Chapter 5

 

 

It’s July 21, 2007, almost one week after my son’s first birthday. There are children laughing and playing on an absolutely beautiful Saturday afternoon. We are celebrating my son’s first birthday, and I can’t begin to describe the joy in my heart.

It’s been a long and tiring day, though, and I need a little rest. I walk to the table specially set in the back of the yard where the men are drinking toasts and engaged in conversation. The eldest member of the assembly is an intelligent, robust man, a well-know political commentator and novelist in the Armenian community. I’ve sat and listened to him speak in precisely such settings on scores of occasions. I usually don’t participate in the discussions, not least because I’ve had the distinct feeling he does not like me. But today is different. I’m celebrating my son’s birthday, and the love I have in my heart is teeming.

The topic of the conversation is not well defined, but the general themes are the power, or lack thereof, of the Armenian people, and the nature of power and success in general. The elder novelist’s position, vociferously supported by one of my oldest friends, is that the Armenian people are, and have historically been, powerless. As evidence, the novelist and my old friend cite to the current fragile state of the Armenian nation and the lack of political “clout” of the Armenian people in the world today. By “power,” of course, they mean what the world ordinarily means by that word: wealth, influence and “clout.” The group to which the Armenians were being compared, as is often the case in conversations where this theme arises, the group who has the wealth, influence, and clout, was, of course, the Jews.

I have come to learn that spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ very rarely means telling the explicit story of Jesus and the meaning of his life, teaching, death and resurrection. I think there is very good reason for this. The explicit story of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a complex, nuanced, historically-sophisticated narrative requiring numerous cultural-linguistic translations in order to bring about its true meaning. It is not the type of thing that can be communicated during the course of an ordinary afternoon conversation. “God loves you,” “Jesus died for you,” “You’re sins are forgiven,” “Jesus revealed the nature of God,” these are all radically condensed shorthand expressions for immensely rich and detailed historical facts, and the theological implications gleaned from them. Proper evangelization of the Gospel in today’s world, I believe, must begin by saying and doing things that shed a short but powerful burst of light into the darkness of modern life and discourse. We must re-tell the stories of this world in a way that reshapes them, tells them from the perspective of the crucified and resurrected Lord. While doing so, do not hide the fact that you are a Christian, but don’t dwell on it either. Those who recognize the light may not necessarily agree with what you are saying or understand what you are doing, but they cannot help but recognize the light, to feel it. And light has a way of overcoming the darkness, but when the darkness is and has been so entrenched, it will be a slow, mustard-seed-style process. We must realize that, usually, all that is required is to send in the burst of light, to plant the mustard seed. The seed may fall on the road, may fall on rocks, may grow but be squelched by the surrounding weeds, or it may bring forth fruit, thirty fold, sixty fold, a hundred fold.

I joined in the conversation. The point I began to convey is that the conclusions they were reaching might be being shaped by a limited perspective. The Republic of Armenia, and the Armenian people, may be powerless and have little or no influence, especially when compared to the Jewish people today, but I asked them to look at the matter from a multi-millennial perspective. There are a handful of peoples that have survived and maintained their definable cultural traditions over several thousand years. The Armenians are one of them. The Jews are another. There must be something, something very “powerful,” that has allowed this to occur. I also reminded them that if they were to go back beyond the last 50 years or so, the Jews were perhaps the most “powerless,” marginalized and persecuted group of people imaginable. Prior to the last half a century, if anyone were to say that their people were less powerful or weaker (based on the definitions they were using) than the Jews, they would have rightly been ridiculed.

But from a multi-millennial perspective, we cannot but say that the Armenians, like the Jews (historically), must have a “power” that is different from the definition they were using. Both have been persecuted, both ruled over by foreign “powers,” and both have been the subjects of an attempted systematic eradication within the last century. But both groups have survived, in more or less culturally definable ways, for millennia. Other groups, even some who have attained the height of what would be considered power, wealth and influence, have since disappeared. I suggested that, within that wider perspective, “power” must have a meaning other than the one they were using. And while I admitted that I would be hard pressed to define wherein that “power” consisted, I suggested that we might get a sense of it when we look around the party we were attending with various traditions being played out, and the conversation we were having, in our ancestral language, speaking of our history of being dominated by various world powers, but given the fact that we were here, as Armenians, enjoying this day, this conversation. I suggested, therefore, that our power may stem from stories we tell each other and to our children, from the traditions and symbols that we have been blessed to see fit to maintain precisely because of our persecution and domination by other peoples. In other words, our power may stem from our people’s love of being Armenian.

