BLOG 12/30/15. A REMINDER: CHRIST IS CONTROVERSIAL
At the threshold of 2016, let me remind those of you who read these blogs that Jesus Christ is controversial, unquestionably. It was he who gave us the enigmatic statement that he did not come to bring peace, but a sword. But Christ is also a reconciler, and the Prince of Peace. So how do you reconcile such apparently contradictory statements?
Before I pursue that, let me take an excursus and report that I just today got the annual report from WordPress, upon whose program these blogs are posted. It reports that in 2015 there were over 2000 of you who visited this site, and those from numerous countries around the world: Algeria, China, Romania, Pakistan, and many others. Thank you for visiting. But I do not post these blogs casually. It is no minor thing to be engaged as a follower of Jesus Christ, and engaged in his mission. And that is where we come back to the reminder that Jesus is controversial, even counter-cultural. How could he not be? Jesus came with the explicit announcement that in himself God’s New Creation was being inaugurated in the here and now, … that the Age to Come was, in him, invading the present age, that the dominion of Light was come to dispel and destroy the dominion of Satan and of darkness. There would be an inevitable clash of kingdoms.
Yet, the New Creation, the salvation, into which he calls men and women is patterned at all after the patterns of the resident power structures, or dominions. His would be one in which righteousness was a hallmark, and peacemaking would be at its heart. It would be a dominion which would focus on the poor and helpless, the hungry and the naked and the stranger. “The rich would be sent away hungry, and the hungry filled with good things.” The one major competitor to faith in God-in-Christ would be mammon, or the worship of wealth. That doesn’t sound too much like the agendas of most earthly dominions, or political leaders (with some wonderful exceptions).
So those who have responded to Jesus as the sovereign Lord, as God’s anointed, as the Rescuer from the devastation of the human rebellion against God, … live daily in a world that is too much governed by an entirely different agenda, or by injustice, or ethnic discrimination, or indifference to human need. That is what makes the Christian faith controversial to a fault, and counter-cultural inevitably. But it also is what makes Christ’s people, his New Creation community to be a “sweet aroma of Christ unto God.” It is what makes them to be the “dwelling place of God by the Holy Spirit,” … and that in the midst of the darkness, the indifference, the hostility and contempt of the dominions and power structures of this age. It is also what makes them to be a people of hope, a people who have found their true center, and their true authority, and their true creative source, and their true guiding line, and yes, their true and final hope–and their number grows quietly like leaven and brings life.
At the threshold of the year 2016 we, all of us from so many nations, live in a global scene that is full of what appear to be unsolvable social and political and ethnic and traditional conflicts and dilemmas. But those of us who have responded to Christ are, in the midst of all of that chaos, called to walk as the children of Light, as the citizens of God’s New Creation, and formed by his Spirit to produce springs in the desert, to love mercy, to do justly, and to walk humbly with our God.
May 2016 make of us those instruments of God’s peace in the midst of the chaos—military conflicts, political campaigns, hosts of refugees—and all the contexts of this present darkness. And, in the midst of the grim stuff, to be instruments of God’s “mirth and gladness.”
