Peace Be With You
April 8, 2018
Easter 2B
John 20:19–31
Brookside Community Church
The summary of the gospel in its fullest sense is that God has a dream for the world’s wholeness. This dream of God’s is not rooted in violence or condemnation but in forgiveness and peace.
To the extent that our lives are shaped by fear we testify that we do not understand or believe the gospel. The power of the resurrection allows us to be vulnerable, to own up to our mistakes, and to live in the midst of the brokenness of the world by witnessing to it the newness of the dream of God.
Jesus, is that you?
It may have been then moment he was being tortured, with the crowd of prisoners watching as he was being interrogated. His arms were stretched out on this instrument clearly designed to cause a deadly amount of pain. It may have been his obstinance, his refusal to give in to the mocking, the scorns, the jeers, the persecution. He refused to allow them the pleasure of watching him give in. Of course, it may have just been because of the striking resemblance, that long dark hair and that thing he wore around his head. Yet… that’s is a main point of difference. Jesus wore a crown of thorns, but Rambo wore that silly headband.
As Col. Samuel Trautman put it, “If winning means he has to die, he’ll die. No fear. No regrets…. Oh and one more thing, what you choose to call hell, he calls home!”
I was 24 years old when I first fully heard the gospel story and my imagination of Jesus began to take shape. But I must have been 7 or 8 when I watch my first Rambo movie. I had one of those Rambo survival kits that you could buy at the store that came equipped with a plastic Rambo knife and army watch, and one of those silly red headbands.
That’s why I’m never sure what to think when I see one of those posters; perhaps you’ve seen one. There is Stallone’s warrior body, holding an M60, with Jesus’ head photoshopped on it, halo and all. My least favorite is the one with Jesus on the cross, with those humongous biceps, breaking the cross just below his elbows so that he can make that “mighty me,” bodybuilder, front double bicep pose.
It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, how our imagination about Jesus gets shaped. How is it that we come to know what God is like? What the universe is like? What we, deep down, are really like? If we’re honest, maybe Rambo is closer to what many people believe about Jesus — despite what the gospels say about him.
If we look at what the gospels actually tell us about the Resurrected Jesus, what we find couldn’t be more different. His last words, while they lifted him up on the cross were not curses of anger from a Rambo warrior with promises of divine retribution. There was no Schwarzenegger style, “I’ll be back!” (to borrow from another violent action film). He said, “Father, forgive them.” His first words after the resurrection were not “This isn’t over!” He said, “Peace be with you,” as he showed his disciples his pierced hands and wounded side.
I have said in many ways as often as I could that I believe the Gospel is about God’s dream for the wholeness of creation. The world is broken, in desperate need of forgiveness, and it is longing to know how to be at peace, to see what real peace looks like. For Jesus’ disciples, they ultimately came to believe the power that would save the world was not that of a warrior god, but a community centered around the teachings of a wounded peacemaker.
The Myth of Redemptive Violence
Rambo Jesus is just one example of what is commonly known as “The Myth of Redemptive Violence.” We find it in cartoons, superhero movies, and even in dramas that extend back hundreds and thousands of years. The theologian Walter Wink traces this myth back to the Babylonian creation story from around 1250 BCE, the Enuma Elish. In the beginning, as the Babylonian myth tells, their was a divine couple: Apsu the father and Tiamat the mother. They give birth to all of the other gods. But these gods were so unruly that they kept their parents from sleeping. A war breaks out, with the youngest member, Marduk, being crowned as the new chief. He catches Taimat — who is portrayed as the Dragon of Chaos — in a net, uses an evil wind to blow her up like a balloon, and then pops her. Out of the explosion that results comes all of the cosmos. Everything you see, the whole world around you, is part of the carcass of the god of chaos — the Babylonian Dragon, Taimat. According to the Enuma Elish, creation is the result of violence. The gods are violent. Evil precedes good. And the only way to bring order from chaos (symbolized by Tiamat) is through violence.
“The implications [of the Babylonian Creation Myth] are clear: human beings are created from the blood of a murdered god. Our very origin is violence. Killing is in our genes. Humanity is not the originator of evil, but merely finds evil already present and perpetuates it. Our origins are divine, to be sure, since we are made from a god, but from the blood of an assassinated god. We are the outcome of deicide.”
