For some reason, my kids are really bad at geography.
Back in analog times, I remember having these huge vinyl maps that could pull down from a tube mounted to the blackboard in school. Talking about the Sahara desert? Pull down the African continental map and point it out. Talking about West Germany? Pull down Europe and point out where the wall is erected. We had globes in every classroom. I even had a small globe in my bedroom that I bought at a rummage sale. You can see where the USSR was, on the other side of the globe, just by spinning it and watching the oceans and islands and international borders slide by. My freshman year of high school we all had to take a one semester Geography class. We had photocopies of land masses we’d have to color code and label and memorize foreign capitals.
My kids though? No idea. We literally live less than 2 miles from Lake Michigan: one of the largest freshwater lakes on Earth – a perfect way to orient yourself in the city (hint: it’s east!), the state (again, east!), and the country (the Great Lakes are up at the top in a blue clump). When we look at maps together, they get confused: where’s Wisconsin in relation to Canada or the Atlantic Ocean, where is India or Ethiopia or Norway?
The maps in your head
Our conception of “the world” is limited to what we’ve learned about geography. To some, “the world” is limited to the confines of your neighborhood. To others, “the world” is your country of origin and whatever happens elsewhere is of little concern. To a privileged few “the world” is made up of all the countries in which you’ve vacationed or studied abroad or taken gap years. We are in an age of globalism where international food and music can be right outside our front door, where international tv, movies and sports is a click or premium subscription away. Our experiences of “the world” vary, but most people have had direct contact with someone or something from another place. When we talk about “the whole world”, we all picture some version of the spherical earth – maybe a NASA video we saw online or a weather radar image from a news broadcast about a tsunami or even that old globe in the corner of the library. “The whole world” is most of the “cool” countries we can remember off the top of our head (Iceland, Australia, Ghana, Japan), and then if we sat down we could probably remember a bunch more of the lesser-known ones (looking at you Federated States of Micronesia).
Climate change has us thinking about “the whole world” more than ever. The Amazon rain forest, flooding in Tuvalu, glaciers in the Arctic circle. The choices we make at the grocery store and birthday shopping online effect farmers in Mexico and garment workers in Indonesia. “The whole world” is at our finger tips and on our mind.
In 1st century Palestine, “the whole world” meant something different. When people spoke of “the whole world”, they meant the Roman empire. Let me just pull down a map here… [*vinyl map unspooling sound intensifies*]
The worlds we inhabit
The writers of scripture used the Greek word oikoumene, which has been translated with the phrase “the whole world” or “the inhabited earth.” In context, it can almost always be alternately translated “the Roman empire” or just “the empire.” The Greeks used the word to refer to their own “world” as a distinctly separate place from “the barbarians” (ie. anyone not Greek). When Rome took over, the word came to be associated with the Roman empire or even “all the subjects of the Roman empire.” Luke 2:1 is a good example of this usage:
Now in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of oikoumene
A census was taken of “the whole world” according to English translations. The decree had nothing to do with China. What is being stated plainly to audiences of the time was “A census was taken of the Roman empire.” They didn’t have vinyl maps or spinny globes. When people in ancient times spoke of the world, they meant the world they experienced. The world that effected their daily lives. The world of family, villages, trade routes, agriculture, temples and – somewhere far away – the emperor. They knew a little about other ethnic groups and empires, but not much, and certainly did not include the Han or the Bantu or the Maya or the Saami in their descriptions of “the whole world.” Here’s Jesus speaking in Matthew 24:
This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in oikoumene as a testimony to [all the nations]
Jesus is instructing his disciples to preach his message across the empire, to every subject of the empire – don’t leave anyone out. [NOTE: That bracketed bit is a whole other post.] Do I mean to say Jesus’ knowledge of geography or people groups was limited in any way? Do I mean to say Jesus was excluding anyone outside the Roman empire? Not exactly. But I am saying the words the author of Matthew chose to communicate Jesus’ message had a specific meaning to their audience. I’m saying that the original disciples of Jesus (and a little later, Paul) were given a very specific task – and by all rights accomplished it.
Look, here’s that map again, but this time it’s just the part where Jesus lived, died and resurrected. Where all his miracles and teachings and travels took place. Where “The Way” (as it was known in the early 1st century) originated.
And I’m probably being generous with the size of that circle. During the disciples’ lifetime, The Way spread across oikuomene (the entire empire). The historical account of that happening is captured a little in the book of Acts. Here’s one testimony from a seaside village in ancient Macedonia (today’s Greece):
These people who have disquieted oikuomene have come to this region as well, and Jason has welcomed them, and they all act in opposition to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.
