Spheres of service
Spheres of service
Granted that the community of Christ is a community of the cross, and will therefore be marked by sacrifice, service and suffering, how will this work itself out in the three spheres of home, church and world?
Life in a Christian home, which should in any case be characterized by natural human love, should be further enriched by supernatural divine love, that is, the love of the cross. It should mark all Christian family relationships, between husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters. For we are to ‘submit to one another out of reverence for Christ’ (Eph. 5:21), the Christ whose humble and submissive love led him even to the cross. Yet it is specially husbands who are singled out. ‘Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy,...and to present her to himself as a radiant church...’ (vv. 25–27). This Ephesians passage is commonly regarded as being very hard on wives, because they are to recognize the ‘headship’ God has given to their husbands and submit to them. But it is arguable that the quality of self-giving love required of husbands is even more demanding. For they are to love their wives with the love which Christ has for his bride the church. This is Calvary love. It is both self-sacrificial (he ‘gave himself up for her’, v. 25) and constructive (‘to make her holy’ and resplendent, growing into her full potential, vv. 26–27). It is also caring and protective: ‘husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies’, for ‘no-one ever hated his own body, but he feeds it and cares for it, just as Christ does the church’ (vv. 28–29). Christian homes in general, and Christian marriages in particular, would be more stable and more satisfying if they were marked by the cross.
We turn now from the home to the church, and begin with pastors. We saw in an earlier chapter that there is a place for authority and discipline in the community of Jesus. Nevertheless, his emphasis was not on these things but on the new style of leadership which he introduced, distinguished by humility and service. Paul himself felt the tension. As an apostle he had received from Christ a special degree of authority. He could have come to the recalcitrant Corinthian church ‘with a whip’, and was ‘ready to punish every act of disobedience’, if he had to. But he did not want to be ‘harsh’ in the use of his authority, which the Lord Jesus had given him for building them up, not for tearing them down. He would much prefer to come as a father visiting his dear children. It was the tension between the death and resurrection of Jesus, between weakness and power. He could exercise power, since Christ ‘lives by God’s power’. But since ‘he was crucified in weakness’, it is ‘the meekness and gentleness of Christ’ which Paul wants most to exhibit.17 If Christian pastors adhered more closely to the Christ who was crucified in weakness, and were prepared to accept the humiliations which weakness brings, rather than insisting on wielding power, there would be much less discord and much more harmony in the church.
The cross is to characterize all our relationships in Christ’s community, however, and not just the relationship between pastors and people. We are to ‘love one another’, John insists in his first letter, both because God is love in his being and because he has showed his love by sending his Son to die for us. And this love always expresses itself in unselfishness. We are to ‘do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than’ ourselves. Positively, we are each of us to look not only to our own interests, ‘but also to the interests of others’. Why? Why this renunciation of selfish ambition and this cultivation of an unselfish interest in others? Because this was the attitude of Christ, who both renounced his own rights and humbled himself to serve others. In fact, the cross sweetens all our relationships in the church. We have only to remember that our fellow Christian is a ‘brother (or sister) for whom Christ died’, and we will never disregard, but always seek to serve, their truest and highest welfare. To sin against them would be to ‘sin against Christ’.18
If the cross is to mark our Christian life in the home and the church, this should be even more so in the world. The church tends to become very preoccupied with its own affairs, obsessed with petty, parochial trivia, while the needy world outside is waiting. So the Son sends us out into the world, as the Father had sent him into the world. Mission arises from the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus. His birth, by which he identified himself with our humanity, calls us to a similar costly identification with people. His death reminds us that suffering is the key to church growth, since it is the seed which dies which multiplies. And his resurrection gave him the universal lordship which enabled him both to claim that ‘all authority’ was now his and to send his church to disciple the nations.19
In theory we know very well the paradoxical principle that suffering is the path to glory, death the way to life, and weakness the secret of power. It was for Jesus, and it still is for his followers today. But we are reluctant to apply the principle to mission, as the Bible does. In the shadowy image of Isaiah’s suffering servant, suffering was to be the condition of his success in bringing light and justice to the nations. As Douglas Webster has written, ‘mission sooner or later leads into passion. In biblical categories...the servant must suffer....Every form of mission leads to some form of cross. The very shape of mission is cruciform. We can understand mission only in terms of the cross...’.20
This biblical vision of suffering service has been largely eclipsed in our day by the unbiblical ‘prosperity gospel’ (which guarantees personal success) and by triumphalist notions of mission (which employ military metaphors that do not comfortably fit the humble image of the suffering servant). By contrast, Paul dared to write to the Corinthians: ‘so then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you’ (2 Cor. 4:12). The cross lies at the very heart of mission. For the cross-cultural missionary it may mean costly individual and family sacrifices, the renunciation of economic security and professional promotion, solidarity with the poor and needy, repenting of the pride and prejudice of supposed cultural superiority, and the modesty (and sometimes frustration) of serving under national leadership. Each of these can be a kind of death, but it is a death which brings life to others.
In all evangelism there is also a cultural gulf to bridge. This is obvious when Christian people move as messengers of the gospel from one country or continent to another. But even if we remain in our own country, Christians and non-Christians are often widely separated from one another by social sub-cultures and lifestyles as well as by different values, beliefs and moral standards. Only an incarnation can span these divides, for an incarnation means entering other people’s worlds, their thought-world, and the worlds of their alienation, loneliness and pain. Moreover, the incarnation led to the cross. Jesus first took our flesh, then bore our sin. This was a depth of penetration into our world in order to reach us, in comparison with which our little attempts to reach people seem amateur and shallow. The cross calls us to a much more radical and costly kind of evangelism than most churches have begun to consider, let alone experience.
