Politics of Jesus: Chapter 1, Part 2

Before we move onto the next major section surrounding this messianic ethic, I want to quickly explain what Yoder means by “politics.” He doesn’t bother to explain the term in Politics of Jesus, but he does take the time to walk through what he means by “politics” in one of his other books, Body Politics. In his Body Politics Yoder acknowledges that we tend to think of politics as “what governments do or what ‘politicians’ do, and ‘church’ people can avoid that.” In contrast to this way of thinking about politics, Yoder wants to recognize that, “The Christian community, like any community held together by commitment to important values, is a political reality. That is, the church has the character of a polis (the Greek word from which we get political), namely a structured social body. It has its ways of making decisions, defining membership, and carrying out common tasks. That makes the Christian community a political entity in the simplest meaning of the term.” Put a touch more simply, “To be political is to make decisions, to assign roles, and to distribute powers, and the Christian community cannot do otherwise than exercise these same functions…” While the church is and must be political in the simplest sense of this phrase, the church must also be political beyond the simplest meaning. “Politics affirms an unblinking recognition that we deal with matters of power, of rank and of money, of costly decisions and dirty hands, of memories and feelings. The difference between church and state or between a faithful and an unfaithful church is not that one is political and the other not, but that they are political in different ways.” This understanding of politics is key for us to understand how Yoder thinks of Jesus being political in the Politics of Jesus. For Yoder it is not simply that the church cares about money, power, relationships and costly decisions, it is that the church cares about these political things because Jesus did and does.
With that in mind, we return to the second part of chapter one. By functioning with the aforementioned “Eight ways of making Jesus Irrelevant” our current situation creates a giant need. Because Jesus is fundamentally irrelevant to how we make decisions or live in the world (think about the definition of politics here) the result is we need “Some kind of bridge or transition into another realm…” Yoder uses the image of a bridge to hint at how precarious our situation is without Jesus. The bridge itself is too narrow and rickety to do a lot of good, and if we are to live well than “the substance of ethics must be reconstructed on our side of the bridge.” When we must construct an ethic on our side of the bridge, with little to no help from Jesus, then we will almost always choose “either common sense [or] the nature of things” as the basis for moral living.
Once these foundations for ethics are mixed with a Spiritual Jesus we are left with “a kind of negative feedback into the interpretation of the New Testament itself.” Put another way, this dangerous mixture is self perpetuating. Once you decide Jesus was not political, and you must view the world through either common sense or natural law you begin to develop practices for reading Scripture that make it very difficult to ever hear Jesus as political at all. Yoder rightly warns that if this mixture is permitted to run rampant we will eventually be forced to ask honestly, “Is there such a thing as a Christian ethic at all?” Yoder of course will say that there is. He will attempt to argue “the hypothesis that the ministry and the claims of Jesus are best understood as presenting to hearers and readers not the avoidance of political options, but one particular social-political-ethical option.” In short Yoder will attempt to argue throughout Politics of Jesus that Jesus “is not only relevant but also normative for a contemporary social ethic.” If there is a coherent Christian ethic, then Yoder expects to be able to find it in the gospel accounts of Jesus, and this is precisely where he turns in chapter 2.