The Reign of God, that for which we pray for each time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, always stands in contrast to the reign of the powers and principalities of this world. When we call Jesus King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and Prince of Peace, we use titles that Caesar had claimed for himself. When the Angels proclaimed to the shepherds outside Bethlehem that they carried good tidings of great joy which shall be for all people, they drew on the formula used to announce the ascension of a new Roman Emperor. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday on a donkey and the people waved branches and threw their coats on the ground to make a path for him, shouting “Hosanna to the King of Kings,” the whole scene was a subversion of a Roman military procession that would have likely happened before passover each year.
The Pax Christi, the peace of Christ, stands in direct contrast to and subversion of the Pax Romana, the Roman peace carried out through the establishment of widespread fear across the known world of Rome’s ability to dish out death to any who dare to defy them. The Roman peace through strength and fear is the polar opposite of the peace of God which passes all understanding and operates not through the fear of death but through the life-giving power of self-sacrificial love. Jesus is precisely the anti-Caesar (which is very much to say that Caesar, and his imperial successors today, are the anti-Christ).
When Christians make the sign of the cross to mark our lives as being God’s, we subvert the greatest weapon in Caesar’s arsenal of terror, a dreaded instrument of torture unto death the mere threat of which could cower peoples into line with the Roman dictates. When we make the sign of the cross, we proclaim that love is stronger than death, that hope is stronger than fear, and that the worst the powers and principalities of this world can do to us cannot break us nor destroy us, because Christ has beaten down death by victory, and death’s sting is gone.
As you might realize by checking the calendar, though, today is neither Christmas nor Palm Sunday nor even Easter. So why, today of all days, am I emphasizing the contrast between Imperial Peace and Christian Peace?
The theological influences who most shaped my life so far have established August 6 as something of the moral axis about which the modern world revolves. Today is the feast of the Transfiguration, Jesus’s transformation in dazzling light into a glorious preview of the splendor of the Reign of God. But 78 years ago today, in dazzling brightness accompanied by a towering mushroom cloud that reached up to the heights of the heavens, the city of Hiroshima was transfigured to oblivion in a radiant display of the apex of humankind’s death-dealing powers.
From the days of Moses, God has called heaven and earth to witness that humankind has been offered life and death, blessings and curses, and invited us to choose life so that we and our descendants may live. Do we seek to thrive by increasing our grasp on the mechanisms that can deal out death to those we would seek to control (the essence of idolatry), or do we seek to thrive by emptying ourself and submitting to a life of humble service and even to death – death on a cross! – for the wellbeing of all God’s creation, even those who would call us enemies? Do we seek what Caesar calls “peace” through power over others, or do we seek the true peace of Christ through love and service? Does peace come from our capacity to nurture life, or from our capacity to dole out death?
From the theological perspective that shaped me, August 6 is where these two worldviews collide: from the moment of the Transfiguration onward, Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem, toward the death on the cross that he knew was the destination ordained by the life of liberation he led, knowing that the powers and principalities of this world would not consent to coexist with his ministry that set the prisoner free and proclaimed good news to the poor. This feast marked Jesus’ pivot from the gathering phase of his ministry to the final showdown with the forces of death, a showdown that could only lead to the resurrection, but could also only lead there through immense suffering. August 6 marked Jesus embrace of the vulnerability that would lead to his ultimate triumph.
But also August 6, 1945 marked a milestone in humankind’s ability to kill one another, to transfigure our world into an uninhabitable hellscape of fire and brimstone beyond Dante’s imagination with the added feature of deadly radiation bring painful later death upon those who survived the first wave death or even visiting its deadliness upon the children of survivors, themselves warped by the deadly impact of the bomb’s radiation.
If Moses set before us the choice between life and death, the nuclear arms race marked humankind’s fullest embrace of the capacity to kill – to overkill with an arsenal whose lethal capacity numbers beyond the population of the world, with a nuclear arsenal that could kill each person on the planet multiple times over and still have more bombs in reserve.
Given that the wages of sin are death, the embrace of nuclear arms makes the modern era most firmly the fruit of the most capital of sins, the capacity to kill of not a single person, as Cain first did, bringing murder into the human story and God’s curse upon himself, but the capacity to kill all of humankind and render the earth uninhabitable.
Thus, I was shaped to believe that as sin is equated to dealing in death, nuclear war is the ultimate sin and the chiefest moral problem of our age.
What people in the generations that have come after me have known almost instinctually but it took me much longer to figure out is that humankind’s capacity to make choices that could render our world uninhabitable do not stop with the atom bomb. Climate change is the new atom bomb. Humanity’s collective ability to kill of so much of life on earth no longer relies on someone deciding to pull the trigger, to launch the missiles, to fail to reach the conclusion that when it comes to nuclear confrontation, the only winning move is not to play. Every day that goes by without dramatic action to reign in greenhouse gasses is taking a step toward the equivalent of a nuclear missile launch that will someday (but we do not know when) become irreversible.
I hadn’t seen it. I hadn’t seen how the moral urgency behind preventing nuclear war is the precursor to the same moral urgency behind preventing catastrophic climate change. And as individuals, we feel powerless in both struggles, able to shape neither national policy about nuclear weapons nor global policies that shape the emissions that could be destroying our livable world. But in each case, God calls us to faithful resistance to the powers and principalities of death. In both cases, God calls us, on this feast of the Transfiguration, to be transformed into glowing agents of God’s love and light, to resist the forces of death and denial that would deny our collective human descendants the chance to live in the glory for which God created us.
On this August 6, God has set before us life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life, so that we and our descendants may live.
