Ted Grimsrud—October 14, 2025
Christian pacifism challenges mainstream Christianity by arguing that Jesus’s life and teaching actually do provide direct guidance for politics. Jesus, like the rest of the Bible, offers a direct alternative to the politics of empire and domination. Christians have misrepresented the Bible insofar as they have embraced uncritical nationalism. My realization that Jesus does give us a realistic peaceable direction caused me to turn away from my nationalistic embedded theology and never look back. In this post I will offer a summary of that peaceable direction.
Jesus affirmed that Torah and the prophets reveal God’s will for the world. When he taught with authority, showed love with his healing, and called together a community to embody the justice of God in the world, he fulfilled the Old Testament. Jesus’s life incurred the deadly wrath of the religious and political leaders. God raising Jesus from the dead in defiance of the leaders’ verdict of condemnation vindicated Jesus’s message. Jesus culminates the political message of the Old Testament when he critiques empire, rejects territorial kingdom as the channel for God’s promise to bless all the families of the earth, and the embodies Torah as the alternative to the ways of the nations. Like Torah and the prophets, Jesus practices power as service, offers compassion and justice for the vulnerable, and resists the powers of domination.
Politics and the gospels
The gospels present Jesus as a king. The gospel of Matthew begins with “an account of the genealogy of Jesus the Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1). Christians tend to think of “Christ” as a religious term having to do with the divine identity of Jesus Christ, the savior. However, it literally means “king,” a political leader. The descriptor of Jesus that follows in Matthew 1:1, “son of David” confirms the political sense of “Messiah.” David stands as the paradigmatic king in ancient Israel, a kind of ideal king.
The rejection of the OT territorial kingdom points ahead to an alternative way to imagine the peoplehood. God never revoked Abraham’s vocation to bless all the families of the earth. If not as a territorial kingdom, then how will the promise be embodied? Jesus will be in continuity with David’s role in carrying on the promise (a great leader for the peoplehood). However, he will be in discontinuity in that his political path will not be to lead a territorial kingdom like David. The gospels provide an account for this alternative political path.
For Jesus to be perceived as a king challenged the empires of the world. Matthew tells of King Herod, who served as Rome’s client king in the region of Judea. Though Herod remained king for a long time, his status always seemed precarious. That a king might arise to reclaim the throne of David in opposition to Roman clients frightened him. Herod learns of Jesus’s birth and his identity when some traveling “wise men from the East” spoke of the birth of a “child who has been born king of the Jews” (Mt 2:1-2). To eliminate this threat, Herod kills many newborn children (Mt 2:16). Angels warn Jesus’s parents, and they manage to escape to Egypt.
From the start, we learn that Jesus will bring genuine peace to the families of the earth and thus set himself against the powers that be. His birth signals a new intervention from God that harkens back to the previous great intervention when God brought liberation to the enslaved Hebrews in Egypt. Jesus’s name means “God saves” or “God liberates.” Jesus’s birth evokes God hearing the Hebrews’ cry amidst their enslavement in Egypt. The gospels tell a new story of empowerment for healing. The exodus repudiated the ways of Egypt and created an alternative, so the ministry of Jesus repudiates the ways of Rome and led to the creation of an alternative.
The agenda of an upside-down king
Mark’s gospel tells how John the Baptist baptized Jesus, a commission as he begins his ministry. Upon Jesus’s baptism, God names him “God’s son,” a synonym with the “Messiah.” Jesus has a kingly vocation. He retreats to the wilderness as the final step in clarifying that vocation. He encounters “the devil” (Lk 4:1) who challenges Jesus. What kind of king (“Christ”) will Jesus be? Will Jesus claim dominating power and trust in Satan or embrace a vulnerable power and trust God in face of suffering and even seeming defeat. Satan offers Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world” because, Satan claims, “it has been given over to me” (Lk 4:6). Jesus says no and sets off to provide an alternative to the satanic dynamics of the empires of the world.
Mark sets the agenda for Jesus’s mission: “Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the good news” (Mk 1:14-15). The term “good news” commonly referred to deeds of the emperor. “Good news of God” tells us that Jesus offers an alternative to the emperor. “The kingdom of God is at hand” tells us that Jesus brings an especially focused reminder of the message of Torah. Jesus accepts the conclusion offered in the Old Testament. The kingdom of God insofar as it centers on the love and justice articulated in Torah will be a contrast society in relation to the territorial kingdoms of the world and not linked with any territorial kingdom.
Jesus offers a simple command: “Repent.” Turn from the injustices and dominations and false gods of the nations and the great empires, and turn toward the ways of shalom (peace). Trust not in the great ones of the world. Trust not in the structures and ideologies that demand loyalty due to God alone nor in the practices of coercion and retribution. Trust, instead, in the ways of love and compassion as demonstrated in the life and teaching of the king (“Christ”).
Jesus gets to work
Jesus will bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight for the blind, and freedom for the oppressed, i.e., “proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Lk 4:18-19). He will reorder the social order and bring justice and healing for the vulnerable. He will turn the social elite from domination. He continues to preach “the good news of the kingdom of God” (Lk 4:43) and calls together of his first disciples (5:1-11). In his teaching such as the sermon on the mount, he reinterprets the message of Torah for his time and place.
Jesus offers a succinct summary of the message of Torah: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Mt 22:37-40). Jesus’s reordering requires displacing the territorial kingdoms, the great empires, as objects of ultimate loyalty.
Jesus’s agenda puts him in direct conflict with Rome. However, he based his challenge on love and compassion, healing and mercy, welcome and respect. He did not try to replace the structures of domination through the violence of most revolutionaries. He challenges his listeners to be servants of the vulnerable and generous toward all (see Mk 10:42-45).