The cross calls us to social action too, because it summons us to the imitation of Christ:
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. (1 John 3:16–18)
According to John’s teaching here, love is essentially self-giving. And since our most valuable possession is our life, the greatest love is seen in laying it down for others. Just as the essence of hate is murder (as with Cain), so the essence of love is self-sacrifice (as with Christ). Murder is taking another person’s life; self-sacrifice is laying down one’s own. God does more, however, than give us a paramount exhibition of love in the cross; he puts his love within us. With the love of God both revealed to us and indwelling us, we have a double, inescapable incentive to give ourselves in love to others. Moreover, John makes it clear that to lay down our life for others, though the supreme form of self-giving, is not its only expression. If one of us ‘has’ a possession, ‘sees’ someone else who needs it, and then fails to relate what he ‘has’ to what he ‘sees’ in terms of practical action, he cannot claim to have God’s love in him. So love gives food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, help to the destitute, friendship to the lonely, comfort to the sad, provided always that these gifts are tokens of the giving of the self. For it is possible to give food, money, time and energy, and yet somehow withhold oneself. But Christ gave himself. Though rich, he became poor, in order to make us rich. We know this grace of his, Paul writes, and we must emulate it. Generosity is indispensable to the followers of Christ. There was an almost reckless extravagance about Christ’s love on the cross; it challenges the calculating coldness of our love.
Yet, as we have repeatedly noted throughout this book, the cross is a revelation of God’s justice as well as of his love. That is why the community of the cross should concern itself with social justice as well as with loving philanthropy. It is never enough to have pity on the victims of injustice, if we do nothing to change the unjust situation itself. Good Samaritans will always be needed to succour those who are assaulted and robbed; yet it would be even better to rid the Jerusalem-Jericho road of brigands. Just so Christian philanthropy in terms of relief and aid is necessary, but long-term development is better, and we cannot evade our political responsibility to share in changing the structures which inhibit development. Christians cannot regard with equanimity the injustices which spoil God’s world and demean his creatures. Injustice must bring pain to the God whose justice flared brightly at the cross; it should bring pain to God’s people too. Contemporary injustices take many forms. They are international (the invasion and annexation of foreign territory), political (the subjugation of minorities), legal (the punishment of untried and unsentenced citizens), racial (the humiliating discrimination against people on the ground of race or colour), economic (the toleration of gross North-South inequality and of the traumas of poverty and unemployment), sexual (the oppression of women), educational (the denial of equal opportunity for all) or religious (the failure to take the gospel to the nations). Love and justice combine to oppose all these situations. If we love people, we shall be concerned to secure their basic rights as human beings, which is also the concern of justice. The community of the cross, which has truly absorbed the message of the cross, will always be motivated to action by the demands of justice and love.
As an illustration of how a Christian community can be comprehensively stimulated by the cross, I would like to mention the Moravian Brethren, founded by Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf (1700–60). In 1722 he welcomed some pietistic Christian refugees from Moravia and Bohemia to his estate in Saxony, where he helped them to form a Christian community under the name ‘Herrnhut’. The Moravians’ stress was on Christianity as a religion of the cross and of the heart. They defined a Christian as one who has ‘an inseparable friendship with the Lamb, the slaughtered Lamb’.21 Their seal bears the inscription in Latin ‘Our Lamb has conquered; let us follow him’, and the ensign on their boats was of a lamb passant with a flag in a blood-coloured field (p.97). They were deeply concerned for Christian unity and believed that the Lamb would be the ground of it, since all who ‘adhere to Jesus as the Lamb of God’ are one (p.106). Indeed, Zinzendorf himself declared that ‘the Lamb Slain’ was from the beginning the foundation on which their church was built (p.70).
First, they were certainly a community of celebration. They were great singers, and the focus of their worship at Herrnhut was Christ crucified.
In Jesus’ blood their element
They swim and bathe with full content (p.70).
No doubt they were too preoccupied with the wounds and the blood of Jesus. At the same time they never forgot the resurrection. They were sometimes called ‘the Easter people’ because it was the risen Lamb whom they adored (p.74).
As for self-understanding, their particular brand of pietism seems to have enabled them to come to terms with themselves. Their emphasis on the cross brought them to genuine humility and penitence. But it also gave them a strong assurance of salvation and quiet confidence in God. ‘We are the Saviour’s happy people’, Zinzendorf said (p.73). It was in fact their joy and fearlessness, when face to face with death as their ship was sinking in an Atlantic storm, which brought John Wesley under conviction of sin and was an important link in the chain which led to his conversion.
But the Moravians are best known as a missionary movement. While still a schoolboy Zinzendorf founded ‘the Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed’, and he never lost his missionary zeal. Again, it was the cross which stimulated him and his followers to this expression of self-giving love. Between 1732 and 1736 Moravian missions were founded in the Caribbean, Greenland, Lapland, North and South America, and South Africa, while later they began missionary work in Labrador, among Australian aboriginals and on the Tibetan border. The heathen know there is a God, taught Zinzendorf, but they need to know of the Saviour who died for them. ‘Tell them about the Lamb of God’, he urged, ‘till you can tell them no more’ (p.91).
This healthy emphasis on the cross arose largely from his own conversion experience. Sent as a young man of nineteen to visit the capital cities of Europe, in order to complete his education, he found himself one day in the art gallery of Düsseldorf. He stood before Domenico Feti’s Ecce Homo, in which Christ is portrayed wearing the crown of thorns, and under which the inscription reads: ‘All this I did for thee; what doest thou for me?’ Zinzendorf was deeply convicted and challenged. ‘There and then’, A. J. Lewis writes, ‘the young Count asked the crucified Christ to draw him into “the fellowship of his sufferings” and to open up a life of service to him’ (p.28). He never went back on this commitment. He and his community were passionately concerned for ‘the enthronement of the Lamb of God’.