GOD'S NEW WORLD, DAY 7 (Eastertide trauma)

“I am a Jew, born in Tarsus in Cilicia, but brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, educated strictly according to our ancestral law, being zealous for God, just as all of you are today. I persecuted this Way up to the point of death by binding both men and women and putting them in prison, as the high priest and the whole council of elders can testify about me.”

(Paul addressing an angry mob in the courts of the Jerusalem Temple: Ac. 22.3-5) 

     A new world.  Easter is the launch of God’s new creation.  On the cross, Jesus defeated sin and death and as he vacated the tomb, Jesus walked into a new world – one in which the power of death had been broken.  The God of life never abandoned his project of creating a world ruled by humans who reflected his glory into the cosmos, a cosmos destined to be filled with the divine glory as the waters cover the sea (cf. Gn. 1.1—2.3; Habakkuk 2.14).  Since the entrance of sin into God’s good world, sin had always been associated with mortality, now seen as the consequence of rebellion against the Creator (cf. Rom. 5.12).  (The threat of) death, of course, has always been the weapon of choice for those who wish to dominate their fellow human creatures.  The first disciples of Jesus were well aware of this reality – they were, after all, subjects of an empire that ruthlessly eliminated any and all who dared resist its seemingly inexorable rule.  Jesus himself had been a victim of Roman “justice”.

     Universal hatred.  The book of the Acts of the Apostles shows that in the early days of the church, the Romans were, for the most part, indifferent to what they considered to be a new “sect” of Judaism, while the Jewish authorities tried their best to stamp out “the Way” (cf. Ac. 9.2; 19.23; 22.4; 24.22).  However, this benign indifference on behalf of the imperial powers to the disciples of Jesus and their movement was not to last.  Three decades after the crucifixion of Jesus, and following the Great Fire of Rome (AD 64), emperor Nero launched a campaign of persecution against the Christians of Rome.  Three decades later, again, emperor Domitian would actively seek to eliminate the church.  First-century followers of Jesus found themselves in a world where, it seemed, they were hated by everyone.  As far as Judaism was concerned, the Christians were (deluded) followers of one who had been rightly condemned by the Sanhedrin as a heretic, a false prophet and a blasphemer (and justly killed through manipulation of the imperial justice system).  Christians were seen by “orthodox” Jews (like Saul of Tarsus) as being subversive of Judaism and as dangerously misrepresenting Yahweh and the Scriptures of Israel to the wider Greco-Roman world.  As far as the imperial establishment was concerned – and once it had become clear that the Jesus-movement was something distinct from mainstream Judaism (which had, exceptionally, been granted that status of religio licita)[1] – the Christians were socially, politically, and religiously subversive, and their refusal to offer the token veneration to the emperor’s “genius” (i.e., burning incense in front of an image of Caesar) was interpreted as an act of rebellion against the empire.  For the follower of Jesus, the first-century world was a hostile one, a minefield of taboos just waiting to be infringed.

     New humanity.  As it turned out, having been endowed with the privilege of being the vanguard of the Creator’s new humanity wasn’t going to be without its dangers… The fact is, the early church was indeed subversive – based on the very Jewish conviction that since the God of Israel had fulfilled his covenant with his people through the (completely unexpected) death of the Messiah, the time had now come for Yahweh’s promise to Abraham of a worldwide family (cf. Gn. 12.1-3, etc.) to be fulfilled and for all nations to be invited to join the (now) multi-ethnic people of God (=new humanity).  The early Christian communities did away with all the divisions and categories used to stratify society according to rank, status, occupation, wealth (or lack thereof), ethnicity or even gender – and all this, in the name of the fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham (cf. Gal. 3.28-29).  The common life of the early Christians could not help but be perceived as radically undermining the entire imperial socio-political structure.  As those Christians thrown to the lions in Nero’s coliseum could attest, when the kingdom of God displaces the kingdoms of this world, things get messy…

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[1] Ancient Rome’s version of “religious freedom”; while it was assumed that each conquered culture/nation would simply add the worship of Rome’s gods to their own religious practice, the Jews (naturally) refused such a syncretistic compromise and insisted on the right to exclusive worship of Yahweh, even – as the Romans were to discover – at the cost of their lives.  The Romans, ever the pragmatists, concluded that dead people would have insurmountable difficulties paying taxes, and therefore granted the Jews the right to practice their own religion unmolested and waived the obligation – universally imposed elsewhere in the empire – of offering acts of devotion to the emperor and the Roman pantheon.