Thick or Thin? Considerations On the Meaning of Peace

This being the week of the 4^th of July (can it be already?) as many are inclined to do, we reflect on our freedoms, and relative peace that we have in this country. While we are at war in far off places, we live in a generally peace-filled place. My hope this week is to reflect on ideas of peace and what that means for us as Christians.

A few years ago I heard a chapel message about the nature of peace. She spoke from the John 20.19 (See also, Luke 24.36) passage which reads, “When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." Peace, as she interpreted it, grew out of its opposite of strife or the negation/absence of strife. I was not quite at ease with her definition. It felt deficient. Slight. Almost cheapening the profundity that should come with Christ’s words. I want something thicker…more substantial.

More recently in our small group we ran into the passage from Luke 10.5-6 (See also Mt. 10.13) which reads, “Whatever house you enter, first say, "Peace to this house!' 6 And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you.” Is Christ here speaking of the absence of strife? And what is all this about offering it and its return?

My contention is that there is a thicker reality to peace than what we as American’s tend to read in these passages.

First off, lets look at the thin reading of peace as the woman offered to us in chapel. Looking back on her remarks I wonder what strife was Christ trying to overcome in his words? Was he at odds with the disciples when he appeared to them? Are his words to be interpreted as an olive branch held out in hope? I am not satisfied with this as the context does not seem lend those interpretations too easily. Likewise if we consider passages like Matthew 10.34 or Luke 12.51 Jesus tells his followers that he has not come to make peace, but has come with a sword. How are we to interpret this troubling passage? Does this sanction a just violence? Through out the Lukan narrative, we see the birth narratives (1.79, 2.14) suggesting peace, Jesus proclaiming peace in his redemptive activities (7.50, 8:48 – we will come back to these), teaching his disciples to do the same (10.5-6). How can these passages be reconciled with the divisive sword? What we see in the narrative is that God’s purposes will engender opposition. This opposition is ultimately the strife and violence that brings Jesus under the weight of the cross. It seems clear that a thin reading from these two passages alone cannot be a sufficient understanding of peace.

That being said, Mark 9.5, Jesus does urge his followers to be at peace with one another. Here, and a few other places, I will admit that it seems that Christ spoke of an absence of strife which offers some credibility to a thin reading…or perhaps a sacramentally thin reading. More likely the thin offering is a resultant effect from the thick interpretation.

So then, what is this thick reading I have been raving about? My tendency is read them Christologically and Soteriologically.

Our small group has been reading Luke through the lens of Isaiah 61 or the prophecy Jesus reads about himself in the temple recorded in Luke 4.16-19,
“When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: 18 "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Luke’s contention, as the narrative seems to suggest, is that when we see these things we are seeing the active presence of the Kingdom of God.

Luke seems to pair peace with healing. Passages such as Luke 7:50, And he said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you; go in peace." or Luke 8.48/Mk 5.34, “"Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace” seem to suggest a great reality to peace than the absence of strife, though it may well include it.

Joel Green suggests that peace is roughly equivalent with salvation in the Lukan narrative (NICNT, 413). Rereading the healing passages above, Christ is not sending the healed women out with an absence of discord, but has sent them away as signs of the healing salvation brings and signs of the inbreaking of the Kingdom. Perhaps the command to go in peace can be roughly reworded to “Go, being now saved.”

But I think we can move beyond the soteriological reading to another reading based in Christology itself. If we see the incarnation as God’s reconciling efforts for peace with humanity, Christ himself becomes the embodied reality of peace as well as the means to procure it.

If we take this perspective to the Luke 10 passage again, we read Jesus telling the disciples to tell the communities that, "The kingdom of God has come near to you.” Not only the redemptive signs of healing and freedom offered in the Isaiah prophecy and the women, but Christ himself as the embodiment of peace. Returning to the woman’s chosen passage that she chose to interpret as the absence of strife, I prefer to read it as a thick proclamation of who Christ was. “Peace be with you,” he said is suggestive of the embodied reality of who he was and also what he offered them. Jesus become the means of acquiring peace with God through faith. But also, that Jesus is the very reality of that peace as seen in the Kingdom of God. The kingdom of God…the peace of God has come near, in a physical human form.

Tyler Durden: A Dark Christ-Figure?

Our small group has been studying the Gospel of Luke for the past 6 months or so and we continue to return to Luke 4:16-21 as a hermeneutical lens for understanding Luke’s perspective of Jesus.

