Popeye and the Myth
of Redemptive Violence
Did you know that Popeye—as in, “Popeye the Sailorman”—did not appear in creator E. C. Segar’s comic strip for almost ten years? Olive Oyl was a main character at the start, but it took nearly ten years for Popeye to appear, and even then, he was only a minor character. But the audience loved him, so Segar increasingly gave the people what they wanted. It wasn’t long before Popeye was the main man.
The popularity of Popeye is no coincidence, according to biblical scholar Walter Wink. Popeye renders in simple, dramatic form the central myth of our modern world, the key story that explains life. “In a typical segment,” Wink explains, “Bluto abducts a screaming and kicking Olive Oyl, Popeye’s girlfriend.” In the beginning, then, there is chaos. Conflict. Evil. “When Popeye attempts to rescue her, the massive Bluto beats his diminutive opponent to a pulp, while Olive Oyl helplessly wrings her hands. At the last moment, as our hero oozes to the floor, and Bluto is trying, in effect, to rape Olive Oyl, a can of spinach pops from Popeye’s pocket and spills into his mouth. Transformed by this gracious infusion of power, he easily demolishes the villain and rescues his beloved. The format never varies. Neither party ever gains any insight or learns from these encounters. Violence does not teach Bluto to honor Olive Oyl’s humanity, and repeated pummelings do not teach Popeye to swallow his spinach before the fight.”[1]
Walter Wink and others have named this kind of story, “the myth of redemptive violence,” and trace it all the way back to the Babylonians and neighboring cultures. In Babylon, this myth was told originally as a creation story, known as the Enuma Elish. The myth is simple. Chaos is the original setting of the world, and it is bad, evil. Only through a violent act can evil be subdued and order established. Indeed, violence is how the world is created. Literally. One set of gods kills another set of gods, and with their dismembered body parts, they fashion hills, rivers…and humans. Murder is in our DNA, according to this myth.
This mythic pattern can be found all over the world. From international politics to the playground, it reigns supreme, far above any other story. Nations understand that violence is necessary to secure their interests from a chaotic world (how many nations are formed, or preserved, through war?), just as children understand that justice sometimes requires knuckles and blood. That this myth forms the basis of a seemingly quaint, popular children’s cartoon is only reflective of how deeply ingrained and unquestioned it is in our social psyche. Indeed, one figure cited from research indicates that by the age of eighteen, a youth will have seen on average 15,000 murders on television. This is the way the world works, we are shown and told, again and again and again. (One hour a week of Sunday School, of hearing a radically different story, of a good creation and the redemptive power of love—one hour a week is hardly going to make a dent on this myth that inundates our world. On this Mother’s Day, however, I’m reminded and grateful that the radically different story of redemptive love does occasionally get told outside church—by mothers who know firsthand the power of unconditional love.)
David Lipscomb’s
Critique of Christian Allegiance
The power of the myth of redemptive violence became unmistakably clear to David Lipscomb, a 19th-century minister in the Stone Campbellite tradition from which our own Disciples of Christ movement emerged. David Lipscomb was born in 1831 to parents Granville and Ann Lipscomb, who both hailed originally from down the road in Louisa County. David grew up amid the strife and discontent of late antebellum America, and he would later be profoundly troubled by the ravages of the Civil War. He struggled to reconcile the fighting with his faith. How could followers of Christ, the prince of peace, turn on one another in violence? How could ministers of reconciliation employ weapons of division and death? In his view, it was bad enough that his brothers and sisters in Christ had submitted to violence. But it was even worse to see them fighting against one another. He could only conclude that the primary allegiance of Christians was no longer to Christ and the kingdom of God, but rather to their respective nations, to what he called “the government of man.” The great tragedy of the church, he says, “is that the children of God enter into the kingdoms of this world, imbibe the spirit of those kingdoms, bring that spirit into the church of God, defile the church and drive out the spirit of Christ.”[2] In other words, the war had betrayed the true hearts of most Christians. They might proclaim the way of Christ, but in truth there was a limit, a point beyond which the way of Christ became irrelevant, impractical—perhaps even “unjust,” insofar as it could not quickly enough resolve the perceived injustices of the world. At this point, only violence would do. Lipscomb thought that Christ-followers had forsaken the gospel of God’s redeeming love and drunk the kool aid of the myth of redemptive violence.
David Lipscomb is a radical. His conclusions may themselves seem impractical. Even so, I am inspired by his example and plan to share his story with you, not only today, but in the months to come, because one thing he does remarkably well is to keep Christ and the kingdom of God in the center of his view at all times. He sincerely asks, “How do I live as a follower of Christ in a world that does not follow Christ? How do I live as a citizen of God’s kingdom amid the kingdoms of this world?” In this way, Lipscomb stands in good company. The early Christ-followers would frequently refer to themselves as “strangers” and “sojourners” and “resident aliens” to distinguish themselves first and foremost as citizens of God’s kingdom rather than citizens of the land where they lived. One of the dangers of our place and time, as I see it, is that we live amid a clamor of cries demanding our allegiance, issuing a call to arms. They can be as diametrically opposed as right and left, liberal and conservative, reactionary and revolutionary, and yet they all share the same foundation: a belief in the myth of redemptive violence. Ultimately, evil is out there somewhere and must be defeated by us, the good guys—if not by the ballot, then by the bullet. To believe the gospel of God’s redeeming love in a world such as this would indeed make a person stick out like a sore thumb. It would make a person a stranger, a sojourner, a resident alien (if not an alien from another planet altogether).