The story’s dark turn—and its reversal
As the gospels recount Jesus’s ministry, the hostility of the Powers always lurks. Jesus prepared his followers. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Lk 9:23-24). “Take up the cross” meant live mercifully even in face of opposition. People knew the “cross” as the empire’s method of execution. The empire used it against people seen as threats to its security and dominating power. Jesus’s work will inevitably be seen as a threat to the empire. He “set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Lk 9:51). The kingdom Jesus embodies will clash with the status quo kingdom of Rome and its Judean collaborators. This clash will result in Jesus’s death—but death will not have the final word.
Jesus faced major conflicts with three main groups of opponents: the Pharisees over proper understandings and applications of the Law (Torah); the Sadducees over the authority of the Temple and its role in the people’s lives; and the Roman Empire and its governor in Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate, over Jesus’s messianic identity.
Jesus taught that the law’s deeper meaning (i.e., mercy) allows for flexibility in how the details are practiced, as long as we serve human well-being. The Pharisees practiced a strict consistency, assuming that each piece of the regulation carries equal weight and that to violate one is to violate the whole. Jesus challenged the Pharisees’ practices and offered welcome and forgiveness to those who the Pharisees excluded and declared unclean. Jesus challenged temple religion when he pronounced people forgiven. When he bypassed the temple’s role in the process of dealing with sins, he drew the ire of the temple leaders. When he performed the symbolic act of driving money changers out of the temple, the temple leaders arrested him and convicted him of blasphemy. They then turned him over to the Roman governor, Pilate, in hopes that he would be executed. When Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God, he directly challenged Rome. He echoed the earlier prophetic critiques of the great empires and of Israel’s accommodation to the empires’ ways. He believed his own work would inaugurate this kingdom. When he did not accept the empire’s claims to bring the “gospel” (good news) of peace, he rejected the claim that empire acts on behalf of God.
With Jesus’s death, it appeared that God had been defeated by the almighty empire of the day. Jesus’s followers scattered in despair. However, the violence of the empire did not have the final say. Jesus refused to stay dead. He appeared to his followers on the third day after his execution and called them to regather and continue his work. When God raised Jesus from the tomb, God emphasized that Jesus’s life reflected God’s will for humankind. God absorbed the violence of the empire. God nonviolently kept the promise alive. The structures and ideologies that buttress empire and religious institutions and cultural exclusivism combined to fight against Jesus’s expression of God’s kingdom. In doing so, they did not act as God’s agents as they claimed. Jesus’s resurrection shows these claims of the elites to be exactly wrong. They do not act on God’s behalf when they kill Jesus (or any other similar prophet); rather they rebel against God. The revelation of that rebellion can help all with eyes to see to turn from trusting in those elites and their structures of power.
Jesus’s nonterritorial politics
The politics of the Bible are a politics of justice and peace, not domination and coercion. Jesus relativizes the Roman Empire (and all other nation-states). He embodies the heart of Torah —a message of special care for the vulnerable members of the community; a message of forgiveness and compassion as core political values rather than competition and domination; and a message of an economics of generosity and equality, not selfishness and social stratification. The Powers—the ruling structures of Jesus’s world—presented themselves as God’s agents and demanded people’s loyalty as such. Their deadly response to Jesus, though, reveals them to be rebels against God. Jesus’s steadfast embodiment of God’s love revealed these Powers to be idols and to be unworthy of human loyalty and trust.
When God raised Jesus from the dead, God vindicated Jesus’s politics of compassion and service. He embodies God’s will for all humanity. Jesus reinforced the message of the Old Testament that territorial kingdoms stand in tension with God’s will for human social life. Jesus helps us imagine a nonterritorial politics. The Bible’s concluding text, the book of Revelation, fuels such imagining, as we will see in our next post.
[This is the 13th of a long series of blog posts, “A Christian pacifist in the American Empire” (this link takes you to the series homepage). The 12th post in the series, “Breaking the hold of territorial kingdoms,” may be found by clicking on this link. The 14th post, “Jesus the Lamb challenges empire” may be found by clicking on this link.]
Thinking Pacifism 
I like this post very much, Ted. It stirs up insight within me about humility. I also love the image you chose for the post.
Thank you, Kathleen.
Well explained and stated. Your good explanation of Jesus’ political (and economic) context is important, and way too little understood by most people, Christians included.
On the important point of a non-terrotorial kingdom, I wonder if we Christians tend to overlook the positive effects of the emergent forms of “rabbinic” Judiasm that followed the destruction of the Temple and the organizational system of much of Judaism…. After the devastation – death and deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews – in 70 AD, made nearly complete in 135, Jews took Torah (physically, and as teachings) all over the Mediterranean region.
This had begun much before, but was accelerated. Now, tithes from the Diaspora no longer went to the Temple system. Sacrifices were abandoned. Jews were generally given special permission for non-Roman religious organizing and teaching, etc., but were also persecuted in ways similar to Christians.
When local or regional discrimination or persecution hit them, Jews’ response was often to concentrate on what service areas were open to them. Thus, in later centuries leading into modern times, they had preserved and advanced professions that aided their communities, and ultimately nations, greatly. They generally followed Torah principles of neighborly love and of caring even about “enemies” or oppressors.
I’d think it is fair to say they did indeed practice the principles of a “kingdom of God” without territory… at least territory as defended “borders”, though often living in ghettos. And, in the process, it seems they WERE able to bless “all the nations” (or a good portion of them).
But my knowledge of Jewish history is minimal… what do you or others think?
I like what you say here a lot, Howard. It is precisely what I would argue, too—though I also am not an expert on that material.