Pharisee Nation
By John Dear
Common Dreams
Tuesday 15 February 2005
Last September, I spoke to some 2,000 students during their
annual lecture at a Baptist college in Pennsylvania. After a short prayer service
for peace centered on the Beatitudes, I took the stage and got right to the point. "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 notblessed, 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 500 studentsstormed out. The rest of them then 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 reelected president. As I travel the country speaking out against war, injustice and nuclear weapons, I see many people consciously siding with theculture of war, choosing the path of violence, supporting corporategreed, rampant militarism, and global domination. I see many othersswept up in the raging current of patriotism. Since most of thesepeople, beginning with the president, claim to be Christian, I amashamed and appalled that they support war and systemic injustice, thatthey do it in the name of God, and that they feign fidelity to thenonviolent Jesus who gave his life resisting
institutionalizedinjustice.
I am reminded of Flannery O'Connor's great book, "Wise Blood,"where her outrageous character Hazel Motes is so fed up with Christianhypocrisy that he forms his own church, the "Church of Christ withoutChrist," "where the lame don't walk, the blind don't see, and the deaddon't rise." That's where we are headed today. I used to think these all-American Christians never read theGospel, that they simply
chose not to be authentic disciples of thenonviolent Jesus. Now, alas, I think they have indeed chosendiscipleship, but not to the hero of the Gospels, Jesus. Instead,through their actions, they have become disciples of the devout,religious, ll-powerful, murderous Pharisees who killed him.
A Culture of Pharisees
We have become a culture of Pharisees. Instead of practicing anauthentic spirituality of compassion, nonviolence, love and peace, weas a collective people have become self-righteous, arrogant, powerful,murderous hypocrites who dominate and kill other in the name of God.The Pharisees supported the brutal Roman rulers and
soldiers, and livedoff the comforts of the empire by running an elaborate banking systemwhich charged an exorbitant fee for ordinary people just to worship Godin the Temple. Since they taught that God was present only in theTemple, they were able to control the entire population. If anyoneopposed their power or violated their law, the Pharisees could killthem on the spot, even in the holy sanctuary.
Most North American Christians are now becoming more and more likethese hypocritical Pharisees. We side with the rulers, the bankers, andthe corporate millionaires and billionaires. We run the Pentagon, blessthe bombing raids, support executions, make nuclear weapons and seekglobal domination for America as if that was what the nonviolent Jesuswants. And we dismiss anyone who disagrees with us. We have become a mean, vicious people, what the bible calls"stiff-necked people." And we do it all with the mistaken belief thatwe 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 theAmericanempire, and teach a subtle spirituality of empire to back uptheir power in the name of God. This spirituality of empire insiststhat violence saves us, might makes right, war is justified, bombingraids are blessed, nuclear weapons offer the only true security fromterrorism, and the good news is not love for our enemies, but theelimination of them. The empire is working hard these days to tell thenation--and the churches--what is moral and immoral, sinful and holy. It denounces certain personal behavior as immoral, in order to distractus from the blatant immorality and mortal sin of the U.S. bombing raidswhich have left 100,000 Iraqis dead, or our ongoing development ofthousands of weapons of mass destruction. Our Pharisee rulers wouldhave 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 weredenounced as the betrayal, denial and execution of Jesus all over againin the world's poor. But the empire needs the church to bless andsupport its wars, or at least to remain passive and silent. As weChristians go along with the Bush administration and the Americanempire, we betray Jesus, renounce
his teachings, and create a "Churchof Christ 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 Pharisees. Instead, we have to try all over again to followthe 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 andthreaten to destroy God's gift of creation. If you want to seek theliving 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 forsure about Jesus is that he was nonviolent and so, nonviolence is thehallmark 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
ascompassionate 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 hypocritesand blasphemers of the land, beginning with their leaders
in the WhiteHouse, the Pentagon and Los Alamos.
Jesus resisted the empire, engaged in nonviolent civil disobediencein the Temple, was arrested by the Pharisees, tried by the Roman governor and executed by Roman soldiers. If we dare follow thisnonviolent revolutionary, we too must resist
empire, engage innonviolent 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 Pharisaic culture 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 sinof 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 hispractice 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 tothose Beatitude blessings.
John Dear is a Jesuit priest and the author/editor of 20 booksincluding most recently, "The Questions of Jesus" and "Living Peace"both published by Doubleday. He lives in New Mexico where he is workingon a campaign to disarm Los Alamos. For info, see: www.johndear.org.
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