Jesus on the Terrorist Watchlist

How Trump’s new security directive criminalizes the way of Jesus.

The Trump administration’s new national security directive, NSPM-7, quietly expands the definition of “domestic terrorism” to include those who not only hold “anti-capitalist” and “anti-American” views, but “anti-Christian” ones as well.

The irony? The teachings of Jesus, which should theoretically be at the heart of Christian teaching, are what Trump’s directive would consider, among other things, “anti-capitalist” and “anti-American.”

But don’t take my word for it. In this story I unpack the Beatitudes, a key teaching of Jesus, one where he offers a vision of the world that would land him and those who follow him on the terrorist watchlist.

As always, I close with three practices to help you embody the ideas in this post that will help us all stay human.

Watch or Listen

The Full Story

I need to tell you something strange:

This week, I discovered, I should be on the terrorist watch list.

Not because I bought a gun.

Not because I made threats.

But because I follow Jesus.

Following Jesus

Now, when I say follow Jesus, I don’t mean what a lot of American Christianity has reduced it to.

The American Reduction

In many circles, Jesus’ life is almost an afterthought. Sure there’s reference to how he lived perfectly, but the real story is about a brutal death to appease God’s wrath. His crucifixion becomes a divine transaction, and his resurrection is the receipt stamped “paid in full.”

It’s a belief that uses a basic reading of the 10 Commandments and Israel’s sacrificial system, strips them from their fuller context, and substitutes moral platitudes for the 10 Commandments and Jesus for the sacrificial offering.

But while this understanding is popular in America, it fails to correctly understand both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament.

Reading the Hebrew Bible Well

What do I mean by that? Let’s start with the Hebrew Bible. This approach reads the 10 Commandments and the rest of Torah Law as a gigantic to-do list and treats God a bit like Santa Claus. Doing the 10 Commandments gets you on the nice list. But when you don’t do them, you end up on the naughty list. The sacrificial system then gives you another chance.

But if you read the 10 Commandments in context, the 10 Commandments and rest of the Law are not what you do to make God love you, they’re what you do in response to God’s love. They outline how Israel was supposed to live differently in the ancient world as to highlight the nature and character of God. Now, I’ll admit, that statement sounds terrifying given what we find in some of those passages, but unpacking some of those is another story for another time.

And while the Old Testament is never explicit on the why of the sacrificial system or how it worked, Jesus makes it clear that all of the Law was given, not for God, but for the people, so the sacrifices too aren’t for God’s benefit, but the peoples. They’re not about making God ok with you, they’re there to help you connect to God.

Reading the Hebrew Bible Through Jesus

At a deeper level, that last line highlights how those who follow Jesus should approach the Hebrew Bible. You don’t let the Hebrew Bible guide your reading of the Christian New Testament, rather, you let Jesus become the key to understanding not only the rest of the New Testament, but all of the Hebrew Bible. Why? Because in Jesus, God’s dream for humanity is, at least in theory, more clearly revealed.

Think of it like going to one of those blue and yellow furniture stores and buying a large piece of furniture with a funny name. You do the best you can with the instructions they provide, but you can’t seem to figure out how the whole thing comes together. Then you search for the item online and pull up some video instructions. As you watch someone else put it together you discover that you had key pieces backwards and upside down.

For humanity, the Hebrew Bible, while having everything you need to know about who God is and how God invites the world to be, is like those easy to misinterpret instructions. Jesus is supposed to be seen as the video that helps make sense of what’s been true of God all along.

How Jesus Understands the Hebrew Bible

But don’t take my word for it, that’s how Jesus describes himself. Whether it’s Luke 24 where he starts with Moses and the Prophets and lays out how it’s all always been about him, or in John 5 when he says that Moses, another way of referring to the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, are about him. Or in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says he’s come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets.

Fulfillment means Jesus shows us how all the parts actually fit. He takes the commandments and the prophets’ cries for justice and mercy and brings them into their true shape: a life that restores relationships, heals wounds, embodies God’s presence.

That’s why he keeps saying, “You’ve heard it said… but I say to you.” He’s taking the popular interpretation of the day and correcting it. He’s not erasing what came before, but unpacking the heart it was always meant to reveal.

What It Means to Follow Jesus

So to follow Jesus isn’t simply to behave in a certain way or believe in a transaction that fixes things when you don’t, but it’s discovering how his life, his teaching, his healings, his table fellowship, his cross, his resurrection reveal God’s heart and invite us into a different kind of humanity.

