It is true that we do not know exactly when the Eighteen Benedictions were formulated, but we have solid ground under our feet in the Psalms of Solomon, mentioned above. They were created in the first century BCE.13 The seventeenth psalm in the collection speaks of the coming Messiah, who will purify Jerusalem of Gentile peoples and destroy all the lawless nations. He will gather for God a holy people and will not permit Israel ever again to give a place to injustice. Foreigners and strangers will no longer be allowed to dwell in the Land. Then the Gentile nations will all be subjected to Israel and be required to serve the people of God under the yoke of the Messiah.
Here, clearly, the author is drawing a picture of an eschatological state belonging to God. It has a center in Jerusalem. It has an authority who acts in the name of God: the Messiah. It has fixed boundaries: those separating Israel from the Gentile nations. It is a “pure community” and in this sense a homogeneous and uniform society: there are no sinners in it, and it no longer contains anything unclean. All that can appeal to individual passages in the Old Testament, perhaps even whole strata of Old Testament texts: compare, for example, Psalm 2; Isaiah 52:1; Joel 4:9-17.
The Hasmoneans attempted to reestablish a Jewish state in the wake of the catastrophe of the royal period. John Hyrcanus I (reigned 134–104 BCE) reconquered parts of Samaria and the land east of the Jordan. He forced the Idumeans in the south to accept male circumcision and incorporated them into the worshiping community of Jerusalem. Aristobulus I (104–103 BCE) reconquered Galilee and joined it once again with Judea. He forced the Itureans in the north to accept male circumcision and assumed the title of king. Alexander Jannaeus (103–76 BCE) brought all of Palestine under his rule, as well as further parts of the land east of the Jordan and the coastal plain. But then came the Romans under Pompey (106–48 BCE) and destroyed all these efforts to re-create a Jewish territorial state. In 63 BCE Pompey entered Jerusalem, seized the temple precincts, and carried out a horrifying bloodbath there. From that time on, Israel was divided and lay under the rule of Rome.
Jesus himself was directly confronted with the attempt to construct a new Jewish state in the Zealots’ dreams of revolt. This time it was supposed to be a real state subject to God. The Zealots longed to revolt against Rome not only because of the profound misery in Jewish society but even more because they were convinced that if God alone were to be the Lord of Israel, then the Romans could not rule in the Land.
Jesus opposed this. He intended something fundamentally different by his gathering of Israel. His idea was the establishment not of a God-state but of a new society under the rule of God. Those are not the same thing. His new society began in his community of disciples, which rested on pure acceptance. Its center was the community of his disciples. So the people of God is not meant to have a state or pseudo-state structure.
Certainly Jesus did not reject the state as an institution, but he did not believe that one could serve the Gospel through the state and with the state’s aid, or by imitating political forms of rule. When he was asked the tricky and at the time highly dangerous question whether a Jew was permitted to pay taxes to the emperor, he answered, “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17). The emperor’s right as a guarantor of order is acknowledged, but in this antithetical parallelism he by no means has rights equal to God’s. What most translations give as “and” is in Greek an adversative kai; the correct translation would be: “Give [indeed] to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, but give to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17).
Jesus knows that the state, with its own structures of rule, is necessary. But the people of God is not a state. Therefore Jesus had no regard for the Zealots, who counted on violence and terror to make of Israel a state in the sense of the Psalms of Solomon. Of course, he probably did not think much of the Roman emperor and his ilk either. He was rather skeptical in their regard. According to Mark 10:42-45, Jesus said:
You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.
These words show that Jesus regarded contemporary “world politics” realistically and soberly. He saw through the arrogance of the powerful and the manipulative mechanisms of their political propaganda (cf. Luke 22:25). They derived their self-satisfaction from the exploitation of those under them. “You know that this is so,” he says. But at the same time, Mark 10:42-45 shows how Jesus imagined the transformation: it has to come as a silent revolution from below, from a completely different perspective, from an attitude that does not seek its own benefit but that of others. This is the attitude Christian tradition calls “humility.”
What is unique in the small discourse composition in Mark 10:42-45 is that in it the disciples are set in direct contrast to the nations and their rulers. But let me say again that the purpose of this is not to condemn all human forms of government. Power is not denounced here as something evil in itself. Jesus by no means questions the necessity of the state, but his interest is not in improving confidence in the government. It is only in God’s new society, which is beginning something unheard of, something altogether new, in the midst of the old world.
This new thing extends to the utmost depths out of which society constantly recreates itself. Mark 10:42-45 summarizes it in the simple call no longer to seek to rule but instead to serve. “Serve” here should not be read in a bland and colorless sense. In its original meaning the word signified nothing other than waiting on tables. It was based on daily table service, which in the ancient world was the burden of slaves, servants, or free women. It was above all at table that the contrast between those more highly placed, who reclined comfortably, and the slaves or women who had to serve was most keenly felt. In Greek and Roman culture serving in the house was regarded as menial. It was by no means seldom at ancient banquets that the guests would wipe their greasy fingers on the hair of the slaves serving them.14 “How could a human being be happy while having to serve anyone at all?” asked the Sophist Callicles in the Platonic dialogue Gorgias (491c). So it is no accident that Jesus shapes the new society he is beginning with his disciples at table. This is the starting point for the true revolution; here begins the genuinely classless society.