The elder novelist responded by saying something to the effect that he did not agree with what I was saying, but that it warmed his heart to hear me saying it.[1] I realized that was perhaps the most significant words that had been spoken by anyone all afternoon. The mustard seed had been planted. I didn’t and couldn’t know what would become of the seed, but that was not mine to know. And I left the conversation with the elder novelist at that.

Notice that nothing of the “Christian message” was discussed per se. The point that I was making is don’t necessarily assume that power is what the world tells you it is. And if you want proof, look at your own people, who you take to be so powerless, and reflect on their survival throughout millennia of such powerlessness. That was my point, but it was not my aim. My aim was to spread the Gospel. I once tried to cook some corn in the husk directly on the grill. The husk burned and the corn was ruined. The next time, I soaked the ears in water for ten minutes before putting them on the grill. It turned out to be the most delicious corn I’ve ever had. Let those who have ears (no pun intended) hear.

Perhaps the elder novelist will reflect tomorrow, or next week, or next year, about that feeling of joy he felt when looking at the issue from that perspective, a perspective which his worldview and experience insisted had to be wrong. Perhaps he will one day, after other conversations, come to a place where he will recognize what many of the great scientists of history have recognized and expressed, that when the heart says “Yes!,” that is a much richer and deeper indication of truth than when the mind does. Perhaps his next novel will incorporate that new perspective in some small measure, bearing fruit through his readers thirty, sixty, a hundred fold.

Or perhaps not. That’s not mine to say. But that’s all right by me. Let those who seek the power of this world worry about controlling all that they come across, destined to fail.

Or perhaps the elder novelist will examine the issue for himself. If, God willing, our conversation resonates intensely enough, he will try to find out how it is that this young man, someone he did not particularly like, gained a perspective that he did not necessarily agree with, but which for some reason made his heart glad. He knows that I identify myself as a Christian. Maybe, he will conclude that I somehow gained this perspective because I am a Christian. But he had never heard of such a perspective being espoused by a Christian, about a topic so close to his heart but yet so far away from it. Maybe that will cause him to start looking into the complex, nuanced, historically-sophisticated story of Jesus, the one he had never heard from other Christians, who had told him that Jesus died for him, that his sins are forgiven, that God loves him.

Maybe.

If he does, what would he find? How does Jesus speak to the issue of power? What does an afternoon discussion about power and politics have to do with Jesus, the Cross, and what it all means?

Have you ever tried to read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, while trying to imagine that you are doing so for the first time, consciously suspending any familiarity and presupposition? It is a very interesting thought experiment. Were you to do so, it would be difficult to avoid the realization that the Gospels are not primarily theological discourses. They are, at their most basic level, political stories, stories about a man who spoke and acted in such a way as to lead to his capture, trial and execution, stories about conflicting perceptions of power, truth and knowledge, and how those conflicting perceptions met head on and were resolved. I heard a story about a theatrical play about the life of Jesus, and in the crowd was a man who had never heard of Jesus. He sat enthralled throughout the production, and as the plot began to reach its climax, he stood up and shouted, “They’re not going to kill him, are they!”

We in the Western world over the last few hundred years have tended to segregate the political message of the Gospels from the theological, due in large part to the Enlightenment’s insistence that religious and spiritual matters, if given any credence at all, should be quarantined from such real-world issues. But it is precisely within that story of power and politics that we glean the theological picture of Jesus saving the world, and only within that picture can we make sense of the personal theology of Jesus dying for me and saving me.

In Mark 10, we find the following passage:

James and John, the two sons of Zebedee, came up to Jesus, saying, "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you."

And He said to them, "What do you want me to do for you?"

They said to Him, "Grant that we may sit, one on your right and one on your left when you come in your glory."

But Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?"

They said to him, "We are able." And Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink you shall drink; and you shall be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized.

