BLOG 4/13/18. YOUR LIFE IRRELEVANT TO HISTORY? SAY WHAT?
My last blog precipitated some response that requires a follow-up. I quoted a missions professor whose statement was: “If you can’t relate your life to Christ’s Great Commission, then your life is irrelevant to history.” I readily admit that such a challenging comment requires more context than I gave it, so let’s give it a re-run. First off: what is the purpose of history? Are we floating around in what one called a boundless, bottomless, sea of chance? Is human history purposeless? Does it even matter what, or how, I conceive of my life’s resonance with any larger purpose?
Actually: yes! It does matter. Somewhere hidden in down in the meta-consciousness of humankind is a wonderment about life’s meaning. The enigma that we face in Jesus Christ is that he came proclaiming a message that gave answer to that very question, but he did it in such a way as is (again) most enigmatic. Jesus came onto the human scene proclaiming that God’s eschatological (check that word out) design for his creation was now being inaugurated: in himself: Jesus Christ. That sounds a bit grandiose for a Palestinian peasant, doesn’t it? In an almost insignificant little near eastern country, out of nowhere, comes this one with such a claim. He doesn’t even come to the centers of religious or political importance, but on the back roads of the province of Galilee. Is he to be taken seriously? Even his later, first-century followers acknowledged it as: “the foolishness of what we preach.”
But it’s crucial to the ultimate question: What, indeed, is the purpose of this life? How can such a claim be taken seriously in a context that is so often peopled with troublesome, fractured, vain, sometimes sordid humans? What’s more, Jesus’ call was not to the powerful, or intellectual, highly-born … but to ordinary, weak, foolish, lowly-born folk. What he did require, however, was that those who were to be his followers take on a whole new frame of reference—that is his command to repent/have a change of mind. It is a requirement to accept the reality that the Creator-God does, indeed, have a purpose for his creation, that that purposeful-creation has been invaded by a spirit of rebellion—a vain attempt at autonomy, or of being its own gods and goddesses, and that this has resulted in all of that which we subsume under the rubric of: evil.
Jesus’ message is that, in himself, God was invading his own rebellious creation in order to make known to it its true purpose, and to bring about a reconciliation between the Creator and the creation, and to inaugurate a whole new creation, and a whole new humanity—but that it would be accomplished at tremendous cost to himself. “The foolishness of what we preach.” So, back to the quote at the beginning of this blog: The followers of Jesus saw in Jesus (his life, death, resurrection and teachings) “the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to Christ’s followers.” Bingo! The meaning of human history.
To relate one’s life to such an understanding is enormously freeing/liberating. It is a calling into a whole new sense of the meaning of my life. And, like Jesus’ own life and ministry, it is communicated in unexpected and non-glamourous places, to real, often-difficult human beings. It makes the most mundane of daily life to be related to the design of God in making all things new. In makes one’s seemingly insignificant contribution in daily life to be suffused with hope. It is the relating of my life to Christ’s Great Commission, and so to be very relevant to human history—not gathered in church meetings (though such have their role in our mutual encouragement), but in being Christ’s church scattered in the 24/7 brokenness of daily life as his witnesses in the sheer Christ-likeness of our love and good works – living out the Great Commission. And if anyone asks us what it is that “makes us tick,” we can communicate the message to them with love, humility and gentleness.
Run with that! [and I’d love your comments]
