Haggai, Daniel, and the Violent Non-Violence of God

Tell Zerubbabel governor of Judah that I am going to shake the heavens and the earth.  I will overturn royal thrones and shatter the power of the foreign kingdoms. I will overthrow chariots and their drivers. –Haggai 2.21,22

This is a passage from the last of the four messages given to Haggai from God which Haggai then passed on to their intended recipients.  In this case it was a message meant for Zerubbabel, the Governor appointed by the Persians over Judah.  It’s a message about a future Zerubbabel will never see.  In fact it’s hard to see how much of this message benefits Zerubbabel at all, except to encourage him that God has chosen him to be his “signet ring”, which upon further consideration I suppose is nothing to sneeze at.  In all reality there are myriad subtle references in this message to the plans that were in motion regarding the pending arrival of the promised Messiah, but given the subtlety of the references I would suggest they were most likely lost on the message’s first audiences.  I would also suggest that much is lost on us as well when we read these types of apocalyptic, fore-telling messages, particularly when the foretold events have yet to come to pass in our own times.  In particular I would propose that we often misread the method through which the Divine mayhem quoted above is accomplished.  We see the shaking of the heavens and the overturning of thrones and chariots and tend to assume that these violent acts will occur violently.  In doing so I believe we make some of the same mistakes that caused the people of Jesus’ time to miss the fact that he was the Messiah.  I believe we’re always in danger of this type of misreading whenever we run our understanding of the Kingdom that does the overturning and shattering through a human sieve.  However, before we consider that sieve, I think we must consider the nature of the Kingdom doing the shaking.

Haggai is not the only prophet to characterize the interaction of this Divine Kingdom with the kingdom and powers around us using this violent language.  In fact one of his contemporaries, though one much older than he, used very similar language 50 or so years earlier.  In interpreting a dream of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, Daniel gives the following interpretation of a part of his dream where a stone destroys a statue representing the kingdoms of the world, and subsequently grows larger than a mountain.  He said, “In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever.” (Daniel 2.44 NIV)  Again we have this violent language, God’s Kingdom “crushing” the kingdoms of the world.  How do we make sense of this violent language in light of the Kingdom of God that Christ reveals in the Gospels? 

Perhaps there’s not much to make sense of.  Many of the references by Christ to the Kingdom of God have their own apocalyptic and even violent touchstones.  The Kingdom as Christ describes it tends to be characterized by healing, wholeness, plenty, justice, mercy, and love, but also by separations and conflict.  One could make the case that the Kingdom of God can be partially characterized by the sword Christ said he came to bring in Matthew 10.  There do seem to be similarities here between the inherent violence in Haggai and Daniels’s Divine Kingdoms and the Kingdom of God being described by Christ.

If that is the case, then what do we do with the healing, wholeness, plenty, justice, mercy, and love that typify the kingdom and which seem out of sync with these violent hallmarks?  How do we reconcile a kingdom that apparently marginalizes the rich, but is freely open to prostitutes and those widely considered immoral and repulsive?  How do we square the violence of the Kingdom with the notion that it’s freely available to everyone, wantonly scattered to any and all soils, even those in which it will not grow?

Perhaps a hint toward an answer to that question can be found in Jesus’ metaphor/parable of the mustard seed/plant.  It’s also meant to picture the Kingdom of God.  As a seed it starts as something inherently small and inconsequent, but grows into something so large that cannot be missed.  The parable is meant to highlight the notion that God specializes in endowing importance into the unimportant; significance into the insignificant.  So how does this relate to the apparent violence inherent in the Kingdom of God?  I’m glad you asked. 

In relation to the question I would suggest that violence and those who wield it are not inconsequent, small or insignificant.  In fact violence in a way is a powerful and more often than not sinful assertion of significance and importance.  By its nature, it gets our attention.  It triggers our self preservation instincts.  It cries out for justice.  Even if wielded justly it triggers the urge for revenge. It is a power play.  It asserts the muscle of the aggressor over the weakness of a victim.  In fact by its nature it creates victims.  So while there are violent touchstones of conflict in Jesus’ descriptions of the Kingdom of God, it seems that violence, at least the manner in which I’m describing it, can’t be a part of a Kingdom characterized by healing, wholeness, plenty, justice, mercy, and love.  This would suggest that perhaps it is the human sieve through which we filter our understanding of violence that is creating this irreconcilable tension here and affecting our ability to imagine an alternative means of overturning thrones and shattering kingdoms.

I suggest that when we hear of Kingdom’s being “crushed”, “overturned”, or “overthrown” our imaginations immediately conjure up the violent means by which these events tend to occur.  We think of coups, revolutions and wars.  We often lack the grace-filled imagination necessary to envision any other way of accomplishing these titanic shifts.  In doing so, we miss the God of the mustard seed at work in the world.  We miss the awesome power of God’s grace, which author Phillip Yancey asserts in his book What’s So Amazing About Grace is the most powerful force in the universe.  As an example of the power of grace Yancey submits the events in Poland in the 1980’s. 

Under the leadership of Lech Walesa, with some of its roots in the Catholic Church, the Solidarity Trade Union asserted themselves through non-violent means with the intent of gaining grater self-governance from the Polish Communist Party.  Granted that is a great over simplification of events, but it will do for a one sentence summation.  The character of the movement though can be seen and understood in one key event, the assassination of one of the movement’s spiritual leaders, Father Jerzy Popiełuszko.  A quarter of a million people publicly mourned him, and as they processed down the streets of Warsaw they chanted, “We Forgive You” to the Communist regime.  Within five years the Communists were out of power.    

