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“Terrorism’s Temptations”
Mark 12:1-12
A Sermon preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley
Today’s scripture is almost surreal when read in the context of the day’s news. It shows terrorism and its results at the hands of an angry God. Terrorism is tempting for those without any other sense of power. But it is a dead end. It is a spiral, not unlike the violence of warfare, it is a cycle that brings death and destruction. It is this cycle that the missing Jesus seeks to stop. I said “the missing Jesus” for a reason.
To hear Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer tell it, the Jesus we have and that most of us follow is not the real Jesus. It is the one given to us by the Gospel writers who were trying to make sense of their violent world. The Jesus we ought to follow is missing from our consciousness. Reclaiming that missing Jesus, the one opposed to systems of domination, the one interested in our own salvation and our world’s salvation is the main work of the church today.
But in order to do that, we have to contend with scriptures like the one we have today. Of the four gospel writers, Mark does the best job of portraying that missing Jesus. Matthew, Luke and John have added layers upon layers of dogma absent from Mark’s account. But Mark is not without his blinders.
Bill Herzog is a seminary professor
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There can be no more shocking parable than the one we have from the 12th chapter of Mark. Just to recap, a man plants a vineyard and then takes off letting tenants farm the land, probably for a number of years. When he is ready to collect the rent, the owner sends slaves to do his dirty work. The slaves are beaten, insulted and even killed. The owner sends his beloved son and they kill him. Seems pretty straight-forward so far, it’s a peasant revolt, but then comes the confusing word. Jesus says that the owner will come back and destroy the tenants in the end. The revolt is futile. Then Mark does the unthinkable: he makes the story into an allegory and implies that Jesus is the son whom the people killed and that God in superior violence will kill the tenants and put down the revolt.
Doesn’t this sound a bit strange to you? Why would a loving God kill the poor?
The answer is even more disturbing. The answer is that this is the image of God that pervades the Bible. According to major portions of the Bible, God is a warrior who punishes the wicked and rewards the good by slaughtering the enemies of the good. That’s what the original song of the vineyard portrays in Isaiah 5. “Therefore the anger of YHWH was kindled against God’s people, and God stretched out the divine hand against them and smote them, and the mountains quaked; and their corpses were as refuse in the midst of the streets. For all this God’s anger is not turned away and God’s hand is stretched out still.”(Isaiah 5:25) And we have the audacity to blindly say “thanks be to God.”
Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer says that this image of God cannot be redemptive and needs to be expunged from our conscious and unconscious faith. We need to say that this image of God is not redemptive, but actually destructive. And everything we have been learning about Jesus through our exhaustive study of Mark these past many months; everything we have been learning about the Jesus who is missing from popular Christianity; seems to point us in this direction. It points us toward a loving God who wants right relationship, who wants love of enemies, who wants justice for the outcast, who wants freedom for her people.
To believe in a violent God is to play into the temptation granted us by terrorism. Human violence simply mirrors divine violence. This is where we get the concept of holy wars. This violent god is found in the Koran. It is found in the Hebrew Bible and it is found in the Christian scriptures. And this perception of God is killing us. It has some of us duped into thinking that terrorism is okay. It has more of us duped into thinking that preemptive warfare is okay. It has most of us drunk by the demonic notion that superior violence is the way God works. Think of the atonement theology that says that the only way to be saved is to believe that Jesus died for our sins in order to appease an angry and violent God. It is rooted in a perception of God that is brutal and barbaric. I guess that’s another sermon, but you get my point.
Bill Herzog does a great job of unpacking the parable, which he thinks is about a peasant revolt and the spiral of violence. He thinks the original parable ends with Jesus’ question to the tenants in the first half of verse 9: “What then will the owner of the vineyard do?” What will the owner do when his slaves and even his son has been killed? Well, of course he will get even. He will punish and probably kill all of the tenants. Herzog says that the parable’s original purpose was to expose the brutality of injustice. When peasants have their land stolen by an absentee landlord (an act of economic violence) and are then taxed for it beyond their means (another act of economic violence), then they become what they despise in their oppressors. They become increasingly physically violent to the point of murder. They justify their violence as payback for the initial violence done to them by the absentee landlord. The parable ends with the question, “what then will the owner of the vineyard do?” It paints a gruesome picture of injustice and the temptation that terrorism has wrought.