"But to sit on my right or on my left, this is not mine to give; but it is for those for whom it has been prepared."

Hearing this, the ten began to feel indignant with James and John.

Calling them to himself, Jesus said to them, "You know that those who are recognized as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them; and their great men exercise authority over them.

"But it is not this way among you, but whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant; and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be slave of all.

"For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many."

For centuries, the Church has jumped to the final verse of the story because it saw there a direct proof-text for one of its favorite doctrines, substitutionary atonement. That’s fine, and I believe dearly in the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, and I praise God every day for Jesus’ giving his life as a ransom for many. But the only way to understand what Jesus meant by that is to look at it in the context in which he said it. And that context is this. True power lies not in lording over one’s subjects, or exercising authority over people. True power is achieved through service to others. And Jesus was not talking about waiting tables. He was deadly serious. Serving others to the utmost means even giving up one’s transient moments of happiness, even one’s life, for and in that service.

And that’s the point of the final line. Even the “Son of Man,” the One who the Jewish tradition said would be King of Kings and Lord of Lords, has not come to exercise power in the manner of those who are recognized as rulers in this world, but in ultimate loving servanthood, “to give his life as a ransom for many.” When Jesus died on the cross, he did not finalize an arbitrary transaction in Heaven by wiping our sins off of a cosmic ledger and transferring it to his, thereby appeasing his angry father whose primary goal was to be paid in blood for our sins. The Parable of the Prodigal Son does not end with the father torturing the prodigal’s brother in order to forgive the returning son. When Jesus died on the cross, that was an indication of the lengths he was willing to go to be a servant for his people, the ultimate act of ultimate power. And it is precisely by the exercise of this power, and its vindication by the resurrection, that the second-rate powers of the world, to which each of us bows a knee dozens of times a day, were exposed and defeated, named and chained, and it is only within that victory that I, personally, am saved when I come to “believe in Jesus,” through and through, including this lesson about the meaning of true power, and strive to live in faith based upon such a belief.

Paul understood the significance of the overarching and central political dimension of the gospel more clearly, I believe, than anyone else save for Jesus himself. This understanding is most clearly illustrated in the introduction to one of the most, if not the most, significant and masterful theological expositions in history: the Letter to the Romans. Most readers of the Bible skim over the introduction to Romans to get to the more “important” sections about justification by faith, the resurrection of the body, etc. In so doing, I believe, they miss one of the most brilliant and imperative sections of the New Testament.

The introduction to Romans is the first time that Paul states explicitly what he means by the word “gospel.” In order to fully appreciate the brilliance of the introduction, we have to understand what the word meant in the original Greek and how it was used within the walls of the Roman Empire, so as to see how it is truly telling that this became the same word that the earliest Christians used to denote the life story of young Jewish peasant who caused a bit of trouble in a remote outpost of the Roman Empire and was duly executed as a result. Koine Greek was a rich language. It contained separate words meaning “story,” “account,” “message,” “biography,” and so on. The earliest Christians did not utilize those terms. They utilized “gospel,” euangelion.

Euangelion had a very specific meaning in the Roman world in the time of Paul. It referred to the accession of Caesar. When an emperor died and a new emperor took the throne, the news of this event was referred to as euangelion, “good news.” It was sometimes also used to refer to celebrations of the emperor’s birthday, etc. In other words, it had nothing whatsoever to do, in and of itself, with a personal theological message, a proclamation of eternal life, or an invitation to come and enjoy a new spiritual experience. When Tiberius ascended to the throne and the imperial messengers went out onto the streets of the Roman Empire to “proclaim the gospel,” they did not go out and say, “There is this new experience we were hoping you might like to try on for size, namely, you might like to pay allegiance to Caesar if that speaks to your heart and if that’s where you are right now in your walk.” No. They said, “Tiberius is Caesar! Get down on your knees!”

And the citizens of the empire did, in fact, get down on their knees. Many did so for fear of being executed if they refused. But for most, the proclamation of the gospel of Caesar contained an implicit story line that most, in some measure, bought into. The story was as follows. The history of Rome has gone on for many, many years, and now we finally have a new emperor who is divine (because his predecessor has conveniently been deified and, ergo, as the “Son of the Divine Such-and-Such,” he is also divine); in him the justice, or righteousness, of Rome shall be revealed and given to the world, which shall thereby be saved from want of such justice. In light of all this, he is Lord, kyrios, and thereby demands the allegiance of everyone in the world.