Now you might be asking, what does that kind of following Jesus have to do with being a potential terrorist?

NSPM-7 and Jesus

Well, this past week the Trump administration released NSPM-7, a sweeping national security directive. It calls for pre-crime investigations into people who hold one or more views on a list of “indicia of violence.” There’s a deep irony to the list because it includes anti-Christian views as well as a broad category on traditional American religious views, but is done in such a way that Jesus becomes a terrorist. As for anyone who actually follows him? They should be on the watchlist too.

But once again, don’t take my word for it, rather, listen to the words of Jesus, specifically a sermon where he clearly lays out his vision of how the world should be, The Sermon on the Mount, which opens with a series of blessings called the Beatitudes.

Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit

Jesus opens, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

What does it mean to be poor in spirit? I’m going to take a wild guess that it means exactly what it says, to be spiritually poor or to recognize your spiritual poverty. It’s not about us and our spiritual performance, it’s about God and divine love for each of us.

This fits well with what Jesus teaches in other parts of the Sermon on the Mount. He tells his followers not to pray like the Gentiles who ramble on and on in their prayers (6:7). He also calls out the prayers of hypocrites who makes sure that everyone else sees them praying (6:5). But his examples go beyond how people pray. It also includes not drawing attention to yourself when giving to the needy (6:2). A little later he addresses those who make horrible faces while fasting to emphasize pious devotion (6:16).

In contrast to all this, Jesus calls his followers to appear as healthy as possible while fasting. He tells his followers to quietly give to the needy. Jesus invites the praying of simple prayers in secret. The whole section opens with the words, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven” (6:1).

But what is the contrast Jesus is drawing? The Beatitudes, like the 10 Commandments, aren’t a to-do list. This is not an invitation to correct their external practice. Instead, he is saying that their existing practice denies their spiritual poverty. There is a pride in their spirituality.

Pride builds a facade that you have it all together. Those who seek to draw attention to themselves typically do so because they are proud. They are proud of both their knowledge and their conviction in their rightness. They lack humility and a sense of awe at the nature of the divine.

And yet this humility, this spiritual poverty, stands in direct contrast to popular Evangelical Christian movements from the Moral Majority, to the Religious Right, to the Pro Life movement, to rabid support for the nation-state of Israel. In fact, any claim to include some and exclude others based on behavior automatically disqualifies you from being poor in spirit.

And yet, to make that claim is easily interpreted as anti-Christianity, or “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion” and even “traditional American views on morality,” all indicators of violence according to the NSPM-7.

Blessed are Those Who Mourn

But that’s not the only reason Jesus and his followers land on the terrorist list. Jesus continues, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

In “The Wild Edge of Sorrow” Francis Weller identifies five points where grief can meet us, five places we are invited to mourn. They include after we’ve lost something or someone, the sorrow of never receiving something we had a right to as a human, grief for the parts of us that we’ve cast out as unlovable, for the injustice in the world, and generational trauma.

When we stand at any of these gates, we discover that mourning is not weakness. It is the holy refusal to go numb. To mourn is to name the violence, the greed, and the despair that so many would rather ignore.

And yet, if we dare to stand at all five gates we will have no choice but to grieve the pain caused to so many by exploitation, racism, and sexism. We will have to confront the divisions we’ve built along lines of race, gender, and class.

Jesus blesses this. He blesses the ones who carry tears in their eyes and weight in their chest. He blesses the ones who dare to lament the world we’ve created. Yet just like spiritual poverty, doing this grief work is an indicator of violence in Trump’s America, after all, how could you not grieve the greed of capitalism, or be honest about race and sex without holding what Trump and his allies would consider extreme views on race and gender?

Yet this grief now makes you suspect for violence.

Blessed Are the Meek

But Jesus isn’t done yet. The very next line in the Sermon on the Mount is, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

While poor in spirit focuses on your relationship with God, meekness centers on the relationship between people. Moreover, meekness does not always appear mild. Rather, someone who is meek, can become intensely angry. However, they get angry for the right reason and then direct their anger in the right way, at the right time, for the right amount of time.

Jesus flipping tables in the temple is the embodiment of meek anger. For the not familiar, in Matthew the scene comes a few days before Jesus‘ arrest and crucifixion. The day begins with Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey. It is a symbol of how his way of love undermines the political power of Rome.

