Preemptive Strikes and Managed Violence: State, Security, and the Christ of the Cross

The Christ My Body Knows, Week Two

Last week, I named the two Jesuses my nervous system recognizes. This week, I want to locate one of them in history.

The news is full of familiar sentences:

Pre-emptive strike.
Major combat operations.
Retaliation.
Targets.
Security.

The language is tidy.

The outcomes are not.

And my body does what bodies do when empires speak:

It listens for what is being hidden beneath the clean words.

Empire has always had a vocabulary for violence.

Rome had one too.

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The State Was Not Background

Jesus was born into an occupied land. People lived under siege.

He did not grow up under self-rule.
He grew up under surveillance.
He grew up in a world where power could decide — without asking permission — which bodies would be made into examples.

Rome was not a neutral backdrop to the gospel.

Rome was the weather.

And Rome was bellicose.

When people romanticize Rome, they say “roads” and “order” and “peace.”

But Rome’s peace was enforced by legions.

The Pax Romana was not the absence of violence.

It was the management of violence in the service of empire.

Comply and you may live.
Resist and we will make you public.

That was the arrangement.

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Crucifixion Was Public Policy

Rome did not crucify private spirituality.

Rome crucified public disruption.

Crucifixion was not simply execution.

It was theater.
It was deterrence.
It was state messaging written on flesh.

The cross said:

This is what happens when you threaten order.

When we speak of “the cross” only as a symbol of personal forgiveness, we risk forgetting that it was first a state killing.

Jesus was not executed in a church.

He was executed by empire.

A colonized Jew (very different from colonizer Jews)
Publicly humiliated.
Displayed as warning.

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Jesus Was Colonized Before He Was Crucified

We often skip from Bethlehem to Calvary and miss the occupation in between.

Occupation shaped everything.

Who paid taxes.
Who carried debt.
Who moved freely.
Who gathered under suspicion.
Who was disposable.

Security language did not begin in modern press briefings.

Empire has always called violence peace.

So when Jesus stands in Luke 4 and reads:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…
to proclaim good news to the poor…
release to the captives…
freedom for the oppressed…”

That is not private devotion.

That is public disruption.

That is a declaration in occupied territory.

And occupied authorities respond predictably.

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The Whitening of Jesus

Over time, something happened to Jesus in the Christian imagination.

The colonized body disappeared.

The occupied Jew became a European monarch in stained glass.

The executed dissident became serene.

This is not only about art.

It is about allegiance.

A whitened Jesus is easier to merge with national power.
Easier to drape in flags.
Easier to invoke at military ceremonies.
Easier to baptize order.

But a colonized Christ is harder to manage.

A colonized Christ makes it difficult to bless occupation anywhere — American, European, African, Asian—Middle Eastern.

Because he remembers what it feels like.

He knows what surveillance does to a body.

He knows what public execution does to a community.

He knows how quickly “security” becomes justification.

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Worship and Anesthesia

I do not distrust beauty.

I distrust beauty without memory.

Some worship music is transporting in the way anesthesia is transporting.

It lifts us up and away — not into God’s truth — but away from the world where God was crucified by the state.

Kind.
Sweet.
Lovely.
Beautiful.

Jesus is tender.

But tenderness severed from truth becomes cover.

Because the Jesus of civil religion is also “nice” — as long as you comply.

He soothes the status quo.
He blesses stability.
He spiritualizes suffering.
He can be gentle in song and bellicose in policy.

I remember one of the many wars unfolding in the headlines.

It was Memorial Day weekend.

That year, Pentecost — Whitsunday — fell on the same Sunday.

But the assembly focused on Memorial Day.

Flags were present.
An esteemed veteran stood in uniform and was honored.
War language had filled the week’s news.

The room felt unified.

The music was beautiful.

And then the congregation began to sing:

“Our God is greater,
Our God is stronger,
God, You are higher than any other…”

I froze.

It was not that the lyrics were necessarily false.

It was the timing.

It was the fusion.

It was the way Pentecost — the day the Spirit fell across languages and nations — was overshadowed by national remembrance.

I could not tell if we were proclaiming the risen Christ or rehearsing national strength.

I have not sung that song since.

I don’t have a problem with the Divine’s greatness. I imagine great compassion, great mercy, great wisdom… all resting within.

But because I need to know what we mean when we say “Our God is greater.”

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An International Word

I am not writing to demonize ordinary people caught in conflict.

I am not pretending suffering is simple or one-sided.

I am naming a pattern.

Empire logic is contagious.

And the church is always tempted to confuse empire’s “security” with God’s “peace.”

The Christ my body knows does not require numbness.

He does not ask us to forget occupation or ignore genocides.

He does not ask us to sanitize crucifixion.

He asks us to remember:

He was born under occupation.
He lived under surveillance.

He was abducted by the state.
He was executed by the state.

If our theology cannot survive that memory, it is too fragile.

If our worship cannot hold that history, it is too thin.

But empire does not always erase what it cannot control.
Sometimes it relocates it.
Sometimes it reframes it.
Sometimes it teaches us how to see it differently.

I want the colonized Christ.

Because only that Christ can tell the truth about empire —

without becoming it.

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