31 He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; 32 it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
33 He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.” [Matthew 13:31-33, NRSV]
Divine Servant, by Max Greiner, Jr.
Whenever Christians heed the call to return to the Gospels, they see afresh in crystal clear fashion that Jesus of Nazareth is all about preaching and living the kingdom of God. From mountain to mountain, the Gospel of Matthew lays it out, Jesus preaches the greatest sermon on one mountain – the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) – and lives it to the full all the way to the other mountain, mount Calvary. He lived and died to show humanity that the evangelical values of God’s kingdom are humanly achievable. Be not afraid. Be encouraged. Even a mustard seed grows into a great shrub, and a little yeast fully leavens many measures of flour.
The Gospels yield the immutable vision that Jesus, the human face of God, lives in the margins. With his mother carrying him in her womb as they made their way to Bethlehem, the family had no room in any inn. He was finally born in a manger with all the health risks imaginable, in the company of sacrificial animals and beasts of burden, and his birth later announced by lowly shepherds. Despite such a humble beginning, he would grow up to be the divine servant and the Prince of Peace. Christians in the modern world profess to follow him, in his servanthood and his peacemaking mission.
What does God’s intended peacemaking look like?
By the term “the Incarnation”, Christian theology suggests it is God coming to dwell among us in the person of Jesus the Christ. This is God’s radical act of peacemaking – God reaching out to reconcile with wayward human creatures. God’s vision is intended for our good, and we are to cooperate with that vision and be ambassadors of peace and reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:20). For Christians, peacemaking begins with the child Jesus who has subverted every expectation the Israelites had and what most of humankind still has of what peace would look like. The Messiah did not come as a military Conqueror or a warrior King. The Israelite Messianic expectation was quite mistaken 2,000 years ago. But today, the current ongoing Israelite military bully of their Palestinian neighbours is simply evil and condemnable. Israel says it wants peace and it purportedly pursues peace; yet Israel’s entrenched policy never ceases attrition towards its neighbours. In this policy of attribution, the USA and the EU are complicit, no less. It is sheer hypocrisy when, with a straight face, they criticize Russia and feed the war in Ukraine, while keeping completely dumb on Israeli genocidal offense against the Palestinians. Listen to the sharp and crisp words of Irish MEP Clare Daly spoken in the European Parliament (5 October 2022):
- State-sponsor of terrorism is a term of U.S. law. It doesn’t exist in EU law, but it’s what the Zelensky advisor called for. It’s in the parliament magazine and here we are again reporting for duty and all it will do is make peace harder to achieve – exactly of course what the extremists want. No peace, no off ramps, all bridges burning, and Ukraine a permanent abattoir, in a suicidal holy crusade against Russia. So if you want to start naming state-sponsors of terrorism, let’s do it. European sponsorship of Israeli terrorism in Palestine, Western sponsorship of Saudi Terror in Yemen, Isis the product of French, American, British, Turkish, and Gulf sponsorship. In Syria and Iraq decades of right-wing U.S.-backed terrorism, against the Cuban Revolution, the contras of Nicaragua, killings in Guatemala, in El Salvador… Remember Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia? Horror after horror, terror after terror, there’s nothing constructive about the pot calling the kettle black…
Peace is “shalom”. What does God’s intended “shalom” for humanity look like?
Shalom, we must know, is no facile peace. It is a state of being where “all is well”, where people across the board have access to work, food, healthcare, decent housing and education, and the opportunity for just relationships in three dimensions – with God, with one another and with the earth. Shalom is grand and wholesome and far more than the facile “peace” of the American all-too-convenient catch-all excuse of “national security” at the expense, often in disastrous scale, of the rest of the world. It is more than a temporary cease fire and certainly far more than a well-played “silent night, holy night” and songs around the campfire. Shalom is God’s vision for the earth that we all call home as He created it to be. Shalom is God’s peace which comes as a gift to humanity not at the disastrous expense of humanity, but at God’s dire expense, including the Son’s sacrificial death on Calvary. God set the example of peacemaking through Jesus Christ; humanity is called to learn and practise peacemaking.
So go and sow the seed of non-violence. Evangelise through little good deeds, use words if you have to. Resist the temptation to compel compliance to your will through worldly powers – money, position, information-control, brute force (military might) – the regular props of force in furtherance of the violent agendas of evil regimes and insolent empires. Christians refuse to take up what the world sees as signs of power and take up the cross instead, as Christ did. God-in-Christ has already done the radical, subversive and revolutionary act of peacemaking and reconciliation in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Through him, God has made peace with creation, and forever overcome the disconnect between the loving Divine and the sinning human. God has promised peace. All we have to do is to live into that promise y following peacemaking ways.
