Reflection on Chapter 3 of The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder
The implications of the Jubilee
Andre Trocme and Le Chambon
Yoder adapts this chapter almost word for word from the chapter with the same title in the book Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution by Andre Trocme. It is available as a free download from The Bruderhoff. During WWII, Trocme and the people of Le Chambon in Southern France, where Trocme was the minister, gave refuge to thousands of Jews who were making their way on the Underground Railroad to Switzerland. Le Chambon became a community living as close to Jesus's principles of a nonviolent community as any community has ever done. You can get a taste of Trocme and Le Chambon and the underground railroad in the new introduction to Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution and in Lest Innocent Blood be Shed by Philip Hallie. I have never seen it, but I understand that the documentary about Trocme and Le Chambon, Weapons of the Spirit, is excellent. I wonder if Trocme and Yoder were friends. Yoder served with the Mennonite Central Committee in France after WWII where there would have been ample opportunities for the two to meet since they traveled in the same Christian pacifist circles.
Jesus’s Prayer
The premise of this chapter is that Jesus inaugurated a community that would adopt the liberatory practices of the Jubilee as described in the Hebrew Bible. One of the jubilee prescriptions is the periodic remission of debt, and since chronic indebtedness led to enslavement, remission of debt would also mean liberation from slavery (although for real liberation from slavery one needed more than just remission from debt, since lack of assets will lead one back into indebtedness and slavery. This is why the jubilee also called for redistribution of capital). The remission of debt figured so prominently in Jesus’s theology that it is central to his prayer "remit us our debts as we have also remitted them to our debtors." The Greek word aphiemi that Yoder translates as remit can also mean liberate or release and is the word used in the Greek translation of the Hebrew bible in the jubilee passages. I think that the connection of indebtedness and bondage were so tied together in Jesus’s time that we loose the meaning of the prayer unless we also keep both in our heads when we are reading it. One gets interesting insights when one makes the replacements: forgiveness of sins = remission of debt = release from bondage in new testament texts. (I read somewhere that in Aramaic the words for sin and debt are the same. Since indebtedness led to slavery, then if all this is true then the parallel readings that I am suggesting will bring us closer to the way Jesus’s disciples would have understood his words.) The association of forgiveness of sin and release from bondage has been well understood by modern prophets as well.
I shall be released - Bob Dylan
They say everything can be replaced,
Yet every distance is not near.
So I remember every face
Of every man who put me here.
I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east.
Any day now, any day now,
I shall be released.
They say every man needs protection,
They say every man must fall.
Yet I swear I see my reflection
Some place so high above this wall.
I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east.
Any day now, any day now,
I shall be released.
Standing next to me in this lonely crowd,
Is a man who swears he's not to blame.
All day long I hear him shout so loud,
Crying out that he was framed.
I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east.
Any day now, any day now,
I shall be released.
Using the equation that forgiveness of sin = release from bondage, the statements in the gospels saying that God will not forgive our offenses unless we forgive those of others turns into statements about when we dominate others we place ourselves in a kind of bondage too. We free ourselves from this bondage when we live with others in a way that liberates others. The domination system has a way of using our own domination of others as a weapon against us. We gain a little freedom by refusing the domination system the use of this weapon.
Perhaps a translation close to the way Jesus’s listeners might have heard his prayer is "Release us from the bondage of the domination system as we practice a community life free from domination." The good news is that our liberation from the bondage of the domination system is at hand. The key to living in freedom is to be the change that we wish to see in the world and to liberate those under our domination. We can start today to live in an intentional community not driven by domination. The prayer takes as given that we have freed others from bondage and released others from debt before we ask God for anything.The prayer is a prayer for and about a faith community striving to be domination free. It uses "us" never "I" or "me." It is a prayer about social salvation not privatized salvation accounts.
Of course, the domination system will still victimize people and make them suffer, no matter how liberatory they are towards others. Sometimes we perceive no alternative to suffering that doesn’t involve coercion or violence. In this case our refusal to use the methods of the domination system compel us to accept suffering. As a suffering servant we at least have the solace that our suffering is benefiting the liberation of others in ways indiscernible by us. The final passage of Jesus’ prayer is a plea that it will not be our lot to be suffering servants. Jesus prays with the same sentiment the evening of his capture "My father, if it is possible let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want." We must be prepared to take up the cross and we need to study and pray hard to accept it if necessary but we should not be ashamed to pray that we won’t have to. Ultimately our prayers and our liberation of others are no guarantee of our community’s own absolute freedom, only the freedom from the domination that we would experience if our community was structured like any other.
The Parable of the Merciless Servant.