Our creation story in Genesis, on the other hand, is diametrically opposed to this. Our “In the Beginning” story, if you didn’t know, was actually written during the Babylonian captivity, and it stood as a the Jewish rebuttal to the Enuma Elish. This Myth of Redemptive Violence is
“the story of order over chaos by means of violence. It is the ideology of conquest, the original religion of the status quo. The gods favor those who conquer…The common people exist to perpetuate the advantage that the gods have conferred upon the king, the aristocracy, and the priesthood… Peace through war, security through strength: these are the core convictions that arise from this ancient historical religion.”
What is interesting to me is how much this sounds like what many Christians believe about God and the world. God — a warrior alpha male like Rambo, the Terminator, or Marduk — will ultimately rescue the world by destroying his enemies. The world is — and ultimately human communities are — inherently violent, and it has been that way from the beginning. And the only way to end this violence is to cause more violence.
When the ancient western empires succeeded in killing their enemies, they praised their war deities: Ares, Mars, Odin, Thor, Indra, and so on. One of my deepest fears is that you could just substitute any number of these with the name Jesus and many Christians today would not be able to point out much of the difference: Marduk… Ares… Mars… Rambo… Jesus.
The Wounded Healer
Our Easter tradition, however, turns this Myth of Redemptive Violence on its head. The Resurrection of Jesus tells the story of violence being interrupted by peace. Instead of responding to brokenness with more brokenness, the Resurrection brings healing and wholeness. It shows what peace and forgiveness look like in action.
This morning we have the story of Jesus, who comes in the midst of his gathered community, a community fearing for their lives, and speaks words of peace to them. Did the disciples imagine that Jesus was revealing to them a God who should be worshiped because of his power and might? In our text this morning, the Resurrected Jesus comes to them in weakness — showing them his wounds.
Most of us hide our wounds, our scars. They are signs for us of our weakness. But Jesus speaks to his disciples, “Peace be with you!” And he wasn’t hiding his wounds, he had them on display for the world to see.
As the 13th-century Franciscan teacher, John Duns Scotus put it, Jesus’ aim wasn’t to change God’s mind about us, it was to change our mind about God. Jesus wounds show us, in spite of our violence, God is loving. And the world is the result of the bursting forth of the limitless love of God.
The world is broken, in desperate need of forgiveness. That is not because of God. It’s because of us. That broken world is longing to know how to be at peace, to see what real peace looks like. As our gospel lesson this morning tells us, Jesus’ disciples ultimately came to believe that the power that would save the world was not a Rambo like warrior god, but a community centered around the teachings of a wounded peacemaker
“As the Father Has Sent Me”
I am always struck by one phrase from the text this morning. Jesus is showing them his wounds, the result of what the powers had done to him. He says to them, “Peace!” And then he says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
I always read that and think to myself, “What? Is he joking?”
After this thing that the violent world did to him, Jesus is now sending the disciples out into the world knowing that it will happen to them too. “What? You can’t be serious? Why would he do that?”
See, I believe that God’s dream for the world is forgiveness, peace, and wholeness. The disciples were sent to interrupt the violence of the world, not with weapons but with the wounded heart of God. Just as Jesus offered himself to the world, in spite of what the world did to him, he sends his followers out to offer the same forgiveness to the world, as witnesses to what peace and wholeness look like.
In order to be a part of the drama of God’s love unfolding in the world, Jesus’ followers are called to go out and offer themselves. Instead of violence, we offer vulnerability. Instead of fear, we offer forgiveness. As we see the wounds of the broken world around us, we see the wounds of Christ reminding us of God’s dream to bring healing to the world. We are able to be human, to engage the world and those we have been told we should hate — and offer them the kind of redemptive, healing, forgiving love that Jesus bore witness to.
The summary of the gospel in its fullest sense is that God has a dream for the world’s wholeness. This dream of God’s is not rooted in violence or condemnation but in forgiveness and peace.
The world is broken, in desperate need of forgiveness, and it is longing to know how to be at peace, to see what real peace looks like. For Jesus’ disciples, they ultimately came to believe the power that would save the world was not that of a Rambo-like warrior god, but a community centered around the teachings of a wounded peacemaker.
