I wonder what a Roman emperor would have made of today’s epistle reading:
For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
1 John 5:3-5
“Who is it that conquers the world but me?”, our caesar might scoff. After all, he would be reading a document using the language of one people conquered by Rome (the Greeks) to describe the God of another (the Jews).
Pompey “was the first of our countrymen to subdue the Jews,” the Roman historian Tacitus explained, not so long after 1 John was composed. “Availing himself of the right of conquest, that general entered the temple” in 63 BC, finding it empty — since Jews “call those profane who make representations of God in human shape out of perishable materials.”1 What survives of Tacitus’ Histories ends with a second Roman conquest of Jerusalem in AD 70.
Not that the Romans were content to conquer other peoples; throughout their history, they learned war by making it on themselves. In the middle of that same campaign against Jewish rebels, Rome’s bickering leaders took time to fight another of their city’s many civil wars. “Sword in hand, throughout the capital,” admits Tacitus, “the conquerors hunted down the conquered with merciless hatred. The streets were choked with carnage, the squares and temples reeked with blood, for men were massacred everywhere as chance threw them in the way.”2
Such is the logic of conquest in what John calls “the world”: not a place, or even a people, but a distortion of God’s good creation that warps plenty into plunder, people into pawns, and power into the end that justifies any means. “The love of the Father is not in those who love the world,” the apostle warns, “for all that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches—comes not from the Father but from the world” (1 John 2:15-16).
Fortunately, “the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God abide forever” (v 17). For while Rome’s empire would take centuries to collapse and others would — and still do — take its place, the world that runs according to “the right of conquest” has itself been conquered.
Even a historian as observant as Tacitus missed the revolution that had taken place. In the midst of recounting the reconquest of Judea in The Histories, Jesus’ lifetime is subsumed into the passing comment that “under Tiberius”— emperor from AD 14-37 — “all was quiet.”3 Tacitus does allude to the “extreme penalty” levied against “Christus” in an earlier work, but only to explain the existence of Christians scapegoated by Nero for the fire that devastated Rome in AD 64.4
What Tacitus dismissed as “a most mischievous superstition” was the very faith that would prevail over the worldview of the emperors: loving the God whose Son defeated death; obeying the God whose Son commanded his followers to “love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12).
While the world sees wealth to be hoarded, this love cannot “abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help” (1 John 3:17). While the world reduces life to survival ensured through slaughter, Christians willingly lay down their lives, knowing “that we have passed from death to life because we love the brothers and sisters. Whoever does not love abides in death” (v 14).
Next week’s lectionary readings: Psalm 1; John 17:6-19; Acts 1:15-17, 21-26; 1 John 5:9-13.
Tacitus, Histories, 5.5, 5.9.
Ibid., 4.1.
Ibid., 5.9.
Tacitus, Annals, 15.44.