Yoder and Trocme use these ideas to explain the parable of the merciless servant. I feel this parable gains from the context of the question that Peter puts to Jesus in which Jesus gives this parable as an answer. In Mathew 8:15-20 Jesus describes rules for community governance in which the violence and coercion of the domination system are entirely absent. But how do you make people do good if there is no recourse to violence or coercion? This is the point of Peter's question when he asks "Lord, if a member of the faith community sins (against me [in another book Yoder point out that these two words are not in earliest versions of the text]) how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" Jesus says to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times." Jesus then tells the parable of the merciless servant which I believe he does as warning to show the consequences of a merciless community and merciless community leaders by giving an example of the domination system in action, where forgiveness is a scarce commodity. It is my belief that the human king in this parable should be understood to be the embodiment of the domination system, not God. When Jesus says that "the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who..." I think what is meant is "the kingdom of heaven may be contrasted against a king who..." Sometimes we can learn something about an ideal by studying its opposite. The confluence of earthly kings with God, when the intention is to associate the earthly king with the domination system and to contrast this with God is symptomatic of church that is corrupted by the dominations system. Even Yoder and Trocme make this mistake in interpreting this parable.
The parable starts with the wicked king demanding payment from a slave who can’t possible pay what is owed. The level of debt is insane, equal to 15,000 years of labor according to my annotated NRSV. The king knows that the slave can’t possible pay and orders him and his wife and children to be sold. The slave begs not to be sold and the king released him from his debt. But the slave knows that he has been saved by a whim of the king and this is only a temporary reprieve. It is an action of false charity designed to glorify the Kings power. It is not real justice. It is a false mercy. Without assets the slave will sink back into debt and he and his wife and family will almost certainly suffer the risk of being sold again. This could even happen tomorrow if the King awakens from the wrong side of bed. The King’s forgiveness is not real. It can be revoked at any time for any reason. So the slave does the only thing he can think to do and demands payment from another slave who owes him an amount of money equal to one hundred days of labor. In his anger and desperation he seizes the other slave by the throat but the second slave can’t pay either and the first slave puts the second in prison. The first slave continues to use the tools of the domination system and so his own freedom is transitory. The very thing that he was trying to prevent through the use of domination comes to pass. The king is angered by the slave’s mercilessness and hands the slave over to torturers, where he will be tortured to death and presumably his wife and children will still be sold into slavery to pay off the debt. If the king in the parable is God then the parable says be merciful to others or God won’t be merciful to you. But this does not make sense as an answer to Peter’s question in the context that he asked it. The parable is directed at Peter, a leader of the faith community who just asked Jesus how many times he should forgive community member transgressions instead of using the tools of the domination system for keeping order. Jesus isn’t telling Peter "Don’t be like that slave." He is telling Peter "Don’t be like that king." When others are not merciful you should still be merciful to them. Otherwise the community will suffer the ills of the domination system. The temptations and self righteousness that comes from judging others from a position of power will lead you to gross injustice and will cause enormous pain in the community which will make the community a reflection of the old society instead of the new. Instead be merciful and leave vengence in God's hands.
The implications of the Jubilee
Andre Trocme and Le Chambon
Yoder adapts this chapter almost word for word from the chapter with the same title in the book Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution by Andre Trocme. It is available as a free download from The Bruderhoff. During WWII, Trocme and the people of Le Chambon in Southern France, where Trocme was the minister, gave refuge to thousands of Jews who were making their way on the Underground Railroad to Switzerland. Le Chambon became a community living as close to Jesus's principles of a nonviolent community as any community has ever done. You can get a taste of Trocme and Le Chambon and the underground railroad in the new introduction to Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution and in Lest Innocent Blood be Shed by Philip Hallie. I have never seen it, but I understand that the documentary about Trocme and Le Chambon, Weapons of the Spirit, is excellent. I wonder if Trocme and Yoder were friends. Yoder served with the Mennonite Central Committee in France after WWII where there would have been ample opportunities for the two to meet since they traveled in the same Christian pacifist circles.
Jesus’s Prayer
The premise of this chapter is that Jesus inaugurated a community that would adopt the liberatory practices of the Jubilee as described in the Hebrew Bible. One of the jubilee prescriptions is the periodic remission of debt, and since chronic indebtedness led to enslavement, remission of debt would also mean liberation from slavery (although for real liberation from slavery one needed more than just remission from debt, since lack of assets will lead one back into indebtedness and slavery. This is why the jubilee also called for redistribution of capital). The remission of debt figured so prominently in Jesus’s theology that it is central to his prayer "remit us our debts as we have also remitted them to our debtors." The Greek word aphiemi that Yoder translates as remit can also mean liberate or release and is the word used in the Greek translation of the Hebrew bible in the jubilee passages. I think that the connection of indebtedness and bondage were so tied together in Jesus’s time that we loose the meaning of the prayer unless we also keep both in our heads when we are reading it. One gets interesting insights when one makes the replacements: forgiveness of sins = remission of debt = release from bondage in new testament texts. (I read somewhere that in Aramaic the words for sin and debt are the same. Since indebtedness led to slavery, then if all this is true then the parallel readings that I am suggesting will bring us closer to the way Jesus’s disciples would have understood his words.) The association of forgiveness of sin and release from bondage has been well understood by modern prophets as well.
I shall be released - Bob Dylan
They say everything can be replaced,
Yet every distance is not near.
So I remember every face
Of every man who put me here.
I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east.
Any day now, any day now,
I shall be released.
They say every man needs protection,
They say every man must fall.
Yet I swear I see my reflection
Some place so high above this wall.
I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east.