Resistance through remediation
By claiming Jesus as their king, they are not only opposing Caeser, they are disrupting the peace of the empire. Pax Romana (or Pax Augustus) was not so much an absence of violence as it was an absolute dominance by so formidable a power that open revolt was almost unthinkable. “The peace enjoyed by a domesticated animal, kept solely for what it could produce,” as Neville Morley writes in The Roman Empire: Roots of Imperialism.
Acts chapter 19 tells three stories of the kind of disruptions The Way is causing throughout the empire. The most detailed account is of a group of laborers and artisans whose “wealth depends on this business” of crafting shrines to the goddess Artemis (Diana). Paul, we learn by testimony of these artisans, “persuaded and turned away a considerable number of people, saying that gods made by hands are not gods at all.” This is a serious disruption to a religious system, but more than that it is a serious economic and social disruption.
In Roman society worshipping at temples was a religious act but it was also a civic act. It united the disparate people under Roman rule and it supplied food, art, taxes, festivals, songs, prayers, entertainment used to create a social identity across the empire. It was this imperial cohesion that was at stake, it was the precarious unity of citizens, slaves, allies, colonies, aristocrats, soldiers, farmers that was at stake. The economic engine of oikuomene was at stake.
Later, Paul is arrested and charged with inciting political revolts among the people:
This man is stirring up insurrection among the Jews – like a plague throughout oikuomene – as a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes.
Translation decisions effect how we understand the text. In this case, there are many instances of this word oikuomene that bring added clarity to the story of the earliest followers of Jesus. The point in scripture is often this: the beliefs and practices of the people of The Way were direct challenges to the rule of imperial Rome. Nero went so far as to proclaim himself “god and saviour of the oikoumene.” By claiming that Jesus is our king, Christians are committing treason against every empire, whether it’s the 1st century or the 21st. Christians, when confronted with the powers of empire, must resist – as scripture calls us. No imperial or colonizing power is a threat to God’s reign; there are no competing authorities or co-rulers with Jesus. On the contrary these powers must be resisted by the people of God if they prove themselves to be engines of injustice. If the Christian is comfortable within any empire, she has forgotten her calling.
In Luke’s biography of Jesus, he includes a story of Jesus being tempted to give up his calling. Jesus finds himself face to face with the Enemy (in Greek, diabolos), who offers Jesus the keys to the empire if he would but bow to him:
And he led Him up and showed Him all the authority of oikuomene in a moment of time. And the devil said to Him, “I will give You all this domain and its power, for it has been handed over to me, and I give it to whomever I want. If You worship before me, it shall all be Yours.”
The authority of the Roman empire is buttressed by worship. This was a temptation Jesus resisted, but Jesus’ followers over the millennia have had a more difficult time saying “No.” The panicked reaction of the idol-makers in Macedonia should be our model: “These people who have upset the empire have come to this region as well.” Idol-makers, who help prop up the empire by providing economic power driven by alternate forms of worship, should lament “they all act in opposition to the decrees of Caesar,” rather than see the people of God as another source of income. “They have ‘turned the world upside down’,” one translation puts it.
Why does this matter? For one thing, western Christianity is complicit in the colonial project due to its global missional impulse. We were tools in the toolbelt of conquest for the Spanish, English, Dutch, French, Italian and other empires. Had Christians resisted their empires rather than baptizing them in “mission”, the colonial project would have collapsed. The old colonial ideas die hard. There have been recent “well, actually” perspectives that claim the slave trade was good because it Christianized the African continent… or that pogroms against indigenous North Americans were good for the same reason. To interpret Jesus’ command as a coercive, globalising dictate is to submit Christianity to imperial expansion. History has shown that, unlike Jesus’ refusal to consider state power, Christians across the western world have made much, much worse alignments. To think we can do it better or differently in the 21st century is chronological snobbery: we’re not so different from our ancestors as we imagine ourselves to be. We ignore our responsibility to hold imperial powers accountable to our detriment and to the detriment of our neighbors.
How can followers of The Way, so far removed from Jesus’ time and context, put into practice the kind of ethic that upsets the empires we find ourselves confronted by and living within? What would that resistance look like? It could be to
- publicly proclaim God’s gracious gifts,
- repair brokenness as a witness to God’s restorative justice,
- love our neighbors characterized by humility and empathy,
- remediate systems of evil by overcoming them with works of truth, beauty and excellence,
- practice The Way in a community that brings life and produces good fruit through the working of the Spirit.
May we be a people of whom it is said we unsettled the oikuomene, whether we know where Lake Michigan is or not.
O, Digression! 