Just as an aside, and by way of comparison, let’s take a look at the implicit story line of another recent empire. The history of this nation has gone on for many years, with many battles against many evil enemies, and now God had blessed this nation by rendering it, unrivaled, the most powerful in the world. This nation possesses freedom and justice in the form of democracy and free market capitalism, and therefore has the God-given duty and right to impose its vision of such freedom and justice to the rest of the world, to save it. In light of all this, it demands the allegiance of the whole world. You are either with her, or against her.

A lot changes in 2,000 years. Imperial rhetoric isn’t one of them.

So back to Paul and Romans, here he is writing a letter to a small band of probably poor and certainly powerless Christians within the most powerful and influential city in the world, seat of the most powerful person in the world. And how does he start off this letter? He says that he has been called to be a messenger of a different “gospel,” good news from the One True God concerning His Son, who was descended from David (his royal ancestry), declared to be “Son of God,” not by an arbitrary deification of his predecessor, but by resurrection from the dead; in Him, the justice, or righteousness, of God has been revealed and, in light of all this, he is the world’s true kyrios and thereby demands your believing allegiance, through which you shall be saved. In other words, and there is simply no way that the original recipients of the letter would not have heard this message loud and clear, Jesus is Lord, and Caesar isn’t! True power has been revealed in the crucified and risen peasant Jew from the insignificant town of Nazareth. Accept no cheap substitutes. Get down on your knees!

This is not a cute analogy that Paul, or the early Christians, created out of thin air. These were real-life, down and dirty, life or death choices between the powers of this world and the power of the Kingdom, the power of Love. The consequences of these choices for the early Christians were far from trivial, far from merely spiritual. Around 155 A.D., there lived a man, a Christian, by the name of Polycarp. He was the Bishop of the church at Smyrna, the modern day city of Izmir in Turkey. The emperors of Rome had unleashed bitter attacks against this small, Jewish sect called the “Christians” (not surprising when we understand the message they were proclaiming, but very surprising if we misunderstand that message as “believe in Jesus and you will go to Heaven when you die.” Why would Caesar fight back against a message like that? What danger would it pose to him?). Polycarp was arrested on the charge of being a Christian teacher. During his hearing, the Roman procurator apparently felt pity for him, because he was a very old man and the fate that was awaiting him was a horrible one, being burned alive at the stake. He offered Polycarp a way out. All he would need to do was offer a pinch of incense to Caesar’s throne and just say the words “Caesar is Lord.” He could do it quietly and no one would have to know about it. And Polycarp came back with this stunning response: “I have served Him for 86 years, and He has never done me any wrong. How can I now blaspheme my King who saved me?” Polycarp knew perfectly well what he was saying. “King” and “savior” were Caesar titles. He was saying “Jesus is Lord, and Caesar isn’t.” He was burned alive at the stake. This is allegiance. This is faith. This, I submit, is power, gained by those who meditated and prayed to grasp the meaning of the oral tradition that came to be memorialized in the four Gospels, where we are given the clues to understanding what Jesus himself thought of the significance of his eventual death.

But he would do so in a way that even the prophets of old who had foreseen these matters, let alone the ordinary Jewish men and women of his time, would never have imagined and could not understand. He would indeed battle the enemy, but Jesus understood that the enemy was not Rome or the other pagan nations: the enemy was Evil, a force so real, so fully and mysteriously intertwined with human affairs that it can only be adequately described by personifying it, giving it a name, Satan, The Great Accuser. But Jesus also brilliantly and lovingly realized something that is very, very difficult for most people, even most Christians, to understand. You do not defeat Evil with evil. You do not beat the principalities and powers of this world by playing their own game, just slightly better, and claiming to do so “in Jesus’ name.” No. Jesus understood that the only way to defeat Evil was by its polar opposite: Love.

