These heralding words from the
letter to the Ephesians, and the heralding words that are employed in the first
letter to Timothy, are so much more than words that a client would use in honor
of his patron. They are words that, in that day, would be reserved for
the honoring of the world’s patron (the patron of patrons), who was
Caesar. It serves as an indication to an alert listener or reader, that
Paul, and those communities being formed around the claims of the Gospel, stand
in opposition to much of the prevailing culture of the day, and are intended to
be a transformative element within that culture. This transformation will
not occur through denouncing the surrounding culture as hell-bound, perverse,
or any number of adjectives that do much to polarize and little to effect
change. While there is certainly a mystical power in the pronouncement
that Jesus is Lord, we can certainly agree that the power is magnified if the
life of the speaker accords with the claim. This goes well beyond the
avoidance of things that are determined to be “sins” or that which is to be
avoided by Christians, having much more to do with an active engagement with
the culture that demonstrates the Lordship of Jesus over every area of
life.
The pronouncement of condemnation
on anything and everything that does not align with our personal viewpoints is
hardly effective, and the condoning of such activities would have to be read
into the Scriptures in a way that lacks context or coherence. This
approach would probably fail to take into account the historical movement of
Scripture, the over-arching meta-narrative of exile and exodus by which the
Scriptures ask to be read, and the covenant and covenant-people framework on
offer throughout the whole of the Bible that defines the people of God and
God’s mission in and for His world. Attempts to use Jesus’ harsh words
against the leaders of the people, His actions in the Temple, or the sharp
words of the prophets and the apostles as justification for harshness or
ugliness that is merely cloaked in the veil of a pseudo-love, would be to abuse
and misuse those words and actions, especially considering the fact that the
harshness is so often directed to God’s covenant people. Though we can
look through the prophets and certainly find words of God’s condemnation
directed towards the nations that surrounded and often mistreated Israel, not only
do we have to remember that such words were subsequent to God’s judgment of His
people, but we also have to remember that God’s taking up of human flesh and
going to a cross in order to die for His enemies (after telling His people to
pray for and love their enemies) pretty much changes everything.
Our distance from the text, both
historically and culturally, especially for those of us in the western world,
should lead us away from dogmatism in our engagement with our cultures, and
towards a compassionate, inquisitive, and mercy-tinged engagement that
recognizes our own shortcomings and lack of complete knowledge. When we
look at the New Testament, what we must see behind the text are communities
that are struggling to come to terms with what is implied by the life of Jesus
and the kingdom of God that has been inaugurated by His Resurrection,
especially considering that said kingdom has been inaugurated in a way that was
completely unexpected. This struggle, which can be seen in the New
Testament and in the records and writings of the early church, encouragingly
informs us that there has never been a monolithic “orthodoxy” at any point in
time in the history of Christianity. Therefore, our own struggles, as we
seek to come to terms with the message of Jesus and His kingdom so that we
might effectively, correctly, and faithfully engage the cultures in which we
find ourselves immersed, should inspire humility and a compassion for others,
as we depend upon and attempt to reflect the compassion of our God.
Condemnation, attempts at
heavy-handed transformation, or a mission-denying withdrawal and separation are
not the means by which either Paul or Jesus asked for or expected the culture
to be countered. Remember, Jesus saved his denouncements for the leaders
of the people. Rather, the culture is countered, and the
transformation into a culture that comes closer to living as the true
humanity originally intended by the Creator, through the kingdom-modeling,
sacrificial, love-motivated and service-oriented activities of the members of
the body of Christ, as they demonstrably and tangibly live out, in imitation of
Jesus, their claim that Jesus is Lord, and that He is Lord even over the Caesar
that bears the title of “son of god.”
What appearance will be taken by
these activities? Naturally, we can find the answer on nearly every page
of Scripture. We can look to the Jesus tradition as embodied by the
Gospel accounts. We can look at Acts. When it comes to Paul, we can
look at the entire body of work that is attributed to him in order to formulate
an answer to this question. We can look to a letter to Timothy, to whom
Paul refers as his genuine child in the faith, seeing there what can be
understood to be, regardless of Timothy’s “position” in the church, as a
personally directed letter that demands a personal response of a single member
of the body of Christ who is, presumably, attempting to live and to serve as
part of a community that is yet one small component of a global kingdom.
Thus, realizing that there is a helpful counter-cultural message in the text of
the letter, we may find the letter more useful than we previously imagined.
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