Jeremiah 6:9-13
“Engine of Empire: Violence,” chapter After Jesus: Before Christianity, Westar Institute
Our scripture from Jeremiah today talks of violent times, seeing them as retribution for not following God’s law or caring for God’s people. It reminds us that when we study history, often the outline of our text is a listing of various wars and the timeline connecting them. The common thread of human history seems to be violence and warfare as one group struggled to gain and maintain power over another.
The first century is called the time of the Pax Romana, the Peace of Rome. In reality it was a particularly violent and dangerous time as Rome maintained “peace” by completely dominating all other nations. They conquered the lands around the Mediterranean, most of what we know of as the Middle East, and central Europe as far as Britain. The Empire was vast, and once the internal civil wars mostly ended in the generation before Jesus, Roman armies were deployed across the known world to dominate everyone else.
Rome maintained its version of “peace” by torturing other people who came under their control. This included both rape and crucifixion. Historians estimate that hundreds of thousands of conquered people were crucified just to terrify others into submission. Crucifixions were public, with crosses lined up along main roads so everyone could watch slow and painful death by suffocation. It was meant to be intimidating and it succeeded. We think of crucifixion as unique to Jesus, and often we’re told that it would have been off-putting to those who heard about it. In later centuries Christians talked about Jesus crucified as the sacrifice both required by God and effective in connecting us to God – overcoming sin by pain. That’s a key Christian understanding, but it’s not a first century understanding. Scholars are beginning to speculate that early New Testament references to Jesus crucified aren’t about his sacrifice on our behalf but are about solidarity. Just like everyone today knows someone who was seriously ill or died of COVID, everyone in the first century knew someone or many someones who had been crucified. Saying Jesus was crucified said he was one of the thousands who understood the wrath of Rome. He too was caught up in the horror of crucifixion, as were his disciples or students who loved him. Then his life and influence continued – a resurrection – and crucifixion wasn’t the last word.
When Rome conquered a new city state or territory, it took many of the inhabitants as slaves. Slave labor was the backbone of the economy. When Jerusalem was conquered in 70 CE almost 100,000 people were taken to Rome, where many of them helped to build the Colosseum. Almost every Roman citizen owned at least one or two slaves, and those of wealth owned many. Slaves ran every household, did all the manual labor of the Empire and provided labor to most businesses. The wealth of Rome depended on slavery, just as the wealth of pre-Civil War plantations depended on enslaved persons. Even the government depended on the knowledge and work of enslaved people who had been scholars and government workers in conquered territories. Paul speaks of being enslaved to Christ and people understood what that meant, because perhaps the majority of Jesus people were themselves enslaved.
In addition to taking the wealth of conquered lands as its own (silver from Spain, art from Greece, farms across the Empire), Rome supported its wealthy class with taxation. Entire towns were built with tax money and populated with slaves and retired soldiers who were moved far from their homes to populate the Empire. One such town was built only three miles from Nazareth during Jesus’ lifetime. The great monuments and temples in Roman towns were paid for with taxes. Herod the Great who Israel on behalf of Rome taxed the people to expand the Temple in Jerusalem. The tax collectors appear often in stories about Jesus, and people hated that they became relatively rich by charging extra for their own pay. There was no first century middle class. There were a small number of wealthy businessmen and administrators and there were vast numbers of slaves and peasants who owned nothing and paid a high percentage of their own production to the upper class.
Across the Empire were visible monuments to the power and violence of Rome. Each Emperor was thought to be a God and people were required to present sacrifices and offerings to their statues. Carvings on arches and buildings reminded everyone that the Emperors as Rome were raping and murdering their way across the known world, and no one was safe from their reach. Into this moment in time came the followers of Jesus the Anointed, a few thousand of them at most spread across the entire Empire, claiming that Jesus brought “good news” to the oppressed, the poor, the enslaved, the common people. Westar describes this “good news” in this way:
This good news was not about winning a great battle or gaining a material foothold. Nor was it about gaining of assurance of life in the hereafter. What made a difference for these communities was caring for one another, bestowing forgiveness, being fed, finding a future, and being surrounded by companions. No wonder student sages mused, “You are the salt of the earth…the light for the world…Don’t fret about your life – what you’re going to eat or drink – or your body – what you’re going to wear…Take a look at the birds of the sky: they don’t…gather into barns…You are to seek God’s domain and…justice first, and all these things will come to you as a bonus.” (Mat. 5:13, 14; 6:25, 26, 33).
Flying under the radar of Rome’s domination, small groups who styled themselves after Jesus’ way, lived in this repressive time with joy. They kept their heads down, watched out for one another, made sure everyone had enough to eat and a place to sleep. They became friends of one another and of Jesus and resisted Rome by living differently than their oppressors. They were kind, honest and just. They demonstrated compassion and mercy. None of those qualities was built into the fabric of their daily lives, but they discovered that there was goodness in living by different standards than the rest of the world. They found peace and joy in the teachings of Jesus and their connection to each other.
In our lives we assume that justice is a given. That those who work hard can prosper. That all people are equal, and opportunity is for everyone. That is our experience, but it’s not the experience of most people of color in our nation. It’s not the experience of the world’s people who live in extreme poverty, in developing nations and in our own town. It’s not the experience today of the people of Ukraine who have been invaded to assuage the vanity of Putin and his cronies. The first followers of Jesus have more in common with those folks than they do with us. We believe we can have a positive impact on our nation and our community – they knew they could not. So they didn’t try to make the world a better place. They simply lived in a better way. They weren’t confronting power. They were hearing good news about community and connection and support for one another and living that good news into their daily reality. In the midst of extreme hardship, they were finding joy and telling others it was life-changing. Just like folks in our time are living through danger, persecution and war and maintaining their humanity. They are the ones who can teach us about what it means to follow Jesus in a first century way. If we let them.