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We have all received and given the advice that when you go to a social gathering there are two topics you just don’t get into: religion and politics. These are topics people tend to feel passionately about and the last thing you want to do is start an argument with somebody you hardly know at a social gathering. After all, religion and politics are what people go to war over…or so they say. Personally, I don’t think religion and politics have been the cause of war. I think it’s that there are people in this world who lust for power and wealth and they know how to effectively use religion and politics as a means to motivate people to their own ends.
And that brings us to another side of this Rubik’s Cube. We have heard it said and said it ourselves, “Don’t mix religion and politics”. Most Modern Democracies have as one of their founding principles the separation of Church and State. This is because the institution of the Church in Western Christianity has a long and terrible history of mingling with empires and nations to the result that Christians frequently went to war not only against Pagans and then against Muslims but with each other and believing it to be what God wanted us to do in God’s name. But again, religion and politics were not the problem. A careful read of history shows it was people who lusted for power and wealth using religion and politics as a means to motivate people to their own ends.
Religion and politics are ideological powder kegs or maybe I should say idiotological powder kegs to try to add a little brevity to the topic. We know that mixing politics and religion or even just talking about them is as foolish as getting involved in a land war in Asia or going in against a Sicilian when death is on the line (A quote from the movie The Princess Bride which probably most of you didn’t get.) We know to just stay away from the topics of religion and politics, but we don’t. So, guess what? I’m going to have to talk about religion and politics today. And I will say that this is the sermon I would have preached today regardless of what happened in Washington, D.C. this week.
It is Baptism of the Lord Sunday. The lectionary passage for today comes from Mark’s Gospel and, guess what Mark has done right here at the very beginning of his account of the life and ministry of this Jew from Nazareth named Jesus. He has mixed religion and politics about as thoroughly as you possibly can and the implications were and are huge.
Starting right here with verse 1 Mark writes: “The beginning of the gospel about Jesus the Messiah (Christ), Son of God.” To our ears today we hear that verse with strictly theological or religious ears. We assume it to say that Jesus is divine, God the Son, and in calling him Christ we think that simply means he died for our sins and that’s what the Gospel is all about. But, if we try to hear this verse with the ears of somebody who lived in the Roman Empire back in the first century and was probably a member of a small group of Jesus disciples of Jewish descent who were trying to make sense out of why they were being persecuted, well, it sounds quite political. The terminology that Mark uses to refer to Jesus is all political terminology used in reference to Caesar.
In fact, I would step out on a limb and say that verse 1 of Mark’s Gospel was one of the most treasonous sentences written in the first century. Mark is blatantly proclaiming that Jesus, the crucified and risen, Messiah/King of the Jews is the true Emperor, not only of Roman Empire, but of the entire world. This sentence would get anyone in possession of a copy of Mark’s Gospel in deep trouble with both the Jewish authorities and the Romans because Mark is saying that Jesus is the true God-anointed King of the Jews and more powerful than Caesar. That’s mixing religion and politics.
So Randy, explain yourself. Make your case. Ok, first we’ll look at this title Son of God. The idea that Jesus is God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, developed a couple of centuries later. So, hold off on that. In ancient Israel it was not uncommon for them to refer to their king as the son of God, especially if he was a good one like King David. But, this didn’t mean that they thought of the king as being divine. It just meant that God favoured the king and he was an agent acting on behalf of God. In the Roman Empire “Son of God” was a title given to the Emperor. Many emperors minted coins with their image on it that also had the inscription “Son of God”. But to the Romans, it did mean that they believed that the Emperor was in some way a god. To the Romans, divinity wasn’t some idea of metaphysical, ethereal mumbo-jumbo. Divinity had to do with power. The Roman Emperor was the most powerful person on earth and was therefore considered to be a god. He was also believed to be the son of the Roman chief god, Jupiter, or Zeus in Greek mythology. So, Mark’s assigning to Jesus the title of Son of God was in the least saying Caesar now has a rival and it’s the Messiah of those rebellious and cantankerous Jews.
The second title Mark uses here is Messiah in Hebrew or Christ in Greek. You’ll see either of the titles used depending on your English translation. The title Messiah or Christ means anointed king, the king that God has chosen and empowered to reign. In Jesus’s day the Messiah was the title they used to refer to a particular king that God was going to send at the end of the age anointed with his own Spirit to deliver his people from all their oppressors and to establish God’s kingdom here on earth. Mark here calling Jesus the Messiah or the Christ means that Jesus is this particular Holy Spirit anointed, end of the age king that God had sent to deliver his people from Roman oppression and establish the Kingdom of God. So, you can see here that there is a blatant hint of insurrection here by the followers of Jesus proclaiming Jesus to be the Jewish Messiah destined to overthrow Caesar.
And there’s more. This word Gospel that Mark uses. We euphemize this term today by translating it as “Good News”. Though that is literally what the word means in Greek, but in the first century Roman world it did not mean just some good news. Nor was what we have wrongfully come to call “The Gospel”; what you need to believe to be saved and go to Heaven when you die. The word Gospel was reserved for a proclamation of something good or blessed that had happened to the Roman Emperor. A Gospel was a message that imperial heralds proclaimed throughout the Roman Empire such as “Caesar has conquered Gaul” or “A son has been born to Caesar”. And since it had to do with Caesar, Son of God, there was a sense of divine blessing behind it as well. Good news about Caesar meant the gods had blessed the entire empire. For Mark to call this collection of stories that he had put together about Jesus a gospel was to set up Jesus with status equal to or surpassing Caesar and saying that the God of Israel is blessing the world through this Jesus…and let’s tag onto that…that it also means the downfall of Caesar and his kingdom. You see, Jesus came proclaiming the Gospel that the Kingdom of God was at hand and people should fall in line with him. This is some treasonous, political stuff. It’s not just religion.
