How Easter brings regime change -Apr 14, 2006

By Simon Barrow

As the nuclear wrangle between the US, Iran and the United Nations continues, talk of regime change once again hangs in the air. And even though the dust is far from even in Iraq, it is unlikely to recede.

History is, to a significant extent, the record of successive regime changes – often by violent and domineering means which end up either terrorising humanity or defeating the apparently noble causes by which they were justified.

Worryingly, the Christian Gospel is also about regime change. But, as the Easter narrative of Jesus’ killing and God’s defeat of death through love makes plain, it is of an incalculably different kind.

From birth through to execution and on to the subversive movement inspired by the early Christians’ disturbing experience of his continuing aliveness, Jesus’ story is couched in terms of the defeat of one kingdom by another.

In his mother’s rebellious song (the Magnificat), God is depicted as turning the mighty out of their thrones and exalting, instead, the humble and weak – those with neither the money nor the means to impose their will by force.

The ‘kingdom’ of which Jesus speaks is an entirely new order of relationships grounded in mutual forgiveness, open table fellowship, the sharing of wealth, peaceable politics, healing for the sick, welcome for the stranger, and good news for the poor.

This social programme (one that would certainly make a modern political party unelectable) is not based on a theory of power relations or an imperial order – but upon a radically altered understanding of God as transcendent love-beyond-manipulation.

Whereas rulers demand patronage and impose privilege, in the kinship of the Holy One nobody ‘rules’, because the kind of power that is achieved through death has been absorbed and confounded by the self-giving of Jesus. The Lamb is on the throne.

In place of his tortured body, which exposes the lie behind all torture and death dealing, Jesus’ followers are therefore invited to become a new Body, a new social reality – the ekklesia.

Unlike Greek and Roman public forums, this new political reality is not based on hierarchy, exclusion and domination. Instead it is an invitation to discover concrete practices which move in precisely the opposite direction to ‘politics as usual’.

This ‘regime change’ extends beyond the wildest imagination of those of us reared on Alexander the Great, John Locke, Niccolio Machievelli, Francis Bacon, Thomas Mann, Thomas Jefferson or Karl Marx, Not to mention Osama bin Laden, Tony Blair or George W. Bush.

For Jesus’ power is reasoned not through force of arms or weight of popularity, but upon gentleness of spirit and the promise of new life. But how does it take shape?

As his Passion approaches, so the majority Gospel traditions tell us, Jesus enters Jerusalem. He challenges the conventional political and religious regimes that rule the metropolis. However he does so not with chariots or warhorses, but on a humble donkey – the transport of a servant.

Likewise Jesus enters the Temple not to affirm the alliance of religion and state, but to initiate a piece of non-violent direct action against it – by the removal of the money-changers and the dismantling of their exchange system.

Working from the grassroots, Jesus disrupts the system, seeks to convert the enemy, undermines the authority of the system, and teaches a new and better way.

It is for this reason that he is killed. Not because he has organised an armed uprising, fulfilled expectations of a military Messiah, done a deal with the Emperor, or established a theocracy – but precisely because he has refused to do these things.

Jesus’ subsequent vindication in the face of the rule of death comes not from a programme or a doctrine, but from trust in the life-giving power of God in which he shares. In other words, from resurrection.

But what could it possibly mean – let alone for our day – to claim that “God raised Jesus”? Part of the answer lies in considering the alternatives. In St Paul’s time many believed in the immortality of the soul or cyclical rebirth – the idea that there is a spark or substance in us that survives death or is reincarnated.

Early Christians rejected such notions for two reasons. First, they were realists not fantasists. Death is not something that can be survived. It is the boundary that makes life impossible. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it: “That Christ was indeed dead was not the possibility of his resurrection but the impossibility of it.”

Second, Paul’s followers dismissed the dualistic notion that body and spirit are two divisible entities, of which one part survives death and the other does not. In his writings the Apostle uses the term ‘flesh’ not to refer to ‘the physical bit of us’, but to designate the whole, embodied human person oriented towards death. The word ‘spirit’ he used to describe not some allegedly ‘non-physical bit of us’, but to the whole, embodied human person oriented towards life.

But just as resurrection is not the survival of some part of a person beyond death, neither is it the reconstitution of a corpse, as is popularly (but wrongly) supposed today.

Rather, when Christians announce, with St Paul, that “God raised Jesus”, what we are claiming is not that a part of Jesus survived death or that his atoms were reassembled in some magical way, but rather that the very power, presence and personality of the earthly Jesus was assumed, transformed and made available again within the endless creativity of God.

In other words, the resurrection speaks of a new creation, a different order of being beyond our current grasp which incorporates all that we have seen and discovered of love in this world, but much more beside.

This depth of life is the work not of us, but of a God who goes on loving and creating beyond the death which we inevitably face. If we have been touched by God’s love, we will begin to know that it has no boundaries, even if its essence (like God) lies beyond our description.

And here is the catch. For as St Paul says, with startling honesty: “If Christ is not raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins” – that is, you are still captive to that which is moulded on death rather than life.

When Norman Kember, Jim Loney, Harmeet Singh Sooden and the late Tom Fox went to Iraq with Christian Peacemaker Teams, they did so to put their bodies in the way of clashing political systems which mortgage themselves on the blood of the innocent. They paid a high price.

What CPT does has been attacked in the Western media as utterly foolish, wrong even. The son of a former Archbishop of Canterbury even likened it to fascism, because the refusal of arms was, so he reasoned, acquiescence with insurgency and Saddamism.

Bereft of the resurrection – that is, the belief that life is given by God, not seized and manipulated by force of arms – such a response is understandable. If Christ is not raised and death has the final word, realism indeed means rule-by-death.

For this reason, the peace that Christ makes possible is not about rosy optimism, moral superiority, wishful thinking, denial of injustice or the self-indulgent search for martyrdom.

It is about the deep, mysterious – and for most of us, downright impossible – conviction that the only regime change which makes a lasting difference is the one which exceeds all our attempts at manipulation, because it does not belong to us.

Instead it is the promise of a God whose love cannot be bought, bargained, bartered, compromised or confounded. For the one who is proclaimed risen by the Easter Gospel is the same one who was on the side of the little people, of those who were hurt and persecuted. He is the same one who was crucified outside the gate, in a place of shame, by those religious and political authorities who thought that they had the right to lord it over people.

What’s more, Jesus’ risen life did not begin after death; it was already present in all that he said and did, and even in the manner of his execution. That is the ‘good news’ of the Gospel.

But it is also difficult news, because it demands that we too live the resurrection life. That we refuse to accept the dominance of injustice. That we refuse to allow people to be treated as mere objects. That we refuse to see might as right. That we refuse to be trapped by a vision of life consisting solely of buying and selling. And that we refuse any religion which masquerades as those false gods.

Frighteningly, that’s what genuine regime change entails. It’s certainly much tougher than fighting a war.

Simon Barrow (www.simonbarrow.net) is co-director of Ekklesia. His background is in journalism, adult education, politics and theology, and his weblog is: http://faithinsociety.blogspot.com