Politics of Jesus: An Introduction

In September 2001, most of our lives, particularly in the United States, were altered forever. For the first time my generation could remember, we clearly understood that some in the world hated us. It was a time to ask serious questions about what it means to be Americans, and for some of us what it means to be a Christian. For me, questions centering on violence, enemies, politics, Jesus and the gospel all came together in one place. This one place, was not Ground Zero, the Pentagon or a farm in Pennsylvania, it was in a little book written by a Mennonite in 1972. Just over 25 years after it was first written, John Howard Yoder’s seminal work, The Politics of Jesus, provided me with the crucial tools necessary to salvage my faith and engage this new world breaking in all around me.
During the seven plus years that have followed my first reading of Politics of Jesus I would guess that I have read through it at least ten more times. It has also been my practice to convince as many people as possible to read through it, though this has been a largely unsuccessful effort. Along the way I have had the chance to teach some of the material in this book to youth and college students, particularly in Sunday School classes and have learned a great deal in doing so. One of the consistent responses to Yoder’s work has been that it is simply too difficult to get into. Whatever value there is in Politics of Jesus is lost amongst my well meaning friends, because Yoder is operating with categories that they can not move around in. After years of hearing this criticism, and a number of pleas from the aforementioned friends, I have finally decided to attempt something like a brief, guided tour through The Politics of Jesus. I will attempt to point out any crucial places, while highlighting key ideas for how we might think through what it would look like to call ourselves Christians in the times we find ourselves.
One final note, The Politics of Jesus once in a while gets easily dismissed as a book about pacifism. Yoder no doubt feeds this misconception in his preface to the first edition when he claims that the meaning of the book is, “On the least sophisticated, most argumentative level, it is the simple rebound of a Christian pacifist commitment as it responds to the ways in which mainstream Christian theology has set aside the pacifist implications of the New Testament message.” Despite Yoder’s intentions otherwise, I am going to respectfully disagree. This book I believe is only secondarily about pacifism, it is in fact much more so about Jesus. A book only on pacifism would certainly not stick around and continue to have the sort of impact this book has had two generations later, but a book that speaks the truth about Jesus might in fact have that sort of staying power. This point is poignantly made in the final line of the book:
Vicit agnus noster, eum sequamur: Our Lamb has conquered; him let us follow.
The Politics of Jesus is fundamentally about what it might look like to follow our Lamb, Jesus who was crucified and resurrected to conquer death and bring reconciliation to the world, and that sort of book is well worth reading through.