Gentle?

Dr dear Dr: Going on from the sword and fire statements of the Lord as king of kings or rex regum, why are we to be as gentle as doves but as clever as serpents?

If we were to judge our ecclesiologies and christologies from the last 100 years of those subjects, then it must be conceded that we might assume that what we have in the Jesus event and his Jesus movement is a pacifist movement of teddy bear believers according to which there can be no violent take-over of the kingdoms of the earth, since in this perspective the real historical Jesus was a pacifist non-violent Ghandi like figure who felt it was better “to suffer wrong than do wrong” in the words of Plato, and certainly there have been Christian philosophers over the last 30 years like Carmody and McGillicuddy and Matthews and Nolan and Thibault and the guitar toting luvvy duvvy Bp Bob who have pioneered such a Socrates like Platonic approach to Christian affairs in the media this whole time, so it would seem that a violent Jesus is not on the cards and is not contemplated by Christian second generation believers or rather beliebers maybe. But yet the avid reader of the actual real gospels of the real historical Jesus above in this timely and apposite Quaesitum offers us a somewhat different hue, a more disturbing and apacifist account of the real teaching of the real Jesus, according to which he said, he had come not “to bring peace to the world but to bring a sword”, and he also said that he had come “to cast fire on the earth and how he wished it was burning already” to echo the solemn words of the solemn messiah inscribed over the doors and lintels of the militant members of the English College in Rome. So there is no doubt about it - there is a huge misunderstanding gone on, and a massive discrepancy between the theologies of the last 100 years since the non-violent guru Ghandi came to prominence for thinkers of the Sixties and the actual real and genuine historical Jesus of the first century AD. Now granted there are many saintly Christian icons and saints who would be at pains to point out that the fire mentioned here is the fire of divine love and divine charity, and more power to them, but the actual words of Jesus would seem to point out to more than this sort of thing, more than a mere spiritualisation of the words of the great man a la Mahatma Ghandi and his supporters when facing the violent suppression of the movement by the old military powers of the old British empire. So it seems we have been nursing a gentle even if understandable illusion about the purpose of religion and the purpose of the kingdom of the Christians. Jesus was not an ordinary religious messiah, like Mahatma, responsive to the religious instincts of the religious men and women of the Sixties timeframe; rather he was a king of kings in his own right. And when Mahatma said that he admired the real Jesus, the solemn and simple truth we must realise is that he was actually admiring the icon of the first century only insofar as he imitated his own gentle non-violent and pacifist values, as he thought the movement meant in his timeframe, in the usual typical Hindu and Buddhist appropriation of the Christ event. So the meaning must lie elsewhere, and the meaning of the words of Jesus must actually still lie in some considerable obscurity. But Jesus also asks the Christians to be “as harmless and gentle as doves but also to be as cunning and clever as serpents” in this world, and thus to oppose the forces of the world with the same cleverness that we find before our eyes in the world. So some degree of non-naivete on the part of the real historical Jesus as king messiah and king shepherd of the true believers of the Fremmin of some planet like Arakis in Dune. Altogether the last 100 years of revisionist and reformist theology on the part of the Hindustani 60s and 70s and 80s Christians may have to be revised in favour of some CRF or Christian Reaction Force theology maybe, a more militant aGerman version of the gospel a la the militant side of the English venerable colleges hidden away around a now distant and largely forgotten old Europe from Louvain to Rome to Madrid to Prague to Paris. This would seem to cohere with the tenor of his actual historical words and actual historical teaching to his disciples and soldiers of the faith and warriors of the new kingdoms. A different kind of Jesus than the simple wandering Aramean peasant leader of a thousand protest movements as we have been led to believe over this last timeframe. A different messiah indeed. Time to revise. Time to reform. Ecclesia semper reformanda.