John Dear's 'Pharisee Nation'
Pharisee Nation
by John Dear*
Wednesday, March 2, 2005 -- Last September, I spoke to some 2,000
students during their annual lecture at a Christian college in
Pennsylvania. After a short prayer service for peace centered on
the Beatitudes, I took the stage. "Now let me get this
straight," I said. "Jesus says, 'Blessed are the
peacemakers,' which means he does not say, 'Blessed are the warmakers,'
which means, the warmakers are not blessed, which means warmakers are
cursed, which means, if you want to follow the nonviolent Jesus you have
to work for peace, which means, we all have to resist this horrific, evil
war on the people of Iraq."
With that, the place exploded, and it seemed like 500 students stormed
out and the rest started chanting, "Bush! Bush!
Bush!"
So much for my speech. Not to mention the Beatitudes.
I was not at all surprised that George W. Bush was re-elected
president. As I travel the country speaking out against war,
injustice and nuclear weapons, I see many people consciously siding with
the culture of war, choosing the path of violence, supporting corporate
greed, rampant militarism, and global domination. I see many others
swept up in the raging current of patriotism. Since most of these
people, beginning with the president, claim to be Christian, I am ashamed
and appalled that they support war and systemic injustice, that they do
it in the name of God, and that they feign fidelity to the nonviolent
Jesus who gave his life resisting institutionalized injustice.
I am reminded of Flannery O'Connor's great book, "Wise Blood,"
where her outrageous character Hazel Motes is so fed up with Christian
hypocrisy that he forms his own church, the "Church Without
Christ," "where the lame don't walk, the blind don't see, and
the dead stay that way." That's where we are headed
today.
I used to think these all-American Christians never read the Gospel, that
they simply chose not to be authentic disciples of the nonviolent
Jesus. Now, alas, I think they have indeed chosen discipleship, but
not to the hero of the Gospels, Jesus. Instead, through their
actions, they have become disciples of the devout, powerful, murderous
religious officials who made his execution possible.
A Culture of Hypocrites
We have become a culture of religious hypocrites. Instead of
practicing an authentic spirituality of compassion, nonviolence, love and
peace, we, as a collective people, have become self-righteous, arrogant,
powerful, murderous hypocrites who dominate and kill others in the name
of God. We have learned from religious officials like the
Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes and high priests who supported the brutal
Roman rulers and soldiers and lived off the comforts of the
empire.
Most North American Christians are now becoming more and more like these
hypocritical religious officials. We side with the rulers, the
bankers, and the corporate millionaires and billionaires. We run
the Pentagon, bless the bombing raids, support executions, make nuclear
weapons and seek global domination for America as if that was what the
nonviolent Jesus wants. And we dismiss anyone who disagrees with
us.
We have become a mean, vicious people -- what the bible calls a
"stiff-necked people." And we do it all with the mistaken
belief that we have the blessing of God.
In the past, empires persecuted religious groups and threatened them into
passivity and silence. Now these so-called Christians run the
American empire, and teach a subtle spirituality of empire to back up
their power in the name of God. This spirituality of empire insists
that violence saves us, might makes right, war is justified, bombing
raids are blessed, nuclear weapons offer the only true security from
terrorism, and the good news is not love for our enemies, but the
elimination of them. The empire is working hard these days to tell
the nation -- and the churches -- what is moral and immoral, sinful and
holy. It denounces certain personal behavior as immoral, in order
to distract us from the blatant immorality and mortal sin of the U.S.
bombing raids which have left 100,000 Iraqis dead, or our ongoing
development of thousands of weapons of mass destruction. Our
so-called Christian rulers would have us believe that our wars and our
weapons are holy and blessed by God.
In the old days, the early Christians had big words for such behavior,
such lies. They were called "blasphemous, idolatrous,
heretical, hypocritical and sinful." Such words and actions
were denounced as the betrayal, denial and execution of Jesus all over
again in the world's poor. But the empire needs the church to bless
and support its wars, or at least to remain passive and silent. As
we Christians go along with the Bush administration and the American
empire, we betray Jesus, renounce his teachings, and create a
"Church Without Christ," as Flannery O'Connor
foresaw.
Troublemaking Nonviolence, the Measure of the Gospel
The first thing we Christians have to do in this time is not to become
good, devout hypocrites, like the religious officials of Jesus'
time. Instead, we have to try all over again to follow the
dangerous, nonviolent, troublemaking Jesus. I believe war, weapons,
corporate greed and systemic injustice are an abomination in the sight of
God. They are the definition of mortal sin. They mock God and
threaten to destroy God's gift of creation. If you want to seek the
living God, you have to pit your entire life against war, weapons, greed
and injustice -- and their perpetrators. It is as simple as
that.
Every religion, including Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism, is
rooted in nonviolence, but I submit that the only thing we know for sure
about Jesus is that he was nonviolent and so, nonviolence is the hallmark
of Christianity and the measure of authentic Christian living.
Jesus commands that we love one another, love our neighbors, seek
justice, forgive those who hurt us, pray for our persecutors, and be as
compassionate as God. But at the center of his teaching is the most
radical declaration ever uttered: "love your
enemies."
If we dare call ourselves Christian, we cannot support war or nuclear
weapons or corporate greed or executions or systemic injustice of any
kind. If we do, we may well be devout American citizens, but we no
longer follow the nonviolent Jesus. We have joined the hypocrites
and blasphemers of the land, beginning with their leaders in the White
House, the Pentagon and Los Alamos.
Jesus resisted the empire, engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience in
the Temple, was arrested, tried by the Roman governor, and executed by
Roman soldiers. If we dare follow this nonviolent revolutionary, we
too must resist empire, engage in nonviolent civil disobedience against
U.S. warmaking and imperial domination, and risk arrest and imprisonment
like the great modern day disciples, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day
and Philip Berrigan.
If we do not want to be part of the culture of hypocrites and do want to
follow the nonviolent Jesus, we have to get in trouble just as Jesus was
constantly in trouble for speaking the truth, loving the wrong people,
worshipping the wrong way, and promoting the wrong things, like justice
and peace. We have to resist this new American empire, as well as
its false spirituality and all those who claim to be Christian yet
support the murder of other human beings. We have to repent of the
sin of war, put down the sword, practice Gospel nonviolence, and take up
the cross of revolutionary nonviolence by loving our enemies and
discovering what the spiritual life is all about.
Just because the culture and the cultural church have joined with the
empire and its wars does not mean that we all have to go along with such
heresy, or fall into despair as if nothing can be done. It is never
too late to try to follow the troublemaking Jesus, to join his practice
of revolutionary nonviolence and become authentic Christians. We
may find ourselves in trouble, even at the hands of so-called Christians,
just as Jesus was in trouble at the hands of the so-called religious
leaders of his day. But this very trouble may lead us back to those
Beatitude blessings.
<...>
* John Dear is a Jesuit priest, a former Executive Director of the
Fellowship of Reconciliation USA, and the author/editor of 20 books,
including most recently 'The Questions of Jesus' and 'Living Peace', both
published by Doubleday. He lives in New Mexico where he is working
on a campaign to disarm Los Alamos. For more information,
see:
http://www.johndear.org
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Raleigh Myers
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Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. - - Margaret Mead
Let us experiment with laws and customs, with money systems and governments, until we chart the one true course - until we find the majesty of our proper orbit as the planets above have found theirs& And then at last we shall move all together in the harmony of our sphere under the great impulse of a single creation - one unity, one system, one design.
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posted by Raleigh myers @ 3/03/2005
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