Ascension Sunday
In today’s scripture, Paul shares his prayer for the church community in Ephesus. In a nutshell, he prays that they would put Christ first. In typical Pauline verbosity, of course, he expresses this with a proliferation of ideas and images, conveying his desire that the Ephesians would gain a fuller understanding of their “hope” in Christ, their “glorious inheritance among the saints,” and the “the immeasurable greatness of [God’s] power” for people who trust in God (Eph 1:18-19). But what else is this hope, this inheritance, and this power of faith, than the kingdom of God, the world where Christ reigns? Indeed, Paul concludes his prayer by imagining the risen Christ “seated…at [God’s] right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion” (Eph 1:20-21).
In the church calendar, today is “Ascension Sunday,” which always falls on the Sunday before Pentecost. It celebrates the scriptural account in which Jesus ascends to heaven forty days after his resurrection. It is typical on Ascension Sunday to imagine Jesus ascending into heaven and sitting on a throne beside God. That’s basically what Paul imagines in our scripture today. But lest we mistake this scene as communicating, “God’s in heaven, all’s right with the world,” the scripture passages for Ascension Sunday point emphatically beyond skyward worship to earthy, nitty-gritty responsibility. In Luke, just before Jesus ascends, he addresses his followers and entrusts them with spreading the gospel: “Repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in [my] name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witness of these things” (Luke 24:47-48). It is, in other words, a holy handoff, a passing of the baton. It is not the end of Jesus’ work, but the beginning. And so in a parallel story in Acts, two angels address the followers of Christ who are gazing up toward heaven after Jesus, saying, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” (Acts 1:11)—as if to say, what you are standing around for?
It may be helpful to remember that, in antiquity, vertical
representations of “up” and “down” conveyed more than literal position. “Up”
conveyed transcendence. It conveyed the superiority of a thing. So when Paul
plays with these same images and says that God raised Christ not only “from the
dead” but also “far above all rule
and authority and power and dominion,” he is actually saying that, for us
followers of Christ, Christ is the supreme authority. In today’s way of
speaking, where we project the spiritual reality of things less into the
heavens and more into the interiority of our hearts, we might say that Christ
is enthroned in the center of our heart. However we say it, the result is
unmistakable. The kingdom of God is not something that gets imposed from above
with force. The kingdom of God, rather, becomes a reality through our making
Jesus first, through our flesh-and-blood faithfulness, through our being
witnesses to a way other than the myth of redemptive violence. To put it
lightly, we follow Jesus, not Popeye. To put it a little more seriously, where
the world proclaims, “Evil is outside us, and needs to be destroyed,” we
believe otherwise. Sin is within, and the remedy is not destruction but love.
Or as Jesus charges his followers just before his ascension, “Repentance and
forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in [my] name to all nations” (Luke
24:47).
I remember in Sunday School and youth group occasionally hearing the call or invitation to put Jesus first in my life, or to give all my life—not just part of it—to God. I appreciate the invitation insofar as it is biblical in origin. We see it today in Ephesians, where Jesus is proclaimed to be “far above” all things (Eph 1:21). But I must confess, making Jesus first in my life was a rather vague idea. To make Jesus first in my life usually just meant being as “Christian” as I possibly could be, which could mean going to church, listening to Christian music, reading Christian books, and having Christian conversations. It wasn’t that different from what’s going on when Jesus talks about the people who say, “Lord, lord,” as though knowing and saying Jesus’ name is the same as living in God’s kingdom. But Jesus says it isn’t the same thing (cf. Matt 7:21-29).
One of the reasons I really appreciate the identification of “the myth of redemptive violence,” is that it shows me where the rubber actually meets the road. It gives teeth to the idea of putting Jesus “far above” all other things, the idea of living as a “stranger” or “resident alien” in this world. It points out one crucial difference (and to be sure, there are others) between the kingdoms of this world and the kingdom of God. For Jesus to be enthroned in my heart means for me to trust and live by his good news that it is love that redeems all things, not violence. It means instead of getting even, I’m called to own up to my part and forgive the part of others. It means instead of looking out for my own good, I am called to look out for the common good. It means instead of taking up arms for the right cause, I lay them down for the kingdom of God, where in the name of Christ forgiveness is proclaimed to all nations. By living this way, I become a witness to the kingdom of God.
When Jesus ascended, his work was not done. It was just beginning. In us, “the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph 1:22-23).
Prayer
Dear Christ,You entrust us with the task of being witnesses
To your way of forgiveness and transformation:
As strangers in our own land,
May we tell a different story
Than the myth of redemptive violence.
May we sing the good news of your redeeming love
And be witnesses to the power of forgiveness and transformation.
In Christ, who longs to gather us all together,
As a hen gathers her chicks—
Amen.
