This behavior learned through the church’s meal table (which
is representative of the messianic banquet that has been transformed into that
which is commonly thought of as the Lord’s Supper) is what makes the love that
is embraced and professed by the Christian community tangible and observable,
as it is expressed in such ways in order to bring glory to the Creator
God. Conversely then, a church composed of believers that is not
operating with such a mindset, that is turned in on itself and seeking
separation from the world so as to prepare themselves for their notion of
heaven (a distant isle of blessedness, which is Greek thought, not Jewish), is
actually modeling something that stands in fundamental opposition to what the
confession of Jesus’ Lordship demands.
A church that is turned in on
itself is most likely not learning the principles of self-sacrificial love and
the preference of one another for the benefit of the body, so that the body
might benefit the community in which it is located as it demonstrates Jesus’
universal Lordship over all things and all areas of life, is probably
perverting the meal table (symbolic or otherwise), having turned the Lord’s
Supper (which is supposed be an enactment of the messianic meal as envisioned
and put into practice by Jesus) into a source of personal benefit as well.
Accordingly then, in that environment it is likely that the
Lord’s table finds itself replete with authoritarian structures based on
subjective spiritual rankings. If love is not being learned and
encouraged at the meal table, so that it aspires to the Jesus-backed vision of
the messianic banquet, then it is highly unlikely that the church that is not
learning these things is going to be engaging in public benefaction (good
conduct/works/deeds).
Ironically then, and transposing
the issue for Peter’s time, the church that is isolated essentially becomes
that which the Christians were accused of being. Since they were not
seeking the good of the world by their public display of Jesus’ Lordship, then
yes, widespread maladies and calamities must be laid at their feet. If
they are claiming that their King is the true King (in opposition to Caesar’s
claims), but not putting that claim into practice by demonstrating the fact
that said Kingship extends to all things through their seeking of good for
themselves and their neighbors, then the fundamental message of the Gospel
(Jesus is Lord) is brought into disrepute. Yes, they might as well be
looked upon as atheists and cannibals, for all the benefits they are bringing
to their world.
One must never for a single
moment lose sight of the fact that the hope of the Christian is to be
resurrected just like Jesus. It is this that is the repeated claim of the
New Testament, and it stands in a polar opposition to a desire for an escape to
heaven. As they were thoroughly steeped in Jewish expectations concerning
the kingdom of their God and the hope for resurrection thereby entailed, the
earliest believers understood that Jesus was resurrected into this world with a
glorified physical body, with that resurrection power set to work in this
world.
This resurrection is that for which the Christian
hopes. Christians living in isolation, concerned for nothing more than
their personal eternal salvation rather than embracing a full engagement with
the world to which their God is reconciling Himself through their overt
kingdom-conscious actions and behavior, have a wrong-headed notion about the
kingdom of God, seeing it as something distant in both time and space, rather
than viewing it as did Jesus and His apostles, within their (fully Jewish)
claim that the kingdom of their God was both present and coming.
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