth, for reality, for the way things are and the way we assume things must be is almost entirely false. The world as it’s arranged is built upon a foundation of falsehood. The prevailing falseness memorialized in marble and robed in glory can appear indisputable, but as Dylan says, “all the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.”

    And now I will appeal to someone more authoritative then Dostoevsky or Dylan.

    Jesus.
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    No Comments / Jesus, Kingdom, Uncategorized /

  • October 6, 2017

    Postcards From Babylon

    Charles_Le_Brun_-_Entry_of_Alexander_into_Babylon

    Postcards From Babylon
    Brian Zahnd

    At the end of Peter’s first epistle — a letter to believers living in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire — the apostle cryptically says, “She who is in Babylon greets you.” What does Peter mean by that enigmatic phrase? Why does Peter end his letter by referring to some mysterious woman living in the once great but now insignificant city of Babylon? The answer to this question has to do with the long and bloody history of empire and the new kind of empire that had just began to emerge in the world, a new empire in which Peter plays an important role.

    In the Hebrew scriptures Babylon is the prophetic icon of empire. Empires are rich and powerful nations that, in their arrogant assumption of a divine right to rule the nations and in their conceited claim of possessing a manifest destiny to shape history, intrude upon the sovereignty of God. Peter sees Rome as the contemporary equivalent to Babylon — the latest economic-military superpower deifying itself and asserting a sovereignty belonging only to God. “She” in “Babylon” is the bride of Christ, the church, the community of those who through faith and baptism have renounced the idolatrous belief that Rome is the savior of the world and that Caesar is Lord, who now boldly confess that it is Jesus who is the world’s true Lord and Savior. This is an audacious claim to say the least! It’s this controversial and dangerous claim that periodically landed Christians in prison and the Coliseum. That is, until the church in the era of Constantine found a way to compromise with the empire and make the convoluted claim that somehow both Christ and Caesar were Lord — one in heaven and the other on earth. Goodbye early Christianity, hello Christendom.
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    No Comments / Christianity, Empire, Jesus, Politics /

  • July 16, 2017

    Foreword to “Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God”

    ForBlog

    Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God releases August 15. Let me share with you Wm. Paul Young’s foreword. It’s full of brilliant and beautiful insights about our journey to know the God revealed in Christ. Enjoy!

    BZ
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    No Comments / Books, Christology, In the Hands of a Loving God, Jesus /

  • May 24, 2017

    Ascended, Not Absent

    ascension

    Ascended, Not Absent
    Brian Zahnd

    Ascension Day. It’s the most obscure of all the major holy days on the Christian calendar. Coming forty days after Easter, it commemorates the Ascension of Christ. The Christian calendar is designed to tell the gospel story from Advent to Pentecost. But most Protestants think the gospel story can be told with Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter alone. It’s safe to say that Ascension Day (Thursday, May 25) will come and go unnoticed and uncelebrated by most American Christians. (It may have a bit more recognition in Europe where it remains a public holiday.) That Ascension day for most American Christians is just another Thursday in Spring is telling. It tells of a deficient gospel and reveals a central problem in our political theology.

    Too often we seem to regard the Ascension of Christ as a kind of awkward explanation for the absence of Christ. Well, after his resurrection, Jesus lifted off for outer space and is now hanging out with God in heaven until he comes back.

    No. The Ascension is not about the absence of Christ, but about the ascendancy of Christ. The ascension of Christ to the right hand of God is the ascendency, the rise, the elevation, the promotion of Christ to the position of all authority in heaven and on earth. The right hand of God is not a cosmological location, but a poetic way of saying that God has now given all authority to Christ. The ascension of Christ does not lead to the absence of Christ, but to his cosmic presence everywhere. This is why the risen Christ says, “Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” In the Ascension Christ now “fills all things everywhere with himself.” There is now no place where Christ is not, and there is no domain over which Jesus is not Lord.

    But that is not how most Christians have thought about the Ascension over the years. And this has had a detrimental effect upon our theology — especially our political theology. Let me explain.
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    No Comments / Ascension, Church Calendar, Jesus, Theology /

  • April 29, 2017

    The Cults of Caesar and Christ

    DivineAugustus

    The Cults of Caesar and Christ
    Brian Zahnd

    The original name for what would eventually became known as Christianity was “the Way.” You won’t find “Christianity” in the Bible, but you will find “the Way” seven times in the book of Acts. If you had asked a baptized follower of Jesus during the first century, “What is your religion?,” she most likely would have replied, “I belong to the Way.” This is what the Apostle Paul said in his hearing before the Roman governor Felix: “I admit that I follow the Way, which they call a cult.” (Acts 24:14)

    The common life of following Jesus together was called the Way, not because it was the way to heaven (the afterlife was never the emphasis), but because they had come to believe that in his death and resurrection Jesus had inaugurated a new way of life. Because the lifestyle of the Way was such a radical departure from the way of the Roman Empire, it is no surprise that people viewed the Way with great suspicion and often maligned it as a dangerous cult.
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    No Comments / Culture, Empire, Jesus, Revelation /