One more thing, Jesus’s Baptism. We could say that Jesus’s Baptism is strictly a matter of religion and focus on its theological meaning. But doing that comes at the expense of realizing and understanding the real-life political movement at the root of what was going on with John the Baptist. The crowds of people, huge crowds of people, were coming to John out in the Jordan River wilderness to the area where the ancient Israelites first entered the Promised Land in order to be baptized in the Jordan as the means of repenting for their sins and the sins of their nation. In a sense they were a let’s get back to our faith roots and start over movement.
These people recognized John as God’s prophet, someone God had sent to his people to speak for him, to give them hope. These people had lost all hope in the effectiveness of their political and religious leaders to do anything to make their lives better under Roman oppression. The Jewish monarchy were immoral, self-serving parasites who often verged into the world of paranoid psychosis killing anyone whom the perceived to be a threat to their place, even siblings. They did nothing more than get wealthier on carrying out the wishes of the Romans who were occupying and oppressing the Jewish people with the most powerful military in the world all the while calling it Pax Romana, the Peace of Rome. The religious leaders had turned Temple worship in Jerusalem into a big business and personal devotion to God into a very irrelevant legalism.
This very large movement of religiously and politically disillusioned everyday people with real everyday needs for peace, justice, and food on the table could have very easily been incited to go storm the palaces and the Temple. But that was not what John the Baptist was about. He dressed and acted like the great prophet Elijah of old. He was constantly confronting those political and religious charlatans for their immorality and abuse of power and wealth and calling everybody to return to God. He proclaimed that God was soon to send the Messiah who would liberate everybody and establish God’s Kingdom on earth and pour his own Spirit upon everybody to make them righteous…so be ready, get ready. He preached a real hope. He proclaimed the reality of Israel’s God being present, listening, and acting. Their God had not forgotten them. Another Exodus like in the days of Moses was about to begin.
Then came Jesus to be baptized. He steps into the water. John pours water over him. Boom. The heavens are torn open meaning if you had the right angle you could see up into the realm where God was. The Holy Spirit like a dove descended to rest upon him. Then God spoke. “This is my son, the Beloved. I am well pleased with him.” The promised one whom God had chosen to deliver his people had arrived.
Now let me tell you something you probably never heard before. What God the Father said about Jesus is almost verbatim what a Roman Emperor said when he declared the person who would succeed him. Back in the first century there were two ways a new Emperor came to power: insurrection or succession. It was usually insurrection but when succession was the route, we would expect that the emperor would pass the torch to his eldest son. But, if memory serves, no emperor passed the torch to an eldest son. He usually passed it to someone whom he considered capable and so he had adopted to be his own son. Take Julius Caesar and his nephew Octavian who became Caesar Augustus as the example.
When an Emperor adopted someone as his son to be his successor he would gather together a great crowd and publicly declare something to the effect of “This is my son, whom I love. I am well pleased to choose him to inherit all that is mine.” Then a gospel would go throughout the Empire announcing that the Emperor had adopted a son to be his successor.
If we lived in the Roman Empire during the First Century and heard the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark we would know precisely that Mark is proclaiming that Jesus, the Messiah of the Jews, is God’s loved and chosen one to reign over all the world with the implication that Caesar must kneel before him. We would then be challenged to listen further to the rest of the Gospel to hear what kind of ruler Jesus will be when he returns. He will heal the sick. Cast out demons. Raise the dead. Establish a fair justice system and an equitable economic system. He will hold corrupt rulers and religious authorities accountable for their self-serving abuse of the people they were to shepherd. His death on the cross for the sins of humanity exemplifies the nature of the love by which he reigns in power. His resurrection from the grave shows that nothing, not even death, is able to stop what God is doing through him. He has died for the world and will bring with him when he comes the New Age where Evil, Sin, and Death are no more.
Back to religion and politics. We are remiss to believe or try to think that the two can or should not have anything to do with one another. Frankly, if people of faith did not get politically involved there would likely be no such thing as hospitals, public education, civil rights, the abolition of slavery, and so on. But, there does need to be some boundaries set. Religious authority should never be used to undergird political authority. Political authority should never put itself in the place of religion. Religion should not become politics nor politics become a religion. When the two get confused and politics uses religion for its own ends or religion uses politics for its own ends, evil is the result.
I am a disciple of Jesus Christ, Son of God. I am also a Christian minister and an American citizen living abroad. We have all watched something really disturbing unfold in the United States this week as Trump supporters egged on by the President and members of Congress stormed the Capital Building and interrupted the work of Congress in an attempt to stop the Electoral College votes from being counted under the false assumption that this would somehow keep Donald Trump in power. Left out of the equation is the role that religious leaders have played in egging on this very deluded movement which history will call Trumpism. In the U.S. there has always been this very troubling confusion and mixture of religion and politics. There are religious leaders in the U.S. who have been holding up President Trump as the Messiah who is going to save America and Trump has quite successfully used them in his personal pursuit of power and wealth. As I just said, whenever religion uses politics for its own ends and politics uses religion for its own end, evil is the result. They need to be held accountable too.
The only person in whom religion and politics can healthfully, constructively, and peacefully come together is Jesus Christ, Son of God. Come and follow him. Pursue him and his Kingdom. Learn his way of self-sacrificing, unconditional love. Be filled with the Holy Spirit and know yourself to be a dearly and personally loved child of the God who made everything and who has an abundance of enough to give to everybody. Learn the power in prayer. It’s time we all come to the Jordan in repentance and make a new attempt at devoting ourselves to the things of God rather than things of Man. Let us leave or idols of Consumerism, Materialism, Celebrity-ism, Racism, Nationalism, and all those other ism’s down and pick up the cross of Christ and find Life in him. Amen.
