Invasion of the Body Snatchers*

Dating the Christian gospels is a somewhat haphazard process. Technically, scholars try to determine the terminus a quo and terminus ad quem dates as bracket times for the earliest and latest possibilities, but no one knows the exact date a gospel was produced. For the Gospel of Mark, the terminus a quo is the year 70 CE. The reference to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple is the giveaway (13:2). In that year the Romans destroyed the temple, captured and enslaved a large number of people, and used the acquired riches and slaves to build the Colosseum. The Roman invasion was an invasion of body snatchers, with the bodies being the Jewish people who had sought and failed to gain liberation.

The historical Jesus probably knew the tale of invasion and body snatching well since in his memory lay the collective experience of Assyrian and Babylonian conquests of Israel and Judah. Mighty powers on the world stage, then like now, invaded other countries, taking whatever riches and people they might find, and figured out ways to defend their brutal acts as necessary. Russia has done this with Ukraine, and now the United States, in its latest expression of empire, has taken a couple of Venezuelan bodies in the name of liberation and has subdued the Venezuelan nation in the name of capitalism. “Plus ça change…” is the French expression for these seemingly unending cycles.

This conquest by mighty powers is where the “empire of God” (basileia tou theou) metaphor comes into the picture for the historical Jesus. In contrast to oil or minerals or land (or people or wealth), the empire of God consists of leaven, sheep, and lost coins. None of the images Jesus employed for empire invoked power, and none have much value when it comes to expanding one’s realm or snatching bodies for profit. As John Caputo says, these are weak metaphors. They hardly stand up against the aristocracy of Rome or the billionaires of America. Yet, these strange images are where the action is. How can this be?

The destructive lifestyles of celebrated politicians and imperial aristocrats, with their habit of violence, their spirit of egocentrism, their disdain of the environment, and their rejection of dignity, is not just the inverse but the closure of the empire of God. To put this into twenty-first-century language, imperial versions of empire override local experiences of inter-connection. In local metaphors used for the empire of God, Jesus corrupts imperial expectations with leaven and redirects wealthy imperial aspirations with a lost coin and an impoverished woman. These images will not do for “real” empires, which focus on control and dream of removing corruption. To hear about the empire of God you have to “un-empire” your imagination. The empire of God disconnects the mind from centralized power and reconnects it to interconnected reality. An imperial empire is singular and narrow. It can only hear itself talking. Everyone else and everything else is noise. Whatever Jesus meant by the empire of God, he certainly did not hold a singular vision.

The empire of God is impossible to define singularly because its vehicle of expression is the parable. One must use parables to explain parables, which makes the empire of God variable, elusive, and scattered. Parables approach reality from different angles, and they highlight the most unexpected locations of meaning, sympathy, and connection. They basically say that the empire of God is everywhere, though people do not see it.

The empire of God is an interconnected empire where anywhere on earth is the location of everything about earth and where no place in particular has more dignity than any other place. By contrast, the empire of Rome is about Rome; there is nowhere else. And if you think there is, you may be snatched away.

 *I recognize that Nicolas Maduro was a dictator and tyrant. The genesis of the blog lies in my concern about the manner of his removal from office and the way in which it patterns the empire of Rome.

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