Is this not the overturning of thrones and the shattering of powers through the wielding of the power of grace?  You could even make the case that this is part of the sword Christ said he came to bring.  I would suggest that in light of the attributes that distinguish the Kingdom of God from earthly kingdoms, that grace is the primary weapon given to the church to accomplish the establishment of healing, wholeness, plenty, justice, mercy, and love, and the acting out of these qualities of the grace-filled Kingdom is what undermines and subverts the authority of the Kingdoms out of line with these hallmarks.  This is a force with the potential to shake, overturn and crush governments, using the Biblical language.   

To be clear I’m not arguing that the events in Poland in the 80’s are in anyway a template to be followed in every circumstance.  I suppose I’m simply suggesting we need to be mindful of the limits of our imaginations in relation to both the manner in which we reveal the Kingdom of God through our actions now, and the manner in which the Divine Kingdom will be and is being established.  We need to be careful to not assume that these violent allusions will be accomplished by brute force.  Much of this, I believe, will be accomplished by the simple, steady, strong grace of God.

Remembrance, Nostalgia, and Reinterpretation

I recently heard a good sermon on John’s little postcard of a letter to the church of Ephesus in the book of Revelation. Among the main points of emphasis was the call to remembrance, tied to John’s recording of Jesus’ assertion that the Ephesian church had forsaken their first love, his plea that they remember the heights from which they had fallen, and his own call that they repent and return to an earlier set of practices or behaviors. After reflecting on the passage and the sermon I was struck by the dangerous road Jesus was calling the church in Ephesus, and by extension those of us who follow after them, to travel: the road of remembrance. The passage down this road is definitely necessary for those who would attempt to pursue God. Throughout the Bible you see God calling those who would follow to remember what God had done previously as a means of building their faith. You see God claiming the history of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the deliverance from Egypt, and the maintenance of grass and sparrows as personal works that we should be drawing on as a means of knowing about and relating to the self-gifting God who is revealed through those acts. The call to the church of Ephesus to remember however seems a bit more personal, which is where the danger lies.

They’re not being asked to directly remember God, but to remember their expressions and experiences of their faith in God, which seems to be a variation on this theme of remembrance. To put it another way, they’re not being asked to remember the works of God, but the manner in which they expressed their faith in those works, and what that felt like. Some may see a danger here in the distance between experiential or “subjective” remembrance and historical or “objective” remembrance. While the nature of that danger, and even whether it’s a danger at all, would be an interesting discussion, I see a different danger here, the tension between remembrance and nostalgia. Often when I hear this passage referenced in messages or songs or in conversation the call to return to “the things you did at first” becomes a longing for an idyllic earlier time in a person’s life, or in our collective history. Attached is the notion that if we could only return there in some way then we would be able to re-embrace our first love. I would suggest this is dangerous to our faith in several ways.

First, nostalgia tends to put God in the box replication; that is it assumes that God must do now in our time and context what God did in a previous time and context in the exact same manner God did it in the past. Because it idealizes the past, nostalgia tends to view what occurred there as the norm. Thus any thing which deviates from the normative past in our present context is judged to be wanting. If this were the nature of reality, it would be a great blow to the freedom of God. I would suggest that just because God is “the same, yesterday, today and tomorrow” doesn’t mean the manner in which God chooses to interact with the world is limited to how it’s been done in the past. To see evidence of this one only need look at the difference between the manner in which God interacted with Moses, and the manner in which God interacted with John himself.

Second, nostalgia tends to prioritize our experience of God ahead of our interactive relationship with God. In short, it prizes the sentimental above the unflinching messiness of reality. When we attempt to return to an idyllic past, what we often really want to return to is an experience of closeness with God which often accompanies new faith. We in essence want to re-experience the exhilaration or joy or whatever emotional state marked our conversion because it is to us evidence of God’s existence and embracing of us. Jeremy Begbie writes of this sentimentalist phenomenon that, “The sentimentalist loves and hates, grieves or pities not for the sake of the other but for the sake of enjoying love, hate, grief or pity.” Here nostalgia has a greater interest in a “Deep Warm Sweet Interior Glowing” than in any “other”, be that God or neighbor.

Third, nostalgia tends to prize spiritual immaturity. When we place an inordinate amount of esteem on our early expressions of faith we can tend to devalue and under emphasize our present expressions of faith. I would suggest that as faith matures it expresses itself differently. Philip Yancey in his book “Reaching for the Invisible God” suggests that faith is akin to a muscle that must be exercised in order for it to grow. As alluded to previously, conversion, especially in many Protestant and Evangelical circles, is often accompanied by an emotional surge which fades with time. In that surge, where the converted experiences a strong sense of the presence of God, the muscle of faith isn’t severely taxed. It’s when that sense of God’s presence seems distant or absent that faith is tested and exercised. When we prize the idyllic past we in a sense treasure an immature expression of our faith and devalue the new things the Spirit has done in our lives since then, and has in store for us.

So if Jesus is calling us to a sort of existential remembrance here, how do we read this postcard through those eyes, and not through the eyes of nostalgia? If we assume that nostalgia is a force that can be destructive to faith, then we must assume a non-nostalgic stance when interpreting the call to, “Repent and do the things you did at first.” This would mean that Jesus isn’t calling the church in Ephesus to a rote mimicry of their earlier practices, behaviors, and expressions of faith, but to return to a vital, first love-centric, renewed, and vigorous reinterpretation of their love and faith in their present context, remembering he “who holds the seven stars (the messengers of the churches) in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lamp stands (the seven churches mentioned in the Revelation)”, the one who is both the object of their faith and the template of self-gifting actions. I would suggest this is the road of remembrance and subsequently reinterpretation they’re being called on to travel.