This revolution is ...biblical
I’d like to tell you a story. It all began with a very long walk. In a city in a land far, far away in a time
long, long ago, a family decided to pack their bags, load their camels, gather
their flocks and head west. This was the
family of a man named Abram. As they
say, the rest is (literally) history.
So begins the tale of the ancient
Israelites. It is no farce that the Jews
had a very different notion of time compared to that of their Ancient Near
Eastern neighbours. Abram’s departure
from Babylonian civilization, where time was understood to be eternally
cyclical, to chart a course into the unknown, all the while conceiving of time
in a linear manner – i.e. to believe that “the future” could be different from
“the past” – was a timely revolution.
Ancient Babylonia, like all other ancient
cultures, not only had a cyclical view of time, but also reasoned in circles –
this is the way things are because this is the way the gods ordained them to be
because things have always been this way because, obviously, this is how the
gods have ordained them because this is the way things have always been… Of course, such a worldview could only be
maintained so long as the culture was stable and as long as the ruling dynasty
was able to hang on to power (which they did through tyrannical means). And thus, we uncover the logic of ancient
empire – a self-sustaining ideology of submission and conformity to the powers
that be, those powers being legitimated by appeal to the divine will (it is
impossible to get even a razor’s edge between religion and politics in the
Bible and its world). In the enchanted
world of antiquity, queens and kings all ruled by divine right, and their
subjects were expected to “manage their expectations” in terms of what would
serve the interests of the monarch (i.e. the will of the gods), which, as long
as they were fed, they were happy to do.
Until…they weren’t. When Abram’s family left civilization to
become nomads, they did so at the beck and call of a strange new god who did
not belong to the Babylonian pantheon. This
previously unknown divinity took a particular interest in Abram and made him
grandiose promises – of a reputation, a land, and innumerable descendants –
whose fulfillment were predicated upon his obedience to and trust in this
god. Indeed, Abram’s
coming-out-of-civilized-centers-of-power-and-culture to wander the world would become
a habit for many of his offspring, and as the tale is told, of Abram’s god
himself… Abram’s god was an adventurer, a divinity who sat loose to imperial
hegemony. Abram’s god, though he did
task him with a cryptic mission that would impact “all the nations”, never
sought to unite the world through coercion.
Rather, this strange god chose as his comrades those who were at the
bottom of the imperial hierarchy – homeless strangers like Abram.
After rescuing the descendants of Abram
from slavery in Egypt, Yahweh establishes a covenant – a sacred agreement
encoded in “the Law of Moses” – with the entire nation of Israel, as they are
now known, and calls them to be a people of justice among the nations of the
earth, promising to be their god and to bless them if they are faithful to the
terms of the covenant, i.e. the Law. The
Israelites encamped at the foot of Mt. Sinai together constitute “patient 1” if
we want to think of Judeo-Christian values as a virus. All that to say that this strange story
continues to exert tremendous power over us and our world. Israel, as a nation, was always called to
embody Yahweh’s justice amid (pagan) imperial tyranny, exploitation, violence
and injustice. Israel was the people of
(this) god, the God of justice. In
short, Israel was called to embody a new way of being human. Worship of the true God was supposed to lead
the worshippers to live truly, faithfully…humanly.
The descendants of Abraham, as his god had renamed
him, would have run-ins with several conventional empires over the following two
millennia, beginning with Egypt and culminating with Rome. Indeed, besides those privileged few who
experienced the short-lived Israelite empire at the beginning of the monarchical
period (10th century B.C.), almost all the children of Abram would
live and die in the shadow of empires which did not acknowledge the God of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Indeed, the
“Golden Age” under the reigns of David and Solomon was the exception to
Israel’s ethos of “no king but God”.
