In the first century when Jesus was alive, the land of Israel was controlled by the Roman Empire. Rome was the superpower of the day, and they had an ideology called the Pax Romana. Roman Peace. They wanted peace in their empire. And largely they achieved peace.
Do you know how the Romans achieved peace? Peace through strength. They had military bases all over the Empire, including in other nations they conquered. Roman soldiers policed all those lands. If you were walking the streets of Jerusalem or Capernaum with Jesus, you would notice the Roman military everywhere. And when there were uprisings, what did the Roman military do? They acted swiftly with overwhelming force to bring peace. Peace through strength.
That ideology is commonplace in our nation and in our world, and what we will discover this week is that the way of Jesus is very different.
It is another quarterly current events and question and answer week. During these weeks my goal is apply biblical theological teaching to the issues of the day or to answer questions people in my congregation ask. I received the following question:
What would it take to allow the love of Jesus to bring peace to America?
There is a lot to that question. First, the world “allow”. I appreciate that the question mentions the word “allow” because it recognizes the importance of free will.
Jesus himself is not going to force his will on the people of America, let alone any other country in the world. Jesus preserves free will. He does not coerce. He will entice, he will woo, he will interact and speak, but he will not make us choose against our own will. I am very, very glad for that, because that is what love looks like. Love welcomes and pursues. It does not coerce or force. Jesus is love.
When it comes to allowing the love of Jesus to bring peace to America, or any other place in the world, it is the human beings who must choose to allow the love of Jesus to be primary. And because we are talking about the love of Jesus in particular, that means we are talking about people who believe in the love of Jesus as a real and important thing.
Who are the people who believe in the love of Jesus as a real an important thing? His followers. Christians. Christians are people who not only believe in Jesus and his ways, such as his love, Christians are also people who are actively involved in a relationship with Jesus, desiring to become more like him in their thinking and actions, inwardly and outwardly, and they are striving toward that end.
Because this question is asking what we can do to allow the love of Jesus to bring peace, this question is talking to Christians, primarily. Certainly, Christians do not have a corner on the market when it comes to love. Any human can express love, as it is part of the image of God. God is love, and we humans are made in the image of God, so therefore, any human can express love, Christian or not. I believe that nearly every human who has ever lived has expressed love in some form. But this question mentions the love of Jesus. That is a particular kind of love. The love of Jesus is something that we Christians should encounter and demonstrate extremely lavishly, precisely because we are followers of Jesus.
Jesus is God, and God is love, so it follows that Jesus is love. Because we have four books of the Bible (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) that relay the stories of Jesus, we can observe Jesus’ expression of love in action quite clearly. Also, Jesus himself talked about love often. Furthermore, the writers of the New Testament go to great lengths to comment on the love of Jesus. So in the New Testament we have a lot to go on if we want to learn and live the love of Jesus.
Before we begin to look at one of those New Testament passages, in the next post I’m going to talk about how answering this question is uniquely challenging in my American context.
Photo by Nate Steele on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 