This is where Mark drops the ball. You see, even Mark believes in a violent God, perhaps not as much as the other gospel writers. Bowing to an apocalyptic worldview, Mark has Jesus imply that God is the absentee landlord and will punish the wrongdoers. There is no question about whether God is right or wrong here. Mark does this because he, like all of the other gospel writers, has the task of explaining a gruesome history. And if you can spiritualize it enough, then it takes the pressure off of the hearers. As Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer puts it: “Turning a parable about the spiral of violence into a rejection of Jesus’ story based on fulfillment of scripture robs the parable of its transforming power and allows Mark, like Matthew, to portray abusive actors in the domination system as God-figures” (Nelson-Pallmeyer, 2001:259). In short, Mark compromises Jesus’ message by buying into the concept of a violent God bent on punishment. Maybe what we’re supposed to do is look at the spiral of violence.
Herzog says that the spiral of violence has three stages. The first is the everyday exploitation of the poor by the ruling elite. Most of this is covert and sanctioned by law, like balancing the budget on the backs of the poor, for instance. More often than not people adapt. We believe that we are getting a fair deal, even when we know we are not. Since all land was family owned, the only way a man could acquire a piece of land was by foreclosure. They often hired the former owners as sharecroppers on their own ancestral land. It’s all very legal: legal and humiliating.
Eventually, even the most patient have their breaking point. This is the second stage of the spiral of violence. It happens when even their subsistence is being threatened. Remember that peasants likely farmed the land in between the grape vines while the grapes were maturing. When the landlord demanded a share of those crops, it pushed them over the edge. These people felt they had nothing to lose. They succumbed to the temptation of terrorism. The parable spends a great deal of time showing how the tenants tortured and killed those that represented the owner. They were desperate, even feeling righteous. When you have nothing to lose, some will do horrible things. This can only lead to the third stage in the spiral of violence.
This stage is the repression of the revolt through superior violence. Herzog says this is done “under the pretext of safeguarding public order or national security.”(Herzog, 1994:109). The revolt ends because the peasants are no match for the might of the owner and his cronies. I’m very concerned that in today’s world, we are addressing only the second and third stages in the spiral of violence, not the first stage. We don’t look at the economic problems that fuel terrorism—that breed terrorism’s temptation.
In the film, The Matrix, Neo has second thoughts about joining this underground group that is out to expose the truth and bring down the empire. He is ready to go back to his normal life when his friend and confidant Trinity says, “Don’t go there, Neo. You’ve been down that road and you know where it leads.” We’ve been down this road before too and we know where it leads. Only now, it might lead to more desperate people resorting to terrorism which will be put down by superior violence, which may breed more terrorism and more superior violence.
So if we believe that Bill Herzog and Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer are right, what do we have to live on here?
Just this. Jesus did live and die in order to show us a better way to live.
Jesus tried to put down violence wherever he could.
He taught us that terrorism doesn’t solve anything.
Love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. That’s Jesus’ answer.
It might sound trite, but it’s actually more revolutionary than anything at all.
It actually has a possibility of
succeeding whereas we already know where the spiral of violence takes us. Loving our enemies might even means feeding
them. On
The church is the place where we can find and even model that redemptive community—where we can put a stop to the cycle of violence, where we can muster all of our God-inspired power and say a new word to a world obsessed with violence—a world that breeds temptation for terrorism.
Bill Herzog says that parables are
meant to be discussion starters that expose oppression and make us reconsider
our place in the world. I think we have
seen this in the past few months. As
people have taken to the streets throughout the world, there is a new power
afoot. Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer
said on Wednesday that there are two superpowers in this world right now. There is the
And we are beginning to see the world as it is.
And unless we want to continue the spiral of violence, we need to stop the temptation of the terrorists.
We need to stop the spiral of violence at its source—the very economic injustice that breeds panic that makes sane people to do insane things.
That is what Jesus lived and died for, and I beleive in my heart of hearts that this is what the church is for.
So our work as Christians is still undone.
Our temples are still under construction.
But if we look close enough, we can see the vision of a new tomorrow.
And we can see that we’re not alone.
Can you see it?
It’s there.
I just know it.
Show us, God.
We need your power. We need your wisdom. We need your strength. We need your courage. We need your vision for the living of these days.
Amen.