This is by no means an easy task on the world stage, where the watchword is power, both military and economic.
Whenever the U.S. talks about some country being a threat to their “national security”, what they really mean is a threat to their “national interests” – finance, economy and ultimately their hegemony. The current escalating U.S.-European conflict recalls former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s infamous adage that “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests”. For as long as they can, and the ends (“American interests”) justify the means, they will hold on to their hegemonic control, so that they can continue to keep their so-called “American culture”, and their luxurious “American way of life” at the expense of the rest of the world. So they print trillions of dollars of paper money at a time, to pay for real goods produced by other nations, without the backing from either gold-reserve or real domestic productions. With all the signs of power linked to their hegemony, the U.S. has for decades been fighting dirty to keep it that way, augmented by their military might and the American Dollar on the one hand, and a systematic scheme of sanctions and foreign-sabotage (spearheaded by their C.I.A.) and disinformation (aided and abetted by the UK and the West) to fool and confuse domestic and international audiences alike on the other.
The litany of wars and sanctions (flat-out foreign invasions complete with looting at nation-decimating and genocidal scales) singularly committed by the Americans ever since the Second World War, combined with the hundreds (roughly 750) of American military bases “strategically” spread across 80 nations around the entire globe (!) have fittingly turned the U.S. into the singular “axis of evil” they regularly label others with. The world ignores the American and NATO expansionist vision and mission only at its peril. In plain reality, neither is their hegemonic power benign, nor their (basically white and northern) imperialist regime democratic, however hard (and ludicrous) their extensive fake-information machinery tries to spin it. In truth and substance, the Americans are and have since WWII always been the real threat to the rest of the world, never the other way round. One has to be insanely blind and naïve to not see behind all that fake-information, that the United States of America is the leader of the violence-soaked Western wolf-pack in wreaking havoc as the world heads into 2023 with two of the worst cascading crises ever, among others – Covid-19 and the Ukraine War.
1st January 2023 is the 56th World Peace Day. The Holy Father Pope Francis’ 2023 message for the World Day of Peace refers to these same crises. He cites Thessalonians 5:1-2 where Saint Paul wrote: “Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” Thus, the Pope recalls that the Apostle Paul encouraged the Thessalonian community to remain steadfast. Likewise he says, “when tragic events seem to overwhelm our lives, we are called to keep our hearts open to hope and to trust in God, who makes himself present, accompanies us with tenderness, sustains us in our weariness and, above all, guides our path.” Crises expose “any number of forms of fragility”, says the Pope. But there is light even in the darkest hour. It does not have to be all doom and gloom for humanity.
The way forward as Jesus the Prince of Peace has shown, is not to resort to sinister means, as evil and conniving empires do, but to be willing to carry the cross.
In Christian theology of the cross, the story that runs from the nativity of Jesus at Bethlehem all the way to the crucifixion on Calvary, underscores one theme – that God does not come as a warrior king, but as a vulnerable baby. The power of the Almighty God is hidden under the signs of vulnerability, even in the face of worldly power that takes down His Son, tortures, humiliates and finally kills him. God comes in weakness and in poverty. To a young woman who had no status in the community, God comes in search of human collaboration. To a world which He had endowed with power, He comes in powerlessness. To nations boasting of plenitude and beauty, God comes in simplicity and ugliness. God’s glory is hidden in the ugly messiness of our lives. In places of violence, in places of suffering, in the margins of decent society, God is there, hidden among us. And in the most profound theo-drama and the horror of the cross, in the violence, ugliness, and the weakness of a man stripped and beaten and hung to die as a public spectacle, there is something more powerful at work. For hidden under these signs of weakness is the glory of God. The cross reveals the depth of God’s suffering love for humanity. This is God’s promise of ultimate shalom.
We encounter God down at the manger, among the sacrificial animals and beasts of burden, among the poor and in the margins. So as Christians we choose weakness and shall fight the temptation to take up what the world sees as signs of power. We choose vulnerability and refuse to be oppressors and dominators. We choose to love and risk having our hearts broken. We shall try to make peace among human beings. We may fall short, but we shall be guided by Christ’s life of non-violence and peace. Faced with violence and disasters of colossal scale, our efforts always seem so meager and pathetically inadequate. Yet, we are encouraged by the hidden power God assigns even to what seems like an insignificant little mustard seed and a tiny yeast.
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, April 2023. All rights reserved.
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