The Dying god of Peace – by Mike Kopchick

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the myriad of gods in the ancient world, the pantheon of local deities worshipped by different cultures.  Gods of everything — gods of lightning, gods of the harvest, gods of fertility.  Each god had their own domain that they controlled.  It strikes me just how radical the idea of a single, invisible God must have seemed to most people of the day.  How would other cultures, like the Romans, have understood the Hebrew God?  Or even more curiously, how would they have understood Jesus as a god?  How would that have fit into their idea of the pantheon, the great collection of gods from different cultures?  Would it have forced them to redefine what they knew to be true, to reshape their reality around such a different understanding of what it means to be a god?

Or maybe they would have tried to find a way to fit Jesus into their current understandings, to squeeze the Christ event into a pantheistic world so that they could make sense of it — maybe they would have tried to make Jesus just another god, standing alongside Zeus, Hera, and the others.  After all, the idea of a god dying wasn’t a new story to the ancient world.  In fact, the “Dying God Myth” is a well-known archetype in mythology.  There are dozens of examples of gods who die and are reborn.  Take, for example, the Greek story of Persephone, the goddess of  and her mother, Demeter (goddess of the harvest):

One day Persephone was out walking around, when she was kidnapped by Hades, the god of the underworld and taken to the place of the dead and became one of them.  When Persephone’s mother found out, she forbade the earth from letting anything grow.  And so the world transformed; it grew cold and lifeless.  Things stopped growing.  After a while people began starving, so Zeus forced Hades to return Persephone to land of the living.  But Hades had a condition for her return: every year, for 4 months, Persephone had to return to the underworld with Hades because she had eaten 4 seeds of the fruit of the dead.  So every year after harvest, no plants yield fruit and the world grows cold as Demeter mourns her daughter’s death.  And in 4 months time, Demeter becomes joyful again when Persephone returns and the world springs back to life.

This is a great example of a dying god myth.  I’m particularly fond of it because it ties together the characters in the story to their individual domains, as gods.  I told this story in my congregation one Sunday without telling them that Demeter was the goddess of the harvest, and I asked them to guess what this story was about, and what the gods and goddesses were “in charge” of.  They were able to correctly guess that Demeter is, in fact, the goddess of the harvest, as well as Persephone’s relationship to seeds and fruit.

Dying god myths reveal the domain of the deity.  Read about how a god dies, and it will tell you who they are, and what they are the god of.

Well, what about Jesus?  If you or I were an ancient person who had grown up with the mindset that there were many gods, and we heard the story of Jesus, what would we think?  What would we think he is the god of?

Maybe that’s a weird sounding question; it should sound a little strange, because we don’t usually think about Jesus as being just another god “of” something.  That has a lot to do with our lenses, with the way we see the world.  In the ancient world, it would be a natural question to ask, “What is Jesus the god of?”  The above Persephone story came out of Greek culture; Jesus existed at a time when Greek culture dominated the ancient world.  People were used to the idea that there were many gods, so it would have been a perfectly fair question to ask.

There are even a couple examples of people asking these questions in the Bible.  Remember Jonah? When he’s on the boat with all the sailors and the storm is threatening to tear the ship apart, and they cast lots to see whose fault the storm is, and the lot falls to Jonah?  They ask him, “What God do  you worship?” Jonah answers “I worship the Lord, who made of Heaven and Earth.” He’s explaining what his god, Yahweh, is the god of.

It’s an interesting exercise to read the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection with the lenses of an ancient person, and to ask, “What is this dying God’s domain?  What is Jesus the god of?”

When I preached on this question, we read through the Jesus’ death and resurrection story, and I asked them, “If you were reading this story like an ancient person, what might you think Jesus is the god of?”  The congregation had some interesting responses.  Some said Jesus is the god of love, or the god of sacrifice.  One said, “the human heart”, a particularly interesting response I’d like to think about more.  In reality, I don’t think there’s only one answer to the question; it’s really more about the exercise than the answer.  But for me, it seems that Jesus is the god of Peace.

Let’s look at the facts.  Jesus is taken prisoner at night, and when his disciples want to fight, he tells them to put away their swords.  While captive Jesus doesn’t ever raise a hand against his torturers or the authorities.  On the cross he could have called down an army; he doesn’t. Instead of cursing his enemies, he forgives them.  A man of peace, to the end.

The resurrection is what really drives it home for me, though.  I would fully expect that, upon his resurrection, Jesus would want to get revenge his enemies — that’s what most other gods would have done, and it would have been just and fair to do so.  But instead, Jesus claims that through his peace was victory, and he commands his disciples to follow his example.

Jesus.  God of peace.  In the pantheon of gods, we have chosen to be followers of the God of peace, the One whose purpose was to unite those who were impossibly separated.  I would be remiss if I didn’t at least ask the question, “What does that mean for us?”  If Jesus is the God of Peace, then what does that mean for his followers?

Would it be too strange if I suggest a redefinition of the word Christian to mean someone, anyone, who actively pursues peace?  After all, if Jesus stood for peace in his death and resurrection, maybe when we stand for peace, we stand with Jesus.  Maybe following Jesus in his death and resurrection has less to do with church affiliation and more to do with being transformed into peacemakers.  In fact, you could say that anyone pursuing peace is, by definition, following Jesus.  Anyone, regardless of class, regardless of race — regardless, even, of religion?  Because whoever you are, wherever you come from, whatever you believe, if you strive for peace, you are following the way of Jesus, our God of Peace.

Mike Kopchick is a graduate of Western Theological Seminary and a member of The Community: An RCA Ministry in Ada, Michigan.  He spends most of his time building his business as a web-based software developer.