Africa-Press – Uganda. It is not novel to argue that Paul’s writings have profound political overtones, claims, and implications. In recent years, various Jewish, Christian, and nonreligious thinkers have written much on the relationship between Paul’s philosophy and politics. Nonetheless, I find it remarkable that many Christians have not thought to read Paul’s Prison Letters through the lens of political resistance.
Paul wrote at least four significant letters from prison. According to Acts, he caused riots in Jerusalem, got embroiled in a theological form of resistance to the state, and was imprisoned and ultimately executed as its enemy. He was simply the Bobi wine of that Time! But why did the Roman Empire want to imprison and kill Paul? After all, if Paul hadn’t been executed, he couldn’t have become a martyr as the term is used in our churches today. And there were plenty of religious people in the Roman Empire/ NRM at the time who believed all sorts of things that differed from the imperial ideology, yet those individuals didn’t get hung up on crosses or have their heads cut off. So what was it about Paul, as well as Jesus and many other Christians, that led the state to jail and then execute them as political heretics?
Much like our Ugandan system of incarceration, Roman imprisonment was a system of detention that was meant to trigger dejection and even despair. Prison was—and is—a “penitentiary,” a place designed to produce “penitence” or “repentance.” As such, prison is a performative statement of the state’s capture and control over prisoners, reducing them to a powerlessness aimed at conversion to their failed ideology.
But much to the chagrin of the Roman authorities, Paul’s spirit, Like the Kyagulanyi’s of our time remains defiantly unbroken and bright during his imprisonment. Paul’s letter from the Kitalya prison of their time to Philippi, a Roman colony, is famously known as his “letter of joy,” because there are no fewer than ten references to joy in its four short chapters. But readers often fail to notice that this joy is wrapped up in Paul’s provocative political defiance.
Imagine Paul’s jailer censoring this letter like the in the case of comrade Kakwenza Rukirabashaija. I expect that the fellow would be shocked, confused, and perhaps intrigued, if not outraged, that Paul rebelliously writes things like “I always pray with joy” (1:4); “I will continue to rejoice” (1:18); “I am glad and rejoice with all of you” (2:17); “Rejoice in the sovereign! It is no trouble for me to write the same things to you again” (3:1; my translation); and “Rejoice in the sovereign always. I will say it again: Rejoice!” (4:4; my translation). Whatever prison was doing to Paul, it certainly was not making him pliant, contrite, or converted to his captor’s ideology something that should inspire many of us that stand as candidates of Prison. Roman prison had not reduced Paul to powerlessness or filled him with despair. Rather, despite the chains that shackled the movement of his body (1:13), Paul embodied a defiant freedom. He always had this in his mind that ” Obusiibe Buggwa” in Eddie Mutwe’s voice!
Paul attributes his treasonous cheerfulness under Roman incarceration to Jesus, his “sovereign”. This is a title archaically translated as “Lord” but which actually meant the highest position of authority, the sovereign ruler. Paul’s choice of terms is not accidental; Caesar/General Museveni also claimed to be “sovereign.” Thus, Paul was implicitly saying that the imperial sovereign’s prison had no power over the crucified sovereign’s joy. Paul pointed to another sovereign who is sovereign over the pseudo sovereign Caesar/General Museveni and his son.
In short, then, the imperial NRM system of detention and demoralization of the time was shown to be a failure in the presence of a prisoner loyal to Christ/Freedom. The springs of his joy were inaccessible to and inexhaustible by the state’s apparatus of capturing and crushing the spirit. Paul’s joy was therefore intensely political—it was an embodied resistance. Paul testified that the new life “in Christ” is sovereign over the state’s sovereignty, which it exercised and enforced through a system of policing, capturing, and conforming its subjects.
Throughout this joyful prison letter, Paul celebrates and inculcates an alternative vision of power, a vision of power that makes Caesar’s famously violent empire look both powerless and foolish. In chapter 2, Paul instructs his readers to have “the same mindset as Christ Jesus” (2:5), which is constituted by this simple law: “value others above yourselves” (2:4). Paul goes on to write that this mindset led Jesus to give up all of his divine privileges, to “make himself nothing,” and freely to “take the very nature of a servant” like an ordinary human being (2:6–8). That is, rather than rising up over others like it is with the NRM regime. Jesus descends to be with and for others, even to the point of embracing a debased and despised lowliness. This is Christ’s governing mentality, his ultimate reason, his mind. And, shockingly, it is for this reason with this mind that “God exalted him to the highest place . . . that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is sovereign” (2:9–10). This is what The National Unity Platform preaches! A servant leadership! Where the voter is the boss of the voted!
Of course, this was ideological heresy and political treason to Ceasor/Museveni. For him. It was about serving him and his family. It was treasonous to preach otherwise. According to Paul, true power is found in presence with and sacrifice for others, not in rising up in terrifying height above them, like the Roman eagle circling above its prey. To the contrary, God exalted Christ as the ruler of the world because he valued others above himself to the point of death. Paul is here defiantly reimagining the very nature of power. If anything, Roman prison(Kitalya) has intensified his conviction that true power—divine power—is found in Christ, in the one whose sovereignty represents the opposite of Caesar’s. Indeed, prison becomes a kind of creative base for Paul to clarify his ideas and spread his message throughout the empire with letters like this one to colonial Philippi.
Paul is not employing an empty metaphor, as though Jesus had become the sovereign of Christians’ hearts or taken up the metaphorical throne of their inner lives or even the church. No, Paul is emphatic that God has given Jesus sovereignty over “every name,” “every knee,” and “every tongue” throughout the entirety of reality. All will acknowledge “Jesus Christ is sovereign.” It is this fundamentally universal claim to Christ’s sovereignty over all people in all places that clarifies the reason for Paul’s imprisonment and execution. The Roman Empire was teaming with religions and spiritualities, which Rome generally welcomed as part of its strategy of assimilating people and defusing potential conflict, but Paul wasn’t preaching a new inner spirituality. He was propagating a new way of interpreting reality, authority, and thus political order like all freedom fighters are doing in Uganda.
Even if Paul affirmed that just rulers have legitimate authority under God and thus should be obeyed, he still affirmed that their authority was under God and thus that they were accountable to Christ not to cause terror for those who do right like General Museveni and his henchmen does to us. Such an assertion was unthinkable and treasonous to the state precisely because it defied the totality of Caesar’s/ Museveni’s claim to authority. Paul insisted that the ruler and his state are subservient to a higher authority that will ultimately judge them.
All of this makes a sham of Caesar/Museveni. When Caesar wants to prove his power, he does not go among the people and serve the despised. He does not spill his own blood. Rather, he makes claims to “being in very nature God” and imprisons people like Paul, trying to intimidate them into believing that he is worthy of being feared, obeyed, and even worshiped. This is how imperial power perpetuates itself. Does this sound familiar? But Paul insists through Christ that Caesar’s/Museveni’s imprisoning power is a hoax; it is an obsolete governing narrative that should no longer impress, much less imprison, the minds of Christ’s new community.
If Uganda was genuinely liberated, why would people like Kakwenza Rukirabashaija be kidnapped by those that claim they liberated us? Why are journalists clobbered? Why do you rig elections yet you claim it is one of the reasons you went to the bush to kill innocent Ugandans? Why all this Corruption and the deep rooted tribalism? Why are we in a transitional crisis? If your liberation song is not Pseudo, then what is it? What is your definition of Liberation?
You are simply a curse to Ugandans that God should save us from. May God convict you of your crimes against humanity.
Pastor Muwanguzi Andrew.
Head of Training and Leadership Development at National Unity Platform
Source: Nile Post
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