God’s Kingdom is Revolutionary

The Writer
March 1942

“Was your Jesus apolitical, Reverend? Quiescent, like Moravians, like German Brethren? Like some monk in his bare cell, praying for the world but avoiding it? Keeping to himself with his little band of merry men?”

“You think that’s what got Jesus crucified? Being quiet?”

Camus stands, pours the coffee, offers a biscuit. Trocmé accepts the one, declines the other.

“I’m just asking. I’ve been trying to understand what’s happening in German churches and not a few French ones— everyone’s keeping to themselves, curling up in their thick blankets of piety, not staining their hands with politics. Are they looking to Jesus and saying, ​‘See, he ignored social corruption. There’s Herod, doing his killing and robbing, and here’s Jesus, preaching about heaven, fussing about petty morality, warning you not to look at a pretty woman and feel aroused.’ Why not mount a resistance movement? Incite his followers to overthrow evil powers? His followers expected this, did they not? What a force this Jesus might have been. So charismatic. People willing to give him money, time, their very lives. Why not channel all that into a real revolution? Instead he ignored it.”

“That’s a common enough interpretation,” Trocmé says. ​“And in one sense, accurate. But in another, it’s not. The kingdom of God was the central message in everything Jesus said. In an age of empire, that’s hardly an apolitical idea. If you keep saying there’s a king but he’s not Caesar, there’s a kingdom but it’s not Rome— you think this is quiescent? You think Tiberius or Herod found it so?

“No, Albert. Jesus was not killed for being apolitical. He was killed — by both religion and empire — precisely because he was political, dangerously political. He struck both religion and empire at the heart. Not with armies. Not with weapons. Not with military tactics. Those would have weakened him or revealed essential weakness. No, he struck religion and empire where they’re most vulnerable: their ideas. The idea that Caesar is god. The idea that religion is the possession of some ruling elite, never to be challenged. Such ideas are fragile, tenuous. The only way to keep them safe is to never question them. Surround them with all the apparatus of wealth and power — laws, armies, tanks, bombers. Flog, imprison, crucify, throw in death camps anyone who says otherwise, who even thinks otherwise.

“And then one day this poor wanderer Jesus comes along with his little band of scoundrels and misfits, hardly a possession to his name. A curator of lost causes, him. And he says, ​‘Rome’s lying. Herod’s lying. The Sanhedrin, they’re lying. Vichy’s lying. The Reich is lying. Militarism is a lie. The truth is not what you’ve heard.’ Then Jesus says, ​‘But I’m not here to argue this with Herod or Caesar, with Caiaphas or Annas, with Hitler or Pétain. I’m not trying to convince them. They’re set. They’ll only shout louder, reach for more weapons. No, I’m simply here to unmask them. To pull back the curtain and expose their illusion. And I’m going to resurrect an old idea, very ancient, very fresh. An idea about God and his ways, God and his politics. I’m going to announce that God’s kingdom is here, right now, and you are actually free. Not in the future. Now. All debts canceled. All slaves released. The Year of Jubilee.’ And that announcement, my friend? That announcement is very dangerous. Very political. Always.”

Camus looks at him for an uncomfortably long time.

“Forgive me, Pastor— my Catholic influence is rioting right now. It’s funny how protective I feel about something I abandoned long ago, if ever I embraced it. My Jesuit friend Father Bruckberger keeps me, I suppose, tethered to it somewhat. But the priest — even the one mere footsteps from where your congregation gathers — the priest would say that Jesus died for theological reasons, not political ones. He died to bring personal redemption. Not to unmask Rome or Jerusalem. Isn’t this how all Christians see it?”

“Why can’t it be both? He came to unmask the pretensions of religion and politics. And he came to bring salvation. Why not both? Indeed, don’t they go together? Isn’t my realizing the bankruptcy of my own thinking a necessary condition to receiving salvation?”

“Hmm. You can split hairs into smaller and smaller strands. All these little wisps. The rumor is that you are a committed pacifist. True?”

“Yes, now. Once I was not. But now I am.”

“And if I understand you, your pacifism is, in your mind at least, not quiescence. Not another form of doing nothing. It’s even, maybe, revolutionary?”

“You understand me better than many of my own people. They think my pacifism is traitorous, that I’m turning my back on our nation. Advocating compliance with, even submission to, evil. But my pacifism is revolution. Eschewing all the ways of violence that never work, that always fail, that only breed more violence. All systems self-perpetuate. Violence begets violence. Hate, hate. Fear, fear. But also peace, peace. My pacifism is not abdication. It strikes at the heart of evil by refusing to do evil.”

“And this is working?”

Trocmé laughs bitterly. ​“Not yet. The kingdom, it’s slow. Tiny to begin. A mustard seed. A net with mostly bad fish hauled in.”

“Sometimes you speak in riddles, Pastor.”

“Even to myself. But I listen to this little man Hitler screaming in Berlin. People cheering wildly. The louder he gets, the louder they get. It all seems unstoppable. But is it? Will it not, in time, undo itself? … ”