He told a remarkable story on his final trip to Jerusalem, where he was going to claim his throne, but in tears. He said he longed to gather the City’s children as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. His agrarian listeners could not have helped but recognize that by this metaphor Jesus was evoking the image of a farmyard fire, when the mother hen would gather up her chicks under her wings, and when the fire had run its course, what would often be left would be a dead, scorched hen with live chicks under her wings. On another occasion, when two of Jesus’ disciples asked him if they should call down fire from Heaven to consume those who did not heed their message, Jesus turned and rebuked them. No, Jesus would not fight Darkness with his/its own weapons. He would take his own ethical teachings deadly seriously, put his money where his mouth was: he would turn the other cheek, he would go the second mile, he would carry the cross, he would be the city set on the hill, the lamp set on the stand to give light to all in the house. And in winning the battle, he would indeed be enthroned, with a crown of thorns and the words “King of the Jews” carved over his throne.

Let those who have ears hear.

So what does the issue of power have to do with Christianity? What does a sunny afternoon discussion about power in today’s world have to do with spreading the gospel?

Everything.

Two final but critical points about this issue. What we must never forget, lest we wrongly come to believe that we are ushering in the Kingdom by our own clever techniques, is that behind all such techniques and creative ways of spreading the Gospel lays the mysterious but ever-present power of God.

Paul was well aware of this when he proclaimed that the Gospel “is the power of God for salvation.” We sometimes take it for granted that Paul simply went from town to town preaching about Jesus, creating converts and establishing churches. We view those acts from a modern perspective, where very few people in the world today have still not at least heard of this man called Jesus. But imagine how it must have been for Paul, walking into a new town in Northern Greece, say, and going into the marketplace and telling a story about a young Jewish peasant (not much of an attention-grabber to begin with), who was tried and executed by the Roman authorities (nothing interesting there; the Romans did that to all sorts of people), and who, by the way, was raised from the dead and is now Lord of the world. We tend to forget how absurd Paul must have looked and sounded in telling this ridiculous story, being laughed at in the marketplace, being told he was crazy, that this was a child’s fairy tale. Imagine then Paul’s blissful astonishment in seeing that, as he told this unbelievable story, some people were challenged, some changed, and so actually believed it and came to worship this peasant Jewish Lord.

Amen.

I was representing a client before the Social Security Administration. We had just emerged from a hearing before an administrative law judge where we had succeeded in obtaining disability benefits. I asked my client to wait for me in the lobby while I finalized some paperwork. The pressures of the ordeal, coupled with the realization that she was now officially considered “disabled” by the government of the United States, reached a critical mass: my client began to cry. I did not notice her crying, consumed as I was with the clerical formalities of formalizing her scarlet letter. One person did notice, though. She was an elderly woman awaiting her turn before the judge, mired in her own stress and fear, but with the love of Christ deeply embedded in her heart. She approached my client, sat down beside her, hugged her and gave her a shoulder to cry on. She spoke to her gently, and then began to pray with her. By this time I had noticed the scene. My first thought was “Why is this lady doing this? She obviously has her own issues at a moment like this.” I then watched as my client’s tears of pain turn into tears of hope and joy, and as the elderly woman wipe those tears away. I noticed her smile and say a few final words, eliciting genuine nods of acquiescence from my client, and then walk back to her seat beside her husband. She sat there emanating true power, not the power envisioned by James and John, by the elder novelist, or by most everyone in the world today. She was emanating the power of Love. And I was drawn to it.

Hey, no one said this was gonna be easy.

And when your friends and neighbors, in shock and wonder, ask you, “Why are you doing this?,” tell them, in your own way, and in whatever context presents itself, “Because Jesus is Lord,” and success, beauty, family, nation, wealth, comfort, the boyfriend that you want to marry, impulse satisfaction, the college you want to get into, coolness, honor…aren’t. And if some don’t ask “Why are you doing this?” but, rather, are strangely drawn to the light that you will emanate by doing it, and come to you asking for solace, for love, for prayer, please, please, leave the evangelism at the door.

Last Thursday, the Executive Board of the La Canada Gladiator Football program voted to cut 7-year-old David [surname] from the Gremlins’ final roster.

