Jeremy L. Berg

Our church just wrapped up a 12-week series exploring “The Cruciform Kingdom” and grappling with what it looks like to imitate Jesus’ humble other-oriented, self-sacrificial love. One of the most challenging aspects of this cross-shaped life is understanding Jesus’ call to non-violent, enemy-embracing love and non-retaliatory peacemaking. Scot McKnight has been blogging through a great new book on this subject. Here’s a taste:

Jesse P. Nickel’s book is now the best accessible study of Jesus the peacemaker. It is called A Revolutionary Jesus: Violence and Peacemaking in the Kingdom of God. There are plenty of important studies about peace in the Bible (I’m thinking of Swartley, Seibert) and peacemaking (I’m thinking of Friesen, Werntz, Cremer, Strait), but this one is the most concentrated on the Gospels and Jesus.

When most humans today think of a symbol that most represents Christianity or Jesus it is a cross, and it is the symbol because it alone represents Jesus and our faith. So, it is through the cross that one must go if one wants to establish that Jesus was a peacemaker. 

When I affirm Jesus as a peacemaker I want it to be clear that he was not a 1^st Century Mennonite or a 21^st Century nonviolent pacifist. Their ideas come from Jesus, but Jesus was who he was, not who we want or wish him to be. He doesn’t fit our categories. He fits into 1^st Century Jewish and Galilean slots, but sometimes with a bump or squeeze or harder tap. Frankly, it is much harder to fit Jesus into the American church than it is to fit Jesus into the various groups of Jews in the 1st Century. I’ll say it boldly: he was more like the Pharisees than the [name the denomination].

To slot Jesus into peacemaking we have to go to the cross. The earliest Christians both explored the cross extensively and they at times could not make up their minds what to do with the cross. The cross carried the heavy load and so became capable of holding vast quantities of Christian theology. A cross, Nickel reminds us, was “a sadistic instrument of torture and death, symbolic of shame and defeat.” It had to be a challenge to make it the center of one’s faith and practice.

Hence 1 Cor 1:18-25, and please read it in light of the crucifixion less than two decades earlier:

1 Cor 1:18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

¹⁹ For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,

and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

1 Cor 1:20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scholar? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹ For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of the proclamation, to save those who believe. ²² For Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom, ²³ but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, ²⁴ but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵ For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

This is but one attempt to explain the cross. It is not only a soteriology but also a discipleship explanation of the cross. And it becomes a hermeneutic for social criticism of both Jewish nonbelievers and gentile nonbelievers. It’s easy to use it as a criticism of American policies and some church practices these days.

Nickel, however, opens the door to this explanation when he says the only way the cross could become this significant is because of the resurrection. Jesus, he observes, “does not stay dead.” Thus, no resurrection, no soteriology.

How, then, does Jesus defeat God’s enemies if the cross is the sign of his defeat? Jesus, according to John’s Gospel, saw his defeat as God’s victory over evil (John 12:23-26, 31).

John 12:23 Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. ²⁴ Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit. ²⁵ Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. ²⁶ Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor. … ³¹ Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.

Jesus’s death conquers the “ruler of this world” (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11; cf. 2 Cor. 4:4; Eph 2:2; 1 John 4:4; 5:19). Nickel connects this view of the cross to exorcisms, and any thing tying to exorcisms would link up with the opening battle of Jesus with the devil in the wilderness test (Matt 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13). The kingdom battle of Jesus was a cosmic battle, as we see clearly in Matt 12:22-32, and for fuller support I point you to Graham Twelftree’s Jesus the Exorcist.

The Synoptics, Nickel observes, have exorcisms; the GJohn does not. What is cited above “invites the reader of John’s Gospel to view the cross itself through the lens of exorcism. The cross, Jesus declares, will be the moment at which the chief demon, the one who holds authority over and within the kingdoms of the earth, the great adversary of the kingdom of God, is himself ‘cast out,’ defeated by the power of God. John, in other words, presents the cross as the singular exorcism of Jesus’s ministry.”

Jesus’s victory, the Gospels show, is not through bloodshed, insurrection, or eschatological military violence. The victory is through the cross.

A cross-shaped Jesus leads to a peace-shaped Jesus.