Like many of my friends, I was elated to see last week’s indelible image of an Iraqi journalist giving outgoing President George W. Bush the ultimate symbol of Middle Eastern disrespect — having someone’s shoes thrown at you.  The journalist, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, captured in his symbolic sneer the feelings of hundreds of millions around the world for whom Bush has epitomized the evils and imperial indifference of the once-admired superpower known as America.  Many of us were all with al-Zaidi in that moment, vicarious rue-mongers in the face of the Fool-Tyrant.

Such symbolic acts of sneering resistance were all too common in Jesus’ day.  Around the time of Jesus’ birth, Rome installed their imperial emblem, the eagle, atop the Jewish Temple — only to have a few Torah students scale the holy building and cast off Caesar’s insult.  Not surprisingly, the students and their teacher (and, as my memory recalls, a few others just for the hell of it) were burned alive for this disobedience.

The two centuries on either side of Jesus endure in history books and Jewish memory as a time of persistent uprisings against the empire.  Roman fortresses were razed, citadels held, and Jerusalem marched on.  Zeal for God’s name and nation throbbed in their heart.  And they made no shortage of attempts to throw their shoe at the Bushes of their day.  I can only imagine the sense of pride and hope and delight that Jewish peasants felt with each symbolic resistance.  Today, our Shoe-Heard-Round-the-World incident can provide a useful window through which to imagine these emotions among Jesus’ friends and family and foes.

Yet it is roundly pinned as the way to destruction.  Resisting Rome with swords and screams and shoes-throwin’ symbolic acts would lead the entire nation right to Gehenna.  Instead of pride and possibility, Jesus felt disgust and fear and heartbreak whenever the shoe was thrown at Rome.  He knew it would destroy God’s people utterly, and he knew how far it was from his Father’s intentions for that people as the Blessings-to-Everyone People.

Why did I have the Zealot response, instead of the Jesus response, to the shoe throw?  I know in my head and, to a degree, in my heart, that such is the way of destruction.  I want to cry like Jesus does over how such acts will probably only lead to more violence and repression in Iraq.  Instead, in my bitterness toward this foe, I find myself with a grin strangely like his as he dodges the shoes… smirking at someone I hold in contempt.

I want to love George Bush; to some degree I do, insofar as I dearly desire to see him reflect Jesus better.  I pray sincerely for him: does that count for much?  Yet my amusement at the shoe-throw exposes unresolved unforgiveness in me toward this pawn of bigger principalities and powers.  I am a public hypocrite in my giggling in solidarity with al-Zaidi.  God help me to cry your tears over this!

How can I, and how can the wider church, employ better symbolic actions to expose state violence?  How can these symbols corrode empire’s evil with love instead of unforgiving hate?  It is so hard to walk this line of soberly understanding the systemic evil accomplished under Bush, and yet choosing to love him.  I imagine I’m not alone in this struggle.

God’s revolution is so much bigger, deeper, and stranger than I feel ready for.  But I want it.  I want his revolution of love even for those being most overtly used by the powers.

God give us pity on those who resist shalom.
Give us humility as we contemplate the same resistance in our own hearts.
And renew us as we lay down our shoes at your cross.
Help me to see myself and the Caesars of today with your eyes, not mine.
Amen.

About Brandon Rhodes

Brandon Rhodes is a lifelong Oregonian who worships and serves in Springwater, a new-monastic Mennonite church plant in Portland's eclectic Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood and presently in its first year together. In his adolescence he was a part-time Christian and full-time fundamentalist crank. But when Brandon lived in a kingdom-centered intentional community while studying Environmental Studies and Political Science at the University of Oregon, he found himself steadily transformed by the gospel. God redeemed him from sneering individualism and into playful community, from shrill nationalism into the Kingdom of the Triumphant Lamb. His is a journey of being regularly startled by God's love and beauty. Since college, Brandon has continued to live in Christian community, graduated seminary, and worked as a writer and activist for several creation-care and global justice nonprofits. He enjoys vegetable gardening, reading compulsively, brewing beer, Mexican food, Romans 8, and trees.