  • April 12, 2017

    What Does This Mean? (Five Hundred Miles of Crucifixes)

    San_Martin_Fromista_cristo
    What Does This Mean? (Five Hundred Miles of Crucifixes)
    Brian Zahnd

    Six months ago Peri and I walked five hundred miles across Spain on the Camino de Santiago. It was quite simply the most wonderful, most spiritual, most healing thing we’ve ever done. The Camino changed both of us. This morning as I prayed I thanked God in tears for the gift of the Camino. Until today I’ve not written about it, mostly because I’m still absorbing it. But Holy Week seems like the right time to share one aspect of my experience.

    We began the Camino on September 14, 2016 ( Holy Cross Day). After a long trek across the Pyrenees mountains from St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France we arrived in Roncesvalles, Spain. In Roncesvalles I spent some time alone in a thirteenth century chapel gazing on a medieval crucifix. While sitting in this dimly lit sanctuary the Holy Spirit seemed to give me four instructions for my five hundred mile walk:
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    No Comments / Cross, Jesus, Theology, Travel, Uncategorized, Violence /

  • March 16, 2017

    God Is Love. God Is Love.

    Sunset from the Top

    God is Love. God is Love.
    Brian Zahnd

    The topography of biblical witness is full of peaks and valleys, mountains and plains. The Bible is not flat terrain. The honest reader of the Bible readily admits that the Levitical prohibition against eating shellfish does not reach the same heights as the lofty Christology in Colossians. As we look at the great peaks of inspired biblical witness, none soar higher than the twin peaks of divine revelation given to us by the Apostle John.

    “But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love. … We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.” (1 John 4:8, 16)

    Soaring above everything else the Bible has to say about God are these twin peaks found in John’s first epistle: God is love. God is love.

    The Arapaho Indians called Longs Peak and Mount Meeker Nesótaieus, meaning “two guides.” The two peaks of this towering massif are useful for orientation when traveling in the front range of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, just as the two peaks of 1 John 4:8 and 4:16 are invaluable when navigating our way through the Bible. When the aged apostle put quill to papyrus to tell his readers that God is love (twice), and that to know love is to know God, and that to live in love is to live in God, he was making a daring move…and he dared to do it!
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    No Comments / Bible, Christianity, Jesus, love, Mountains, Water To Wine /

  • March 2, 2017

    The Sermon on the Mount and Caesar’s Sword

    Constantine

    The Sermon On the Mount and Caesar’s Sword
    Brian Zahnd

    As I call Christians to the practices of radical forgiveness and nonviolent peacemaking that Jesus embodied and most clearly sets forth in the Sermon on the Mount, I often encounter Christians using Romans 13:1–7 as a kind of rebuttal. (Though whom they’re rebutting — me or Jesus — isn’t always clear.) Their argument goes something like this:

    “God has ordained the government and has given it the sword to execute vengeance; therefore we cannot be opposed to war because Romans 13 sanctions ‘Just War.’”

    Usually this argument is given to me in the context of advocating that the United States government should wage total war on ISIS and other enemies of America, and that the church should celebrate this.

    But this is an egregious misinterpretation and misapplication of what Paul is talking about. Let me explain.
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    No Comments / America, Christianity, Jesus, Theology, Violence /

  • December 29, 2016

    Vive la Révolution!

    jesus-and-pilate (1)

    Vive la Révolution!
    Brian Zahnd

    Pagan astrologers read it in the stars — a new king of the Jews had been born. And so the magi came from the Orient bearing their gifts and accidentally got tangled up with the current King of the Jews — a debauched and murderous megalomaniac named Herod who decades earlier had been made an imperial client king by the Roman Senate.

    Not long after that the death squads were breaking down doors and killing baby boys in Bethlehem.

    An angel got Mary and Joseph and the baby king out of town in the nick of time. And so the Holy Family became refugees seeking asylum in a foreign country in order to escape a violent regime in their homeland.

    All this was happening while Augustus Caesar was the Roman Emperor. The coinage of the Roman economy bore the image of the “august” Caesar with imperial titles like, Son of God, Savior of the World, King of Kings, Prince of Peace. Sitting in his palace on Palatine Hill, Augustus could never have imagined that in less than forty years these titles would be re-appropriated for a Galilean peasant who had suffered a state sponsored execution under the jurisdiction of a Roman governor. Much less could Caesar Augustus have imagined that within a few centuries millions of people throughout the Roman Empire would pledge their allegiance to the crucified Jesus of Nazareth, calling him the risen King of all kings.

    But that’s what happened.

    If this all sounds very political, you’re right, it was…and it is.
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    No Comments / Christianity, Jesus, Kingdom /
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