Re-framing Peace pt. 4

Jesus message worked, although not in the way the people wanted with peace instead of violence, to deal with evil, and we can learn a whole lot if we follow that framing story instead of our own...

Jesus entire kingdom message was/is counter intuitive. Instead of Jesus "picking up a sword" and fighting (which is what some read when they read Revelation, but is what I believe to be an inaccurate reading of that text), he told Peter to put down his sword, he talked about blessing peacemakers, he said things like if his kingdom was was of this world that his followers would fight to protect him, etc. Jesus sounds like a wimp, or at least his contemporaries would have thought so, and I think that we must think so too, because we still insist on using violence to solve our problems. The real problem is that following Jesus creates a sort of cognitive dissonance with living in the world, or by the worlds means.

The kingdom of this world tells us that violence is a form of power and that if we do not have the power then someone else does and they can use that power against us. That is why we think that our way of doing things is the only way to do things. It seems that more and more, Christians are rejecting the kingdom of God for the kingdom of this world. We end up boiling Jesus message down to a ticket to a disembodied existence somewhere away from the world.

Through all of these posts on re-framing peace, objections have been raised about both peace in the Hebrew Scriptures, and about peace in Jesus own life (usually based on the "temple cleansing" passage, which has more to say than what we place at its face value). If we want to know more of God's character, we need look no further than in the incarnate, God became man, so that the powers of this world would not have the power. What appears to be weak is actually strong enough to defeat evil at its worst. If God did not fight true evil with violence, then why do we need to fight perceived evil? God always wins, not through violence, but through peace.

To understand what our role in peace is, perhaps we should re-frame what we define as peace and how we reach that, when Jesus re-framed what Messiah-ship looked like to the first century, so too did he re-frame what it means to be in him. Let us live in him, and let his ways overcome the way of the world. Let Peace overcome violence in all respects, that we may be as we are called to be and not be of the world.