Easter in the corridors of power.
November 14, 2008

RADIO 2CBA FOCAL POINT COMMENTARY BROADCAST ON FRIDAY APRIL 21st, 2000 ON RADIO 2CBA FM.

Easter is a good time for remembering what happens when religious authorities become too happy walking along the corridors of power. They can easily end up serving Mammon rather than God.

Disarming Times is the magazine of Pax Christi Australia, the Australian end of Pax Christi International, one of the world’s most influential ecumenical organizations fostering the spiritual and scriptural dimensions of peacemaking.

Recent editions of the magazine have contained items by Shirley Hosking and Margaret Holmes on the gospel imperative of non-violence.

One aspect of this discussion that caught my eye was the speculation about what happened to the church when the Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity 1700 years ago and he made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire.

Until that point, Christianity had been on the fringe of the empire. Until then, Christians had believed in obeying gospel imperatives, such as turning the other cheek, returning no person evil for evil, loving one’s enemies and doing good to those that hate you. They had chosen to serve God rather than Mammon.

But once Christianity became the religion of the empire, there was a need to create theories to justify the use of force in certain cases, hence the interest in theories of the “just war”.

In other words, instead of focussing on the Kingdom of God, Christian scholars had to help rulers make sense of how they were to govern their own secular empire on Christian grounds. Therefore, they were drawn into all the day to day business of government.

Over time, some Christian authorities used the power of the state for their own purposes. There were no Christian “holy wars” before the conversion of Constantine 1700 years ago – there could not be so because the early Christians lacked the means as well as the motive for doing so.

It is worth recalling that at that the first Easter, although there was a mob calling for the death of Jesus, the mob did not do the killing. That could only be done by the government of the day. The crucifixion was judicial murder – and not a lynching by an angry mob.

Jesus was an outsider and He was not trying to create His own religious state. But the religious authorities of His day had become too close to the corridors of power and so deemed Him a threat to their standing. Therefore he had to be killed.

Therefore, some of the best witnesses for Jesus have been outsiders. These people have not been close to ruling authorities and so they have been able to stand back and criticize what was happening in their society.

As Margaret Holmes recommends: “Perhaps a study of their lives could show the international Christian Peace Movement the way forward and would also provide us with some answers on how to “overcome evil with good” peace and love.