#hauerwas

Gentleness is given to those who have learned that God will not have his kingdom triumph through the violence of the world, for such a triumph came through the meekness of a cross.

‘Herod is a pawn used by Rome to maintain order useful to Rome. Jesus is born in an occupied land, a small outpost, on the edge of a mighty empire. Jesus is eventually killed under Rome’s authority, and at the time his death will mean nothing to Rome. … Rome knew how to deal with enemies: you kill them or co-opt them. But how do you deal with a movement, a kingdom whose citizens refuse to believe that violence will determine the meaning of history? The movement that Jesus begins is constituted by people who believe that they have all the time in the world, made possible by God’s patience, to challenge the world’s impatient violence by cross and resurrection. Too often the political significance of Jesus’ birth, a significance that Herod understood all too well, is lost because the church, particularly the church in America, reads the birth as a confirmation of the assumed position that religion has within the larger framework of politics. That is, the birth of Jesus is not seen as a threat to thrones and empires because religion concerns the private.’

We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God's kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.

‘To be kind is to learn how to be a creature with other creatures without regret. To be kind is to learn how to receive kindness from others without protection. To be kind is to be drawn into God’s good creation without fear. To be kind is to be disposed to trust the gifts of others that quite literally make life possible. To be kind is to know when not to speak because nothing can be said that is not false. To be kind is the willingness to be present when nothing can be said or done to make things better.’

‘Christian hope reaches out beyond this world toward a future world of freedom in which real communication is possible. Such freedom should not be confused with the autonomy promised by captalist societies, that is, the freedom associated with the bourgeois secular city in which we suffer nothing other than having to endure our own desires. Rather the Christian seeks to transform the media of domination into the media of communication, in which people are free to love one another without fear.’

Other Words: Four More Cries from the Cross

‘As [Jonathan] Tran memorably states, because Christians have learned to tell time doxologically they are not allowed to do nothing but rather they believe they can do anything. In particular Tran argues that the Eucharistic memory that shapes all Christian worship “makes possible the impossibility of forgiveness and that presages a politics of memory revolutionary in a world fixed on revenge/forgetting.”.’