Any day now, any day now,
I shall be released.
Standing next to me in this lonely crowd,
Is a man who swears he's not to blame.
All day long I hear him shout so loud,
Crying out that he was framed.
I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east.
Any day now, any day now,
I shall be released.
Using the equation that forgiveness of sin = release from bondage, the statements in the gospels saying that God will not forgive our offenses unless we forgive those of others turns into statements about when we dominate others we place ourselves in a kind of bondage too. We free ourselves from this bondage when we live with others in a way that liberates others. The domination system has a way of using our own domination of others as a weapon against us. We gain a little freedom by refusing the domination system the use of this weapon.
Perhaps a translation close to the way Jesus’s listeners might have heard his prayer is "Release us from the bondage of the domination system as we practice a community life free from domination." The good news is that our liberation from the bondage of the domination system is at hand. The key to living in freedom is to be the change that we wish to see in the world and to liberate those under our domination. We can start today to live in an intentional community not driven by domination. The prayer takes as given that we have freed others from bondage and released others from debt before we ask God for anything.The prayer is a prayer for and about a faith community striving to be domination free. It uses "us" never "I" or "me." It is a prayer about social salvation not privatized salvation accounts.
Of course, the domination system will still victimize people and make them suffer, no matter how liberatory they are towards others. Sometimes we perceive no alternative to suffering that doesn’t involve coercion or violence. In this case our refusal to use the methods of the domination system compel us to accept suffering. As a suffering servant we at least have the solace that our suffering is benefiting the liberation of others in ways indiscernible by us. The final passage of Jesus’ prayer is a plea that it will not be our lot to be suffering servants. Jesus prays with the same sentiment the evening of his capture "My father, if it is possible let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want." We must be prepared to take up the cross and we need to study and pray hard to accept it if necessary but we should not be ashamed to pray that we won’t have to. Ultimately our prayers and our liberation of others are no guarantee of our community’s own absolute freedom, only the freedom from the domination that we would experience if our community was structured like any other.
The Parable of the Merciless Servant.
Yoder and Trocme use these ideas to explain the parable of the merciless servant. I feel this parable gains from the context of the question that Peter puts to Jesus in which Jesus gives this parable as an answer. In Mathew 8:15-20 Jesus describes rules for community governance in which the violence and coercion of the domination system are entirely absent. But how do you make people do good if there is no recourse to violence or coercion? This is the point of Peter's question when he asks "Lord, if a member of the faith community sins (against me [in another book Yoder point out that these two words are not in earliest versions of the text]) how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" Jesus says to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times." Jesus then tells the parable of the merciless servant which I believe he does as warning to show the consequences of a merciless community and merciless community leaders by giving an example of the domination system in action, where forgiveness is a scarce commodity. It is my belief that the human king in this parable should be understood to be the embodiment of the domination system, not God. When Jesus says that "the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who..." I think what is meant is "the kingdom of heaven may be contrasted against a king who..." Sometimes we can learn something about an ideal by studying its opposite. The confluence of earthly kings with God, when the intention is to associate the earthly king with the domination system and to contrast this with God is symptomatic of church that is corrupted by the dominations system. Even Yoder and Trocme make this mistake in interpreting this parable.
The parable starts with the wicked king demanding payment from a slave who can’t possible pay what is owed. The level of debt is insane, equal to 15,000 years of labor according to my annotated NRSV. The king knows that the slave can’t possible pay and orders him and his wife and children to be sold. The slave begs not to be sold and the king released him from his debt. But the slave knows that he has been saved by a whim of the king and this is only a temporary reprieve. It is an action of false charity designed to glorify the Kings power. It is not real justice. It is a false mercy. Without assets the slave will sink back into debt and he and his wife and family will almost certainly suffer the risk of being sold again. This could even happen tomorrow if the King awakens from the wrong side of bed. The King’s forgiveness is not real. It can be revoked at any time for any reason. So the slave does the only thing he can think to do and demands payment from another slave who owes him an amount of money equal to one hundred days of labor. In his anger and desperation he seizes the other slave by the throat but the second slave can’t pay either and the first slave puts the second in prison. The first slave continues to use the tools of the domination system and so his own freedom is transitory. The very thing that he was trying to prevent through the use of domination comes to pass. The king is angered by the slave’s mercilessness and hands the slave over to torturers, where he will be tortured to death and presumably his wife and children will still be sold into slavery to pay off the debt. If the king in the parable is God then the parable says be merciful to others or God won’t be merciful to you. But this does not make sense as an answer to Peter’s question in the context that he asked it. The parable is directed at Peter, a leader of the faith community who just asked Jesus how many times he should forgive community member transgressions instead of using the tools of the domination system for keeping order. Jesus isn’t telling Peter "Don’t be like that slave." He is telling Peter "Don’t be like that king." When others are not merciful you should still be merciful to them. Otherwise the community will suffer the ills of the domination system. The temptations and self righteousness that comes from judging others from a position of power will lead you to gross injustice and will cause enormous pain in the community which will make the community a reflection of the old society instead of the new. Instead be merciful and leave vengence in God's hands.
posted by ross at 5:25 PM
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