maintain good conduct among the non-Christians, so that
though they now malign you as wrongdoers, they may see your good deeds and
glorify God when He appears. – 1 Peter 2:12 (NET)
The Gospel is inherently social. Because it is the
declaration of Jesus’ Lordship, with this Lordship being the Lordship not just
of individual lives and souls, but over the whole of the cosmos, it has a
social element. This is a far cry from the Gospel being reduced to a
“social gospel,” but rather, it is to say that the implications of the
declaration demand to be worked out in a tangible, visible way, on display for
a society to see. Just as the worshipers or proponents of Caesar declared
his Lordship, and in doing so, were not asking people to make a private confession
of faith in Caesar or to cultivate a personal and private holiness that would
somehow be pleasing to Caesar, neither were the proponents of Jesus. The
Gospel was and is public. The reaction to the Gospel demanded a community
context. The presentation of Caesar’s gospel resulted in certain
activities (the erecting of statues, sacrifices, festivals, submission to his
earthly rule, etc…) that made it clear to all that this gospel was being
accepted, so it would be expected that an alternative Gospel would demonstrate
the same.
When the Gospel was preached into a world that was
accustomed to a regular hearing of a gospel message, it was preached into a
world that was prepared to hear such a message, and it was preached into a
world that would have expected public, community oriented demonstrations of
what it was that was being trumpeted. Yes, the Gospel was and is meant to
be transformative, but that transformation was and is to be manifested in
public behavior. That public behavior is not, as we so commonly propose,
merely that which takes place in our church gatherings, where singing, praying,
lifting up hands, and giving are taken as the evidences of the power of the
Gospel and of transformed lives. Public behavior is not that which is
primarily concerned with a dramatic abstention from participation in life’s
pleasures, accompanied by thinking that it is by constant refraining efforts
that holiness is demonstrated. Those things can certainly be evidentiary,
but they are only the primary evidence if we exalt the individual, rather than
the body, and if we place private spirituality in the context of a personal
quest to achieve heaven upon death higher than offering tangible service as and
for a community. Such a focus seems to run counter to the movement of
Scripture, in which God is constantly calling a people to Himself, beginning
with Abraham, so that they might exemplify divine blessing. Persons are
called, and they are called to be a part of a people, for the primary purpose
of being a blessing to the world so that the God that calls them into covenant
might be glorified.
Yes, the Gospel will effect transformation in the lives of
its adherents, and those effects will be seen in interactive relationships, as
Christians live out their ambassadorship on behalf of their Lord and their God
with respect to their interaction with others and the world. This is the
love that we see in Romans twelve and in first Corinthians thirteen, which
demonstrate the tangible working out of that love based on what is learned at
the meal table of the body of the church. It is this basic demonstration
of love and of preferring of one another, and of the awesome transformative
power of the Gospel that is then put on display by individuals (functioning as
and for their communities), which is what we then see worked out in the
thirteenth chapter of Romans. Not that Paul’s writings are determinative
for the way that we approach Peter, but it is with such things in mind, as
early evidences of the way in which Jesus (His death and Resurrection) is being
interpreted and understood, that we look to Peter and hear him being so
incredibly insistent on the social nature of the Gospel.
It is worthwhile to first understand this aspect of Peter’s
first letter before we move to what becomes the rather obvious dealings with
the church’s meal table (recognizing that the church constituted itself around
a meal table). Peter insists that the church is “a chosen race, a royal
priesthood, a holy nation” (2:9a), declaring that God calls the church to be “a
people of His own,” that they “may proclaim the virtues of the one who called…
out of darkness into His marvelous light” (2:9b). Though there is
certainly a mysterious power to be found in the very proclamation of the
message that Jesus is Lord, we’ll see that the proclamation that Peter has in
mind is more deed-based than word-based (though the word is not to be
neglected---deeds would lead to the opportunity for words to be heard).
To this end, Peter calls this church to “maintain good conduct among the
non-Christians, so that though they now malign you as wrongdoers, they may see
your good deeds and glorify God when He appears” (2:12).
In that day, Christians were accused of being atheists
because they did not worship Caesar or the Roman gods, cannibals because of
what was said at their meal table (eating the body of their God that they also
claimed was a man who had been killed and physically resurrected), and usurpers
of the social order because they refused to acknowledge the standard divisions
of society in their public or private gatherings. Eventually, Christians
would become scapegoats, as blame for all manner of maladies and calamities
would devolve upon them. Peter understood that this was happening and
would happen, and that much of this was owed to the fact of the radical nature
of the lived-out Gospel. For this reason, Peter, using the language of
public benefaction, calls the church to be civic-minded, doing good deeds that
will be recognized as beneficial for their community. In this way,
contrary to being singled out and maligned for being a negative force in
society that would be specifically tied to claims about an alternative Lord,
their good deeds would bring glory to the God to which their allegiance was sworn
through Christ. This would be learned at the meal table.
No comments:
Post a Comment