Then he goes to the temple to do the same to undermine the religious establishment of the day. He, “drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves” (Matthew 21:12). Then he quotes a verse from Isaiah 56 about turning a place of prayer into a den of robbers.

In other words, the local merchants who were there to provide a service that allowed those from across the known world on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to obtain animals necessary for sacrifice, were using the laws of supply and demand to exploit the people and enrich themselves.

So Jesus gets angry at the exploitation and directs it towards those doing the exploiting. He does it as masses of pilgrims arrive in Jerusalem for the feast of Passover. Moreover, the very next verse in Matthew has him healing the blind and lame in the Temple. That is the right reason, direction, timing, and duration of meek anger.

But NSPM-7 wouldn’t have let Jesus make it to the healing. After all, there’s no doubt that flipping those table would constitute anti-capitalism, and given how our national law sees property as more valuable than people, flipping tables might as well qualify as assault.

Blessed are Those Who Hunger and Thirst For Righteous

Terrorist Jesus continues, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteous, for they shall be filled.“

Discussions of righteousness are often shrunk down to private morality: following the rules, being pious, behaving well. But this doesn’t convey what Jesus is getting at. Rather, he’s talking about right relationships, which can be with God, with neighbor, with community, and with creation.

But when it comes to your relationship with God, the foundation of a right relationship is believing that you are beloved. It is about receiving divine love. This is not because of something you do or have done. Nor is there anything you can do to change that fundamental reality. God comes to you, declaring you beloved, and invites you to believe it.

The righteous response then is first for you to believe it and then go to others and declare them beloved as well. And because throughout the Biblical narrative God demonstrates preference for the outcasts and marginalized, so should we. This means we should not prioritize the people who look and live like us. Our focus needs to be on the social fringe. As it turns out, these are often the people who feel the most unloved. Jesus calls us to love them right where they are.

This create two reasons for us to land on the watchlist.

First, it rejects any effort, political or cultural, by those claiming to follow Christ, that imposes a set of values on the rest of society. That’s behavior that flows from the tradition of the Pharisees, not Jesus. So that gets on the list for anti-Christianity.

Second, embracing your inherent value is anti-capitalism, which insists that our value is based on our contribution to production and the bottom line. Moreover, treating others, especially the marginalized, as if they have inherent value, that’s extremism on migration, race, and gender, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.

And Jesus doesn’t call us to dabble in these ideals, he invites us to hunger and thirst for them. To ache with longing. To feel in our bones that our nation and world is not as it should be … which I guess means we’re also on the list for anti-Americanism.

Blessed Are the Merciful

More reasons to be tagged as potential terrorists come with, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”

Mercy is often lumped in with forgiveness, but there’s a different quality to it. While forgiveness is a decision to not hold someone’s harmful actions against them, mercy focuses the future of both the offender and the victim.

The response comes in one of two forms. On one hand, mercy is a decision by someone in power, like a judge, to not administer rightful consequences. They offer mercy believing the offending party is either contrite or that the mercy will bring about contrition. Either way, this leads to change.

The other response involves a third party, like a humanitarian worker or therapist, seeking to heal to those wrongly harmed. The goal is the reduction and ultimately negation of suffering’s effects. This source of the suffering includes things like war, famine, natural disasters, or a more individualized trauma. This work recognizes that suffering has a ripple effect as people in pain are more likely to harm to others.

What these merciful responses have in common is the idea of restorative justice. One aims to restore the life of the person that degraded to the point of harming others. The other aims to restore the life of the people harmed. Restorative justice stands in contrast to the much more common understanding that justice is retributive.

Retributive justice says, “You hurt me, so I hurt you back.” or “You broke a law, so we break you with punishment.” That is the justice empire knows, and it never heals. It only deepens the wounds.

But restorative justice recognizes the wisdom of Gandhi that, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Restorative justice calls for a world where things broken are restored and things torn apart are made whole. It is God’s relentless desire to put broken lives, broken families, and broken communities back together.

However, if that’s going to happen, we need to acknowledge the damage that’s been done. Once again this calls us to embrace what Trump would consider an extreme view of race and gender. Odds are good, that would also constitute an assault on traditional views of the family, if nothing else, because it holds a higher view of women in relationships. And of course, restorative justice will ultimately demand an anti-capitalism response it seeks to undo generations of exploitation.

Blessed Are the Pure In Heart

As you might expect at this point, Jesus next line, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” is yet another for us to land on the terrorist watchlist.

