“Blog for advent “ (rejected)
Reading Luke this year brings up some important issues I hope Sojo will consider addressing. Attached is an essay I've written that may be challenging to read but important given the season and the prescribed readings for Advent. I am sharing it with a small number of online outlets, so please let me know if you would like to reserve it. Thank you!
At the end of the year training bases across the United States shut down to let recruits and drill instructors return home for Christmas and New Years. In December 2000 we called this tradition “Exodus.” The Biblical imagery was informal, but reflects the fact that a higher percentage of soldiers identify with Christianity than civilians do. My own service came on the heels of four years of high school youth group, and Christmas Exodus was a welcome respite after the grueling experience of basic combat training.
This year the Church is reading from Luke, the same Gospel I listened to seven lectionary cycles ago in candle-lit Advent services as a trainee. Luke is an especially interesting text for Christian soldiers because it and its sequel, the book of Acts, contains the most nuanced perspective on military service in the New Testament. You may not realize this if you only hear scripture interpreted by civilians. Let’s take a look at a handful of particularly important texts prescribed for
On the third Sunday of Advent, we read about John baptizing the crowds that come to him at the Jordan River in Luke 3. Verse 14, in which some soldiers ask his advice, has frequently been reduced to little more than a silent toleration of military service; they are not told to leave the military, so John must not have an issue with soldiering per se. This is how Augustine interpreted the passage in his second letter to General Boniface in 418 CE and it remains the rule rather than the exception. But John’s situation, and ours, calls for closer attention
In John and Jesus’ lifetimes, there were no Roman soldiers in Judaea, at least not fair-skinned Italian legionaries. In Galilee, Antipas was allowed to maintain an indigenous force he inherited from his father, Herod 1. Judaea was a sub-province of Roman Syria and, while centurions may have been low-status foreigners, most recruits were Syrian auxiliaries incentivized, just like I was, by a steady income and the promise of veterans benefits and citizenship. In first century Palestine, most soldiers performed administrative and judicial duties, like accompanying tax collectors. John does not assume his “baptism of repentance” (vv. 3,8) for them includes going to war and/or killing because that is not what most soldiers did, then or now.
As a member of an infantry platoon throughout my combat service, I was in the minority in the military. According to a 2010 study, 74% of soldiers in developed nations are service and support personnel who may never see frontline fighting and whose interaction with a firearm is more for qualification than killing. In the United States, that number was 84%, second only to Switzerland’s 93%. In Jesus’ lifetime and our own, most soldiers never see conventional combat and will never be put in a position to have to kill another person.
These facts escape most theologians and pastors because most, like the evangelists, are civilians. In the absence of direct experience of their own, they are forced to rely on stereotypes and half-truths and mistake their personal bias for Gospel truth. It is Richard Hays’ scholarly opinion, for example, that “the place of the soldier within the church can only be seen as anomalous.” (Moral Vision, p.337) George Kalantzis, on the other hand, did serve briefly in the army, but he seems to normalize the hyperbole of basic training, claiming “what is asked of soldiers is to kill.” (Caesar and the Lamb, p.8) However misled, this condescending language has scriptural precedent, and pacifist theologians have a friend in John. After calling everyone there to repent and be baptized a “brood of vipers,” he adds a jab at the soldiers, brow-beating them as “fig polishing” sycophants. Soldier-shaming may be cheap fodder for progressive culture warriors like John, but Jesus takes a far more realistic and moderating stance toward military service.
If you only use the revised common lectionary for Sundays, you may miss the readings from Luke 7 on the second and third Wednesdays of the daily reading schedule. After healing the servant of a Herodian military officer and raising a boy from the dead, John sends disciples to ask his relative “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (v.19) It’s unlikely that raising a boy from the dead caused John to doubt Jesus’ divinity, the passage instead suggests that anti-militarism has blinded John to the radical inclusiveness of Jesus’ ministry. That’s why Jesus’ parting message to John’s disciples is “blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” (v.23) John is not merely blinded by his bias, he is offended that soldiers get treated with respect, even praise, when they respond favorably to Jesus’ good news.
In case there is any doubt in readers’ minds, verse 29 clarifies that the soldiers of chapter 3:14 were baptized, making them proto-Christians and the first soldiers of faith. The narrative then returns to Jesus and his teaching to drive home that the disagreement between He and John was over soldiering. This does not put them at odds, however, and Jesus draws a parallel between them, saying in verse 34;
For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’
Jesus uses sarcasm to point out that outsiders will find a way to cast aspersions upon the bearers of good news, ‘If they can’t accuse us of gluttony and drunkenness, they’ll say we’re possessed.’ He warns his own disciples not just about biases in general, but specifically anti-military bias. Luke 7 has no tax collectors, the reference in verse 35 is a callback to Luke 3:14, where we see not “tax collectors and sinners,” but tax collectors and soldiers. The whole chapter is Luke’s warning to so-called believers who can’t see past their own anti-military bias.
If all you see in soldiers is sin, then Jesus has some harsh words for you. Reducing all soldiers to sword-wielders or trigger pullers is not only a false narrative, it is also a stumbling block to those who look to scholars and pastors for spiritual guidance. As a new generation of recruits listen intently to our Advent and Christmas services, beware not to lead them astray by false teachings and toxic theology. Rather be prepared to be led by the least of us, from suckling babes to new recruits, into the good news that salvation is radically, offensively inclusive.
@ 1208 from Josiah Daniels
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