Taking Off and Landing

I’m starting a new series. FYI.
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Today, I took a respite from my normal community and went over to University Baptist Church, partly for a change of pace, and partly to see Rob Bell speak. He’s kinda the next big voice in the college scene. When I was in college, it was the Passion stuff, with Louie Giglio at the helm. Since then, the Emerging Church has come onto the scene in a big way, with a lot of college students trying to figure out what it means to be a Christian in a world where so much of the Christian vocabulary has really lost its distinctiveness. But that’s a whole other conversation.

Today, Rob talked about the pre-crucifixion week, narrating why exactly Jesus found himself on the cross. On one level, confessionally, I look at Jesus and say that he was mediating a way to God the Father for me. One another level, this is really a political mess, which is what he was talking about. I’ll summarize the main points of the argument:

1) The time of Jesus was a tense one for Jews, with the Romans occupying the land, famine decimating the population, a small powerful minority controlling the region, and a religious hierarchy stifling the people.

2) Jesus, preaching a message of another kingdom, sounds for all the world to the Romans like a Zealot, and to the Pharisees like a prophet. Anyone who comes in talking about the kingdom of God, after all, is going to find himself right in line with the prophets of Israel, challenging the nation to turn again to its true king.

3) Passover, the celebration of the children of Israel being liberated from a foreign oppressor, becomes a politically volatile time, especially when you consider that less than 20 years earlier, a revolt in Jerusalem during Passover left 2,000 Jews dead. As such, when Jesus approaches Jerusalem on a donkey, behaving like a liberator, he’s challenging the existing system which has tyrannized the people, kept them in spiritual oppression, and led them astray.

4) Jesus is thus executed for being a political/religious troublemaker. Over 2,000 speaking of God’s concern for the poor and oppressed highlight this as God’s ultimate suffering with the least of the world.

Variations on this basic story differ from point to point, but that’s the gist of it. On one level, this is correct: Jesus was a political threat in a very real way. But here’s where the story gets a little tricky: when you start talking about salvation in only relational terms, that Jesus was a religious/ political leader who sought to free the people to worship and to restore right political and economic relations, it’s really easy to create too close a correspondence between our world and Jesus. If the cross is God’s demonstration of the preference for the poor, two things happen: 1) Economic condition becomes linked with favor, only in reverse. It’s a really bad connection to say that wealth is God’s favor; it’s equally bad to say that little money equals God’s favor. 2) We never consider the awful possibility that we are on the side of the oppressor, the rich, the powerful of the world.

Where we stand in the matrix of oppressor/oppressed, rich/poor is such a relative stance. In all of our life, we participate in both systems; we unwittingly step on others, and are outrageously stepped on. But to absolutize one position or the other is to say that there is only what we see to the story. It’s real easy for me to want to kick Bernie Evers in the face, but this ignores the fact that I spend way too much money every summer cooling off my room, thus participating in the oppression of Nigerians or Venezuelans. To say that the Gospel message is about right economics only is to say that we can extract ourselves from the economic situation and be able to ever stand in a place of right action.

This is not to say that the Gospel has nothing to do with economics. I’m betting my life on the fact that it very much does: it impacts the kinds of practices we support with our dollar. The Gospel says that my resources are not my own, and that those in need should get what they need. The Gospel tells me that the argument that welfare is a bad idea is a total load, if for no other reason than there are some who don’t get the chance to earn their bread. A society which refuses to take responsibility for the factors it creates that cripple people is a society which has become so atomized that it will eventually splinter into a million self-interests.

But to reduce the Gospel to only economicscannot be the end. To be quite clear, this is not where Bell ends–his sermon ended with a call to a revolutionary way of life, to follow Jesus in a broader way that embraces more than just one’s spirit. And to preach to a crowd of private-college kids that the Gospel demands a different lifestyle–one of service, sacrifice, and social activism–is a great start. But first things first. In the coming weeks, I’ll be looking at some of the facets of this. Stay tuned.