Purity in Jesus’ day was about boundaries. Who was in. Who was out. Who was clean. Who was unclean. It became a system of division, a way to protect power and control.

Jesus blesses a different kind of purity. Not ritual separation, not sexual obsession, but singleness of heart. Now, in the Jewish mind, the heart is so much more than just the seat of emotions. To talk about the heart is to talk about your inner life. So the heart includes the feelings, mind, and will. This means you think and move and be in accordance to the heart. You could actually say that your heart is what interfaces with spirit.

Another way to think about your heart is to think about your loyalty. Empire thrives on divided hearts. It asks for loyalty to flag and to cross, to profit and to prayer. NSPM-7 calls loyalty to God over nation anti-Americanism.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers

Jesus continue to bat 1000 on the terrorist watchlist with his line, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”

In the Jewish mind, the concept of peace means more than the absence of war or conflict. Shalom, the Hebrew word for peace, centers on the idea of wholeness. At a societal level, peace means our social structures are not only stable but the facilitate thriving of everybody. It also means our relationships with one another are strong. Finally, at an individual level, peace only happens when people are physically and emotionally healthy. All of this means that peacemaking requires changing unjust systems something that once again puts us on the watchlist for anti-capitalism, extreme views on migration, race, and gender, and I’m sure a slew of other reasons.

So there very ones that NSPM-7 labels as potential terrorists, Jesus calls family, the very children of God.

Blessed Are Those Who Are Persecuted For Justice’ Sake

Which brings us to the final Beatitude, one that lets us know that NSPM-7 is exactly what we should expect for following Jesus, after all, this is the same path that led Jesus to the cross.

You see, while today the cross is a religious symbol, in Jesus’ day it was a tool of empire. In the Roman world, crucifixion was state-sponsored terror, reserved for rebels, slaves, and anyone who threatened the order of Rome. It was how the empire silenced insurrection, hanging bodies on roadsides as a public warning: this is what happens if you defy Caesar. The cross was Rome’s way of pressing down every hint of resistance, a weapon to keep the oppressed in fear and the powerful in control.

So as Jesus closes with, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for justice’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” it becomes clear that NSPM-7 is the American Empires promise of a cross for those who dare defy it.

If you follow Jesus, if you embody the Beatitudes, you will be misunderstood. You will be opposed. You will be reviled. Jesus promises that assault from Empire is not a sign of failure, it is confirmation that you’re on the right path.

The prophets were always rejected. The faithful were always mocked. Jesus prepares his followers for the same. And in doing so he blesses them. He says the kingdom of heaven is theirs.

Empire will always find ways to punish those who hunger for justice, who practice mercy, who make peace. NSPM-7 simply encodes the persecution into law. But Jesus calls it blessing. He promises that those who bear the wounds of justice are the ones who already live in God’s kingdom.

Empire or Jesus

Early in this story I offered an analogy using furniture instructions. While the Hebrew Scriptures can be like those pages of diagrams, full of truth but so easy to misread, the same is true for the broader human experience. The Hebrews weren’t the only people in the ancient world, actually they were among the smallest and most insignificant. As a result, Empire, be it Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, or Rome always held them under their thumb as Empire has been building upside down for centuries, and the result is a world of violence, loneliness, and despair.

Jesus came into that world like an online instructional video, seeking to shows us how the pieces fit together. He reveals what the Law and the Prophets were always pointing toward: mercy instead of vengeance, justice that restores instead of punishes, love that refuses to let go.

Empire, be it Roman or American, calls that dangerous. NSPM-7 calls it radical. But Jesus calls it life. And if following him puts me on a watchlist, then I will take my place there gladly. Because the wisdom in his words, whether you follow Jesus in name or just in practice, are the only way we can stay human.

Practices For Personal Transformation

One of the biggest challenges when unpacking something like the Beatitudes is to not turn it into the Be-Attitudes, that is, a checklist of attitudes you should aim to be or embody.

Instead, the nuance of Matthew’s Greek says that these are postures that will flow from you when you have a healthy understanding of who you are and who God is. As I understand it, that means to see God as relentlessly loving and yourself as relentlessly beloved.

At a psychological level, really embracing that undermines shame and invites us to a place where we no longer needing to prove our worth. This frees us to live authentically and it also spurs a desire for others to know their belovedness.

So this week, I am offering three practices to help you move towards embracing your own belovedness. Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation reflection, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, I have something for you.