Hauerwas 3 :Anti-Imperial practice

How could Rome know that this man [Jesus] would be the most decisive political challenge it would face? …The movement that Jesus begins is constituted by people who believe that they have all the time in the world, made possible by God’s patience, to challenge the world’s impatient violence by cross and resurrection (Page 37)

Hauerwas’ reading of the early chapters of Matthew is guided not so much by exegetical heavies such as Allison & Davies, and Luz, but by Bonhoeffer, Barth and John Howard Yoder. Intertwined with the nativity themes of promise, mystery, virgin birth and human hopes, Matthew weaves the darker strands of kingship, nationalism, state security, herodian politics, refugees on the move and massacres in the home village – the structures of power guarded by the machinery of terror.

Hauerwas is committed to the idea of the kingdom as an alternative community which embodies anti-imperial praxis.The Kingdom of God is an ‘alternative world, an alternative people, an alternative politics’. As I read Hauerwas’ commentary, unmistakable Hauerwasian themes, like peaceable kingdom, community of character, and against the grain of the universe, emerge in his exposition through a process of eisegesis. Paradoxically, his kind of theological eisegesis seems to expose and articulate the radical political critique and spiritual power of the text, in a way often less accessible to stringent traditional exegesis.

That’s my feeling anyway – there is for me a felt congruence between Hauerwas’ finger-pointing prose as he tells the truth he finds in this trext, and Matthew’s message of cruciform discipleship. His main conversation partners, Bonhoeffer and Yoder, also took Scripture with utmost seriousness. Together they and Hauerwas offer another essential approach to the interpretation of the Bible text – askingthe life disrupting questions, ‘what does this text say to us about following Jesus, about carrying a cross, about who we are, and what that might mean for our own political allegiances’  The kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world – these are stark Matthean alternatives, presented in black and white terms in this gospel from start to finish – and with the call "Follow me" about to be uttered.

Which is a longish way of saying this is one of the most refreshing, disturbing and (overused word coming) challenging readings of a gospel I’ve read since Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man (on Mark).