Though some Jews would come to center their hopes for deliverance on a
“Messiah”, i.e. a king like David, there was an underlying conviction among the
ancient Israelites that only Yahweh – the one and only God, the Creator – was
to rule over his free people. One day,
the God of Abraham would set up his kingdom on earth. One day…
Not long after the Israelite empire had come
apart at the seams, far to the west of Canaan, another kingdom was rising. After the reigns of seven kings, the kingdom
of Rome became a republic, under the (purported) rule of the Senate and the
People of Rome (SPQR). The roman
republic would gradually expand its territory, mostly through defeating the
empire of Carthage and claiming her lands, from Spain to Sicily. After defeating her foe to the west, Rome
turned east and conquered Greece and established a beachhead in Asia
Minor. Eventually, a young Roman consul
by the name of Julius Caesar would begin to style himself as a new Alexander
the Great (the young Macedonian who had conquered the vast Persian empire
before his premature death at the age of 32), and invade territories to the
northwest of Rome. Another would-be
Alexander, and a great rival of Caesar’s, Pompey, invaded Judea in the year 63
B.C. and brought the Jews under Roman hegemony.
Caesar would eventually defeat Pompey in a civil war and claim sole
leadership of the Republic. Fears that Caesar
was abrogating to himself kingly prerogatives led to his assassination in the
Senate in the year 44. The Republic died
with Caesar, and his successor, Octavian – known to us as Augustus – was the
first to rule over the self-aware imperium romanum (i.e. Roman empire).
It was, of course, during the reign of
Augustus that a son was born to a Galilean peasant girl on the eastern frontier
of the empire – a child whose birth[1]
would have been lost to history if not for his sensational yet brief life
(similar in length to that of Alexander) and what was claimed to have happened
after his ignominious death… Indeed, the chroniclers of Rome did not make much
of this figure, who had caused quite a stir in his native Palestine. Surely, the reported doings of a provincial
wonder-worker-turned-criminal did not contribute much to propaganda efforts to
bolster the glory of Rome.
Six decades after the death of Augustus (c.
70 AD), and as Jerusalem was reduced to a smouldering ruin (as the man from
Nazareth had, 40 years before, predicted it would be), the Roman empire entered
its golden age. Rome was by far the
greatest civilization that the world (west of China) had ever seen. The second century AD (as we call it) saw
Rome at the height of its territorial acquisition, military might,
administrative efficiency and infrastructural prowess. Roads constructed during this time are still
usable. Rome forever marked the history
of the western world, and many a testament to its greatness remain embedded in
our culture; indeed, do we not still have senates? All the nations conquered by Rome were “invited”
to submit to its inexorable manifest destiny to rule the world (and thus live
in peace). The gods willed it,
obviously. How could Rome have succeeded
so brilliantly otherwise? Like all
ancient empires before it, Rome legitimized its conquests by appealing to the
heavens. There was one world, and
(whoever was) Caesar was its Lord.
Also like all empires before it, Rome was
not to last forever. By the early fifth
century, not much remained of the vast domains of the “eternal city” (dubbed
thus during the reign of Augustus). What
replaced the Roman imperial socio-political structures in Western Europe[2]
was the last thing anyone could have predicted.
It was a popular movement – composed of the followers of the Galilean
who had been born under the reign of Augustus and crucified under that of
Tiberius Caesar – that would create a new civilization out of the ruins of the
Western empire. This was the climax of
the Christian revolution. In an ironic
twist of fate, a victim of the empire (and a son of Abraham) was at the origin
of a mass movement that, over the course of three centuries, would
non-violently undermine, delegitimize and eventually co-opt[3]
the very empire that had crucified its founding figure. A still-famous Christian thinker, as he
witnessed the (first) sack of Rome in the year 410, interpreted that event as
the coming (to earth) of the kingdom of God.
The people of Yahweh – the true king of the nations – had survived
Egypt, Babylon and now Rome. However,
great changes had occurred within the people of God following upon the death of
Jesus of Nazareth and the kingdom of he who reigned from a cross was like no
other.
Comments
Post a Comment