“The Week of His Arrest”

On this Sunday morning, while choral music played in the background, a tagline caught my eye in the list of news-based emails that are funneled into my inbox each morning: “…the week of his arrest….” Unconsciously, I immediately connected that with the emotions of entering into what is known as “Holy Week” among Christians—the week that led to the arrest, sham-trial, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.

However, that news click-bait was not referring to the Christ of the Gospels. It was not intended to help focus our attention on the historical story of the sacrificial death and the miraculous return to life of the “King of the Jews.” This headline was about the expected arrest of a former president—one for whom the parallels of the mission of the Biblical Messiah are, for some Americans, strikingly similar: “We need someone to fix this mess, to take the power away from those on the other side of the aisle and restore power to those of us who are being deprived of our rights. And now, the one in whom we trust is likely to be arrested and persecuted for trying to ‘take back’ our nation from those who are ruining it.”

I feel that the juxtaposition of the two events this week, the two scenarios of the arrest of an ideological leader (the historical arrest of Jesus Christ and the possible arrest of Donald Trump), help to expose the hopes and expectations of many Christians. And I’m deeply concerned about the way many Christian friends are conflating the goals and ideology of the Kingdom of Christ and the ideologies embedded in the cultural wars of American and Canadian society.

The Christ who was arrested by the enemies of “The Kingdom of God” in ancient Israel came to this earth to establish a way of life, a society based on self-sacrifice, love and fulfillment that leads to eternal life. The movement he began practically integrated into itself the ultimate ideal of God “reconciling to himself all things in heaven and on earth.” There was no space for grasping power over others, no need for conquest by might, no assumption that our fears are allayed by accumulating weapons, and certainly no expectation that God’s plan hinges on the successful recovery of national pride and patriotism.

In contrast to that, I feel that many American Christians have completely altered and redesigned the story. The Jesus we now need is a “saviour” who came to earth and died to make sure that some of us don’t go to hell, that there is relief for the guilt we feel for our sins, that we don’t commit most sexual sins, and that after death there is a destination where my soul can float around in ethereal bliss forever.

This story doesn’t need a Jesus who actually transforms our value system and replaces our entire bent toward power, wealth, empires, and control of others. This story keeps Jesus in his place—as saviour of our souls, so that we can pursue the American dream and avoid the limitations of political weakness and vulnerability to the rich and powerful.

This “Christian” story seems to imagine that the United States is the standard by which to measure every belief and ideology. This story attempts to hang our future and our hopes and our joys on the preservation of an empire and on the romantic description of the founding of the nation and how blissfully utopian it will be when it is great again.

Instead of expending energies and passions toward reconciliation, justice, and flourishing communities where mutual respect and hope and self-sacrifice put others’ needs in focus, the new “gospel” is about how to win all cultural wars, how to protect the right to keep an AR-15 or how to raise our voices louder than those of our opponents.

In this Holy Week, choose your “messiah” carefully. I can’t state strongly-enough the futility of aligning our passions or pledging our allegiance to the messiahs of national empires and of political-economic might. Consider the moral platform from which your messiah speaks, and the ultimate outcome of the moral values and ideology for which they may be arrested by the authorities of their time.

I pledge allegiance only to the historical Jesus the Christ, the only Son of God, whose life, suffering, crucifixion, and resurrection we remember and commemorate in this season. Jesus Christ is Lord! And he alone will restore the cosmos to what it/we are created to be.