Scandalous Witness by Lee C. Camp

Author:Lee C. Camp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Assyrian soldiers carry severed heads of their prisoners from the town of “-alammu,” reign of Sennacherib, relief panel, 700–692 BC, from the Southwest Palace at Nineveh, British Museum, London. Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP (Glasg). Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 4.0

The mockery, the indignity, the violence of it all, and the utterly understandable fury that erupts:

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!

Happy shall they be who pay you back

what you have done to us!

Happy shall they be who take your little ones

and dash them against the rock! (vv. 8–9)

This horrific historical plunder of Israel—which continued even after the Persians allowed the people to return to Jerusalem—posed the great question of God’s working in the world over against the strutting might of the bloody empires of the world. Would God allow God’s people to continue to be dominated by the empires? Would the imperial word be the final word? Would the military might of the powerful determine the fate of human history or no?

By the time Jesus comes on the scene in first-century Palestine, there would have been many freedom fighters, numerous false messiahs, all seeking to undo the power of imperial might and kingly bloodletting, themselves often strung up to die and killed mercilessly. And when Herod the Great—that somewhat of a Jewish puppet-king of the Romans—hears from the wise men that a competing king had been born somewhere thereabouts, he plots to kill the newborn babe. But when his violence is foiled, he calls a play from pharaoh’s playbook and kills all the little ones in and around Bethlehem.

It would be this empire, and all empires, to which Jesus’s kingdom would be the great undoing. When Jesus went out preaching, he did not say, “Behold, I come declaring the true religion; embrace your personal relationship with me, and you shall enter heaven when you die.” When Jesus went out preaching, he did not say, “Behold, I come declaring to you the means for you to know personal fulfillment and calm your existential angst.” No, when Jesus went out preaching, he said, as the Synoptic Gospels summarize it: “Change! For God’s kingdom is here.”

Surely the truth revealed in Jesus does have a great deal to say to us about our personal communion with our Maker, and does have a great deal to say about our personal angst and struggles with our own mortality. But the declaration of the good news is summarized in the announcement of a new kingdom in which the bloodletting of history, the injustice of the nations, the brokenness of all manner of institutions, powers, and individual human lives are begun to be set right.

If we would be Christians, then, we must have faith to see the decline of empires—including those from which we may have derived many of our own benefits and power and personal privilege, often at the expense of others—as the inevitable consequence of the coming of God in Christ into the world. More, this does not even require Christian faith. This sort of realism about the manner

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