Caesar or Jesus

The entirety of human history, no matter the time or location, has been scarred by the existence of systems of power and oppression. There is always a system of someone, or someones, who wield power and those who are oppressed by the ones in power. It’s inescapable.

If you pick up a history book, you will notice the vicious cycle of violence due to these systems constructed for failure. Pick up the Scriptures, and the same cycle exists there as well.

Humans are a violent, greedy, and power-hungry breed, and we fall prey to the sadistic and cyclical nature of human history. The power structures we see at play today throughout the world are no different than they were two thousand years ago. It’s just that now we have nuclear weapons.

Where you see any semblance of civilization, you see power and oppression. Obviously there are different scales of power and oppression, but they exist nonetheless.

This is why I find the Jesus story so refreshing and inspiring. The man, who just so happened to be God, constantly turned down opportunities to gain influence and power. The only Person who deserved power shunned it. The One that is Glory incarnate chose an inglorious life. The Divine entered into time and ended up dying.

And why did he die? A system of power chose to oppress him. There is more at play with his death, but the fact remains that the socio-political elite of his day found him to be threatening to their own system of power.

So they killed him.

Jesus chose to give dignity to those on the fringes of society. Power, though, cannot exist when the oppressed are dignified. The system was being upended, so the system fought back.

And the system won.

Just a few hundred years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, those who claimed to follow in his footsteps forsook his example and chose to align with power. Constantinian Christianity aligned the Church with the socio-political power, and as a result, the Church became the oppressor. The same violence, greed, and hunger for power had infiltrated the Church, and its claws have dug deeply into our souls.

Crusades, Inquisitions, slavery, and all forms of violence have been a mainstay within the people that claim to be following the Christ Jesus. In the United States, slavery was justified using the Scriptures. The same people that went to a local church on Sunday lynched men, women, and children on Monday. Those who most fervently defend the Bible are the same ones that defend their guns and send people to the electric chair. Structural power rears its ugly head in the form of police brutality, Charlottesville, and war, all of which are defended by those who claim to follow Jesus.

If this sounds harsh, it is because it is supposed to be. Facing the reality of injustice at the hands of Christians shouldn’t be an easy pill to swallow. We can make up all the excuses we want, but it is very hard to justify our violent patterns with the person of Jesus. We have prostituted our faith for political gain.

I get it. It’s hard to face our own complicity with injustice. It’s difficult to divorce our faith from our striving for power. We each have been born into a system in which we were taught that to be Christian is to be Republican. We strive for political influence in order to secure the ideals in which we hold most dear. But as we so often see, we find ourselves becoming the oppressor when we achieve the height of power.

Jesus did not vie for social or political influence. Instead, he stood on the side of those who were oppressed. Jesus did not choose to change the world by garnering power, but instead chose to change the world by initiating a revolution that restored the inherent dignity in each and every human being, especially those who found themselves on the fringes of society.

When we act out of selfish greed in our pursuit of power, we fall prey to the systems of the world. We become whom we most despise. We choose to align with Caesar rather than Jesus. We seek power instead of humility, hatred instead of love, and violence instead of peace. We become those who yell, “Crucify, crucify!” instead of becoming those who are crucified.

Jesus tells us to carry our crosses. Those who are crucified are the oppressed, not the oppressors. To live like Jesus is to no longer be concerned with winning or being right. Instead, it is to surrender all that we think we want and all that we think we are in order to see the inherent dignity in all those we come across.

We see Jesus in the least of these. We become like Jesus when we become the least of these. We battle not against flesh and blood but against systems and structures that seek to oppress our neighbors.

How else can we become like Jesus?