I recently wrote about how a wrong approach to interpreting scripture can actually prevent us from having a right view of God. Today, I want to take a text that has puzzled me in the past and demonstrate very simply what it means to apply a Jesus-shaped hermeneutic.
The text in question is Matthew 11:12:
“From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.”
A bit of context first. John the Baptist is in prison having spoken out against Herod’s immoral lifestyle (“speaking truth to power” might nowadays have become a trendy catch phrase, but look where it will get you). While Jesus is out teaching the crowds, John sends his own disciples to ask whether Jesus is the “one who is to come”. Jesus replies by describing the inbreaking of the kingdom of God in the form of healings, resurrections and good news for the poor. This leads him into a bit of teaching on John the Baptist, in the middle of which comes our rather perplexing verse.
Or is it actually perplexing at all?
Believe it or not, over the past 28 years or so, I’ve heard at least three or four sermons on this scripture, as well as many other allusions to it in various contexts. In each and every case, the interpretation has been the same: that Jesus is encouraging those who would participate in the kingdom to be forceful.
While this seems like a reasonable enough interpretation on the face of it, it’s never quite satisfied me.
First, the idea of Jesus encouraging people to be forceful (not to say violent – which is, after all, the word that most Bible translators have seen fit to use here) in their pursuit of the kingdom seems, well, more than a little off. If you flip through the preceding few chapters of Matthew, you’ll find Jesus going around doing various healings, interspersed with teaching sessions with his disciples. According to Matthew, the verse we’re looking at here comes in the middle of Jesus’ first documented public teaching after the Sermon on the Mount. And the thing is, the Sermon on the Mount is where Jesus publicly talks about, you know, turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, praying for those who persecute you, not resisting an evil person, that kind of thing.
Now, maybe it’s just me, but pretty much everything Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount seems about as far removed as you can get from any notion of forcefulness or violence. So for Jesus to then turn round and tell people that they need to get forceful in order to “lay hold” of the kingdom seems just a little incongruous.
Second, it seems to me that interpreting this verse as a call to force of whatever kind can provide an excellent pretext for all sorts of anti-kingdom behaviour. If you want to encourage people to be go-getters, to rise up and assert themselves, to break through to the next level, to get vocal and aggressive in denouncing what they don’t like and demanding change – basically, to feel very confident about doing God’s kingdom work for Him using their own strength – then you can turn this verse to great advantage by using it as a kind of call to arms.
The trouble is, Jesus never issued any call to arms. Whenever any suggestion of force came up, he was quick to correct it, even when his or his disciples’ personal safety was at stake (think of Peter drawing his sword to defend Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane). He was always about giving, laying down, serving and loving; he was never about pushing, shoving, striving, climbing or coercing.
Now, you can try to reconcile a forceful interpretation of this verse with Jesus’ message of a non-violent kingdom, but only by substantially redefining the meaning of the word “violence”. Personally, I figure that if what Jesus meant to say about the kingdom was closer to “enthusiastic men lay hold of it”, that’s what we would find in our translations.
For these reasons, I’m inclined to reject the interpretation according to which, in this verse, Jesus is encouraging people to violently lay hold of the kingdom. But what then does he mean?
Given the context in which these events took place – an oppressed Israel waiting for a warrior king to rise up and deliver them – I think it’s entirely likely that what Jesus had in mind here was various currents and movements that saw the coming of the kingdom as a violent revolution, and which thus sought to use the kingdom for their own ends. If I’m right, then far from being an encouragement to use force of any kind, Jesus’ words in this verse are in fact a warning against such things. He’s not holding up the use of coercion or force as something to be lauded, even when done in pursuit of the kingdom; he’s specifically warning against it!
I would have liked to expand on this further, but I don’t have time. So here’s the main point I wanted to get across. If you start with a “flat” reading of the text, you’ll very likely make an assumption that some kind of force or violence is sanctioned when done in pursuit of the kingdom. If you do this, you’re essentially making Jesus uphold force and violence.
Alternatively, if you start with what we know about Jesus from the whole witness of scripture – that he eschews all forms of coercion, force and violence and explicitly instructs his followers to do likewise – you’re free to approach the text from a different angle and end up with a much more satisfying explanation of what Jesus was saying.
Sadly, religious history, littered as it is with bitter and bloody conflicts and wars, shows quite clearly which of these interpretations have proved more popular through the ages.
(Note: if some scholar comes along and proves from the original Greek that I’ve completely misconstrued this verse, I might end up looking like an idiot. I’m okay with that. It won’t be the first time, and it undoubtedly won’t be the last.)
[ Image: Mateus_27:24&25 ]