 

Ordinarily, such a vote is not noteworthy. The San Gabriel Valley Junior All American Football Conference has a roster limit for each team, and it is sometimes necessary to cut a few players in order to meet that limit. Prospective players have been cut before. There will be cuts in the future.

 

This cut was different.

 

As a result of the vote, at least one Board member and two coaches resigned from the program. A number of parents pulled their kids off the team. Several other players resigned in protest, led by David’s older brother and 5-year veteran of the program, Marty.

 

What caused such a stir over a simple roster cut? As with many of life’s questions, there is no clear answer.

 

The Board’s official position is that David was cut because he was a “safety risk,” the term used for a player too weak to protect himself on the field of play. This is the only basis for which a La Canada resident can be cut from the team.

 

Others say that it was petty politics and scheming that brought about David’s fate. Less than a week earlier, David’s father, Tony, an assistant coach of the Pee-Wee division team, had openly expressed concern for the safety of one of the players on the team, who just so happened to be the son of one of the other coaches, who in turn was a close friend of the Athletic Director.

 

Still others believe the clamor was initiated by an unwritten practice in other junior football programs possibly rearing its ugly head here at home. The practice is called “weeding out.” Here’s how it works. Players who are designated to be cut are given an unusually high number of repetitions, in high-contact positions against the strongest hitters on the team. The net result is that these kids, with broken spirits if not broken bones, quit prior to being voted off. 

 

While all of these theories may be true, or all false, there is another reason for the uproar, one that now holds the majority view among those who have protested this decision.

 

That reason is David himself. His nickname is “Bid D.” That name has nothing to do with his physical attributes.

 

David is likened by many who know him as a modern-day, miniature Daniel Ruettiger, the no-talent/all-heart Notre Dame 4^th-stringer celebrated in the 1993 sports classic “Rudy.” In his first year in the program, David was awarded the Desi Geestman Award for courage and determination. What he did to earn that award, however, was little compared to the courage and determination he exhibited last week.

 

We can’t accuse the powers that be within the Gladiators organization of trying to weed David out.

 

No one has admitted ordering the Code Red.

 

What we do know is that while ordinarily receiving limited repetitions in “safe” positions against players of equal strength and ability, last week, David, a supposed “safety risk,” was given twice his usual number of reps, positioned in the highest-contact positions against the toughest kids on the team. As expected, Big D was beaten to a pulp. He was thrown about like a rag doll. He was battered and bruised. One parent said she was “horrified” at what she was seeing. Another said that he could not take such a beating.

 

There was one problem. Big D kept getting up. He didn’t complain. He didn’t cry. He didn’t quit. He just kept getting up.

 

He was a true Gladiator.

 

Those who know David off the field say they are not surprised. Whatever David does, he does with all his heart, soul, mind and strength. He plays with everything he’s got. He laughs with everything he’s got. He cries with everything he’s got. During his first two years in the program, he received the award for the highest grade point average on the team. He even studies with everything he’s got.

 

As mentioned earlier, the executive board voted David off the team last Thursday. This was not the whole story, though. The Board’s first vote on the issue, held earlier in the week, resulted in a decision to keep David on the team. On Thursday, there was a re-vote, because one of the members had “misunderstood the issue.” The outcome was changed.

 

But this is not an Oliver Stone movie. This is the story of one exceptional kid, a kid who can teach many of us “grown-ups” what it means to live this life well.

 

The tragedy is not David’s. He has been hit. He will get up. That is his nature (although I pray it hasn’t been corrupted by this incident).

 

No. The tragedy is ours. It is the community’s. David will bounce back. The community, however, is losing someone who had the potential of inspiring it. And how often do we come across inspirational people nowadays?

 

David would have made his teammates better. Maybe not better players, but better young men. He would have taught them about courage and determination by being courageous and determined. He would have taught them that the best way to play football, and the best way to live life, is with all one’s heart, with all one’s soul, with all one’s mind and with all one’s strength. And he would have taught them that when all that is not enough, keep getting up!

 

As a matter of fact, he has already taught us all this.

 

The Gladiators’ official web site contains the following statement: “Coaches are not always looking for the best football players—they are looking for the best member for their team.”

 

No. They are looking for the best football players. And that’s what La Canada will have. The best football players.

 

Not the best member for our team.

 

 

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