Public Moral Debate is Dying: Being Willing to Lose

Being Winsome or Belligerent is Beside the Point

The triumphal entry into Jerusalem offers a window into the aims of public moral debate for the Christian. Some updates on writing projects. Some other miscellany. The full post is available for paid subscribers.

On this, Holy Week, we’ll continue exploring the dynamics of public moral discourse, but refracted through the events of Jesus’ last week before the crucifixion and resurrection. Today, we consider whether or not the point of moral debates is to win the debate. That, I think, is a mistake.

The Donkey Takes the Field

The overtures of Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem in the Gospel of John are impossible to miss, particularly in light of all that has come before. Some of the Gospels are a bit more on the nose on this question—particularly Luke—but the connection between Jesus’ ministry and his entrance through the gates of Jerusalem in John 12 are hard to miss: Jesus is being hailed as a deliverer of Jerusalem.

But not as some kind of deliverer of an immaterial soul divorced from the body, and not as the one who will deliver the people from the sacrificial system¹: Jesus was being hailed as the Messiah, the restorer of Israel, the new Son of David. Following Jesus’ raising of Lazarus, the Pharisees knew the score and what this acclaim would lead to:

(John 11:47-48): “What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”

Jesus’ signs up to this point—feeding the 5000, healing the sick, raising the dead—were exactly the kinds of things you’d want in a military leader, and resolve all of the major logistical challenges of an army: food, sickness, and death. That Jesus was coming into Jerusalem hailed with shouts of “Deliver us!”², and came in during the celebration of Passover, a commemoration of God’s smiting of the oppressor Egyptians—puts too fine a point on the thing.

The thing is, though, Jesus’ entrance functions more like a parody, coming in on a donkey. John directs our attention to Zechariah 9: 9-11 to make sense of this, and it’s worth pausing on:

Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion!
    Shout, Daughter Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you,
    righteous and victorious,
lowly and riding on a donkey,
    on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
¹⁰ I will take away the chariots from Ephraim
    and the warhorses from Jerusalem,
    and the battle bow will be broken.
He will proclaim peace to the nations.
    His rule will extend from sea to sea
    and from the River^[a] to the ends of the earth.
¹¹ As for you, because of the blood of my covenant with you,
    I will free your prisoners from the waterless pit.

The entrance here—as matched as it is to the expectations of a warrior returning home—inverts the whole thing: Jesus is the one who breaks the bow not of the Romans but of Jerusalem as well. This is Big Contrarian Energy here: the freedom of the people will be accompanied not by another flood, fire, hail, and frog storm, but by putting down all of the mechanisms of hostilities.

I asked the AI for “donkey with a sword”. Not terrible?

It’s a dumbfounding thing to say that this age-old conflict between Israel and her oppressors is one which ultimately comes to an end not through overcoming the Romans, but through putting to death all of the mechanisms of hostility in a way which will not back down from the terms of the “disagreement”, but propose a different way forward. For the discussion we’ve been having, it makes all of the energy spent over whether such public engagements should be “winsome” or “antagonistic” energy spilled for no reason: the moral life is not an instrumental one calibrated toward victory, but calibrated toward witness insofar as Christ comes to put an end to the agonistic mode of discourse.