The passage states, “When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: 18 "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." 20 And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21 Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

The scroll was open to Isaiah 61 which should be read a fuller understanding for this context but Jesus’ own words suffice as a summary. Verse 19a of the Luke passage or 2a of Isaiah 61 mention the “year of the Lord’s favor” which points to the Year of Jubilee in Leviticus 25 where all property shall be returned to its rightful owners and debts are forgiven.

With that in the back of my mind, my recent viewing radically changed my perception of Tyler Durden. Kelton Cobb, in The Blackwell Guide to Popular Culture states that Jack apprentices Tyler’s in an “ad hoc twelve-step program that Tyler devises to free Jack from his bondage to the dominant paradigm of consumerism” (p. 11). I began to wonder, is Tyler a sort of Christ figure, albeit a very dark one?

Much of what the Lukan passage suggest and recurs throughout the Gospel is liberation from illness, oppression and the structures of society. Tyler is trying to liberate Jack and subsequently the rest of the men (and also the participational viewer) from the burden of branded identities and consumption. Tyler whispers to Jack while he is on the phone with the police, “Tell him the liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perception.”

Another telling scene is in the basement of Lou’s bar or tavern. Lou enters and proceeds to pummel Tyler. Tyler willingly accepts this beating for the sake of others. Tyler motions to Jack to stay on the sidelines because his entry would derail his purposes of obtaining this venue on behalf of the greater whole. He, like the Space Monkeys later sacrifice themselves so that fledgling community of Fight Club may go on.

Another telling scene takes place in the back of a convenience store…the epitome of unnecessary consumption. With the glow of soda machines in the background the store clerk, Raymond K. Hessel is hauled out at gunpoint and made to kneel on the ground. Tyler sifts through his wallet finding an expired community college I.D. card he asks what he studied. The clerk, fearing for his life manages to dribble out barely understandable words. At one time, he had wanted to be a veterinarian and having become overwhelmed by the work involved he left his dreams behind to work in a life-sapping environment of consumption. Tyler takes the man’s license and says that he will check in on him in 6 weeks and will kill him if he is not on the way towards becoming a veterinarian. Afterwards Tyler says, “Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day in Raymond K. Hessel’s life.” Raymond is awoken from the slumber of self in a society bent on selfish consumption and freed to pursue his dreams. In fact, his life (both metaphorically and literally) depend upon it. In a later scene, we see the back of a door covered with stolen drivers licenses signifying that this was not a random act. Rather they had encountered many attempting to liberate them from consumption towards a greater good.

Another central question that should be asked is the nature of the violence. To what end is the violence. Is there meaning in or redemption from the violence? In these particular scenes it would seem that there is. The cross, the supreme act of violence in the Christian tradition becomes the central motif for Paul and the means of our salvation. Here too the violence is the necessary method of freeing others from the oppression of social structures. Raymond K. Hessel and all the others represented by their drivers licenses have been in someway freed. The Space Monkey’s too have been freed from their miserable lives to find meaning in liberating others. And we as the viewer also are to find liberation by participation in the story.

Tyler may be thought of a sort of Christ-figure insofar as he gives sight to the blind (awakens slumbering culture to the effects of consumerism) and then heals them by giving them a new identity, and brings good news to the poor (both literally poor and of spirit), and frees them from the burden. The clincher for this Christological lens is the year of the Lord’s favor…the Year of Jubilee. Tyler, and project Mayhem are bent on bringing down the credit card industry to level the economic playing field. By destroying this harmful and oppressive banking practice Tyler initiates what to many would be the Year of Jubilee.

And yet, we must consider (as one of my students pointed out) not only what Tyler is liberating them from, but to what/where are they going? And this is where the Christ-figure lens would seem to fail. Robert Bellah points out a fantastic irony in Habits of the Heart by saying, “just where we think we are most free (we’ve cast off these oppressive structures and philosophies), we are most coerced by the dominant beliefs of our own culture. For it is a powerful cultural fiction that we not only can, but must, make up our deepest beliefs in the isolation of our private selves” (p. 65). Radical individuals fail to see that they cast off one set of traditions for another set. Thus Tyler leads them from the oppressions of one tradition (namely consumption) to another (namely violence and anarchism). If this is correct and the film finally does not endorse the violence it portrays, Tyler can simultaneously be thought of as an anti-Christ leading his followers into another form of oppression.