Confronting the Powers that Be: Jesus' Answer to Domination (Session 5)

...Almost every sentence Jesus uttered was an indictment of the Domination System or the disclosure of an alternative to it. (TPTB)

Concern for the redress of a particular injustice needs to be seen as part of a larger struggle against the Domination system in its entirety. Social justice campaigns have been hampered by the shortsighted inability to see that larger context. Consequently, the means they use often involve domination. Or class or racial divisions are preserved within the social-change movement. Or male supremacy is imposed by its leadership. Piecemeal efforts for social betterment are often unrelated to each other. There is no larger vision that fuses all such striving into a greater whole. (ETP 107)

Wink gives examples of the divine alternative to domination: the ruler and teacher who serve, economic equality, nonviolence, the equality of women, a new definition of purity and holiness, family as nurture rather than control, law as subordinate to love, and a radically different understanding of sacrificing the eyes of God.

Leadership: Jesus overthrew old forms of power insisting that those who lead should be servants, humble. He acted out that role in the way he led and taught and symbolized it by washing the disciples' feet.

Economic equality: People forget that besides the worship of other gods, the main thing the great prophets of the Hebrew scriptures condemned was the continually recurring disparities of wealth and poverty, the way the rich gathered land and turned people into serfs or slaves. But we are used to interpreting Jesus' teachings in the context of America's extreme individualism and pietism. We have been taught to ignore the actions of great power structures in our society--government, corporations, unions, insurance companies and the like--which can devastate the lives of millions with the stroke of a pen, and, instead, to concentrate on getting to heaven.

Nonviolence: It is equally difficult for us to hear Wink's exegesis of Jesus' on nonviolence. In this one, we like to elevate Jesus to the pedestal of absolute idealist who had charming teachings but is utterly impractical in this kind of world. Wink points out how Jesus exposes the deceptions of the Domination System, how it persuades people that violence saves and violence is necessary, when most violence is related to protecting property and wealth or attaining it. He writes:

A society with an unfair distribution of goods requires violence. Violence is the only way some are able to deprive others of what is justly theirs. Inequality between the rich and the poor can only be maintained by violence. (TPTB 69)

Women: We are only now discovering, with the help of women scholars, how revolutionary Jesus' teachings about women and his treatment of them were. He spoke to women in public; he touched them to heal, even a women who was ceremonially unclean because of bleeding; he healed a crippled woman in the midst of the synagogue, challenging male domination; he let a woman of questionable repute touch him in public; and so on and on. Wink says:

...in every encounter with women in the four gospels, Jesus violated the customs of his time. Indeed, his approach to women had no parallel in "civilized" societies since the rise of patriarchy over three thousand years before his birth. (TPTB)

In contrast to the traditional view that uncleanness was contagious, Jesus regarded holiness/wholeness as contagious. The physician is not overcome by those who are ill, but rather overcomes their illnesses. Thus Jesus touches the leper, the unclean, women, the sick, without fear of contamination. (ETP 117)

I believe Jesus was so consistently disparaging because the family in dominator societies is so deeply embedded in patriarchy, and serves as the citadel of male supremacy, the chief inculcator of gender roles, and a major inhibitor of change. It is in families where most women and children are battered and abused, and where the majority of women are murdered. (TPTB 76)

Law: Paul saw that law, in principle, is good and necessary. In practice, it is unjust and in the shackles of the Domination System. We usually understand this in an individualistic way. But Wink notes:

Law is sucked into the contest for power; it becomes an instrument of violence and a generator of violence, thus limiting its utility as a means of reducing violence. (TPTB 79)

The powers had used their final sanction against Jesus and had failed to silence him. Not even death could hold him. But if a mere Galilean artisan has withstood the entire Domination System and has prevailed, then the power of the Powers is not, after all, ultimate. There is another power at work in the universe that, like water, cuts stone: nonviolent love. (TPTB 80)

2. What does it mean when we are told that the American Christian heresy is a radical individualistic interpretation of scripture? How does the Domination System use individualism to blind us by ruling out discussion of social issues in the churches?

3. The prophets often condemned accumulation of wealth with the impoverishment of many, and judges who took bribes and ruled against poor people in favor of the rich. Where do we see similar behavior in our society?

Copyright © 1998 by Vern Rossman