Why Does God Side with the Outcast? Part V: Becoming an Outcast
By Austin
I opened this series by asking what is the theological justification for God’s concern for the outcast. First I argued that because God is our creator, we are absolutely dependent on God. Second I argued that because God is the sole ruler of all things, he relativizes any claims to authority. Third I argued that we can see the form of power and the society we ought to desire in the person and work of Jesus: the form of a servant, and the community – for lack of a better term – of love.
These three points are just a background for the next two essential aspects of Jesus’ life: his death and resurrection.
Why did Jesus die? What did he do to get himself killed? To understand the answer, you need to understand the purpose of crucifixion.
Crucifixion was the basic Roman instrument of colonial control. The Romans had lots of techniques for keeping their colonies in order, but because of the distance and difficulty of travel in the ancient world, they tended to use techniques that were spectacular – and horrifying. Crucifixion was the bedrock of their techniques, and it was really reserved for two types of people: disobedient slaves and rebellious colonies, the outcasts of the Roman world.
The question is now: what was Jesus crucified for? Christians often give this a metaphorical or spiritual interpretation – as if historically we can explain this by reference to the theory of substitutionary atonement. The fact of the matter is the Romans crucified Jesus for being a part of the latter category – a perceived threat of rebellion.
And Jesus was this perceived threat of rebellion, at least in the Roman eyes (he wasn’t all that different for the Jewish authorities – look at Caiaphas’ discussion in John 11.45-57). But what was this threat? The fact that this man built a non-violent community around the himself, a community that healed the sick, exorcised demons, and feed the poor? What is threatening about this?
Everything. Jesus was being something that most of us never dare to be: fully human.
In other words, the crucifixion is simply the outcome of Jesus being what God created us to be: a human. Jesus was sent to show us what it means to be human. It just so happens that when we and the powers of this world see a real human, someone who loves fully, who fully reflects who God is (is an “imago dei”) we cannot help but destroy this person. This person does not fit in this world as we’ve made it – and they become especially annoying when they gather a big crowd around them (usually the poor and marginalized).
The crucifixion of Jesus happened because Jesus showed what it means to be a fully open, loving, and real human being.
I should just point out, for my purposes, that this also meant that Jesus became to be the most marginalized as well. In fact, this seems to be a common theme in the Bible. If you are fully being human (whether like Israel, when it is following the law, Jesus when showing love, or the early church, when imitating Jesus) you are likely to be marginalized, considered a fool, or just ignorant. When Christians are fully being human, when they are fully imitating Jesus, then they inevitably will be treated as an outcast – just as Jesus was.
The crucifixion, in sum, shows us that not only does God care for the outcast, God became an outcast. Of course, this would be no comfort if it ended here. Next time, we’ll look at the answer to the prayer Jesus’ crucifixion was: resurrection.
Why Does God Side with the Outcast? Part IV: The Form of a Slave
By Austin
In the last three posts (here, here, and here) I’ve argued that in order to understand why God seems to partisan for the oppressed – the orphan, the widow, the alien – we need to understand that we are fully what we are when we are dependent (God as sole creator of all things), and that God’s authority relativizes all political, earthly authority (God as sole ruler of all things).
These two doctrines meet in the one place most people would not have expected to find them – in a man from the redneck hillside of Galilee. The confession that “Jesus is Lord” melds these views together, so that the identity of God and the identity of Jesus are the same. If Jesus is Lord, the highest good, our greatest desire, our real hope, tends toward what he reveils in his life, death, and resurrection. Today, we’ll think about his life.
His life shows us two things: what true power is, and what type of soceity is desireable.
a. True power: the text most relevant for this is Luke 22.24-27 (also in Matt 20.20-28 or Mark 10.35-52). The text explains how we typically see power – as a benefactor and a patron, which was the basic system of the Romans. This assumes a certain status relationship – the one with more status rules over the one with less. No matter how status is established, this is a pretty accurate representation of things. It’s certainly different now - we don’t have the same patronage/benefactor system. But clearly this is the way it works.
Jesus then asks a rhetorical question (they’re all at the last supper here): who’s greater? The server or the one being served? Clearly it’s the one being served, since they have the status. Then Jesus hits them – “I am among you as the one who serves.” In other words, if you think I am great and powerful, then you should know how my power works. It turns everything upside down…
b. A new soceity: The early Christians took this to heart, and there is perhaps no better way to see this than in that wonderful passage in Phil 2.1-11. The text is really of two parts: the first 5 verses show how our community life should be, and the second (more famous) 5 verses grounds this community life in the fact that Jesus came to us in the form a slave, and because of this condescension is exalted. The community that Jesus expected was enacted by Jesus himself, and when Paul tells us to “have this mind” – after he has told us concrete steps toward this – we recognize that Jesus, through upending our expectation of what power is, has established a new way of being a society, a whole new world.
Paul’s point is that the confession that Jesus is Lord gives full weight to the type of community that Jesus formed around himself. John Howard Yoder gives probably the best description of what this community was:
When He called His society together Jesus gave its members a new way of life to live. He gave them a new way to deal with offenders – by forgiving them. He gave them a new way to deal with violence – by suffering. He gave them a new way to deal with money – by sharing it. He gave them a new way to deal with problems of leadership – by drawing upon the gifts of every member, even the most humble. He gave them a new way to deal with a corrupt society – by building a new order, not smashing the old. He gave them a new pattern of relationships between man and woman, between parent and child, between master and slave, in which was made concrete a radical new vision of what it means to be a human person. He gave them a new attitude toward the state and toward the “enemy nation.” (The Original Revolution, 29)
The type of society Yoder points to is a society in the form of Jesus’ life: forgiving, sharing, suffering, building, re-defining. This is a society we should be desiring because this was the mind of Christ.
In summary: the confession Jesus is Lord, bringning together two sides of Christian belief, means that true power happens in the form of Jesus – in the form of a “slave” – and true society happens in the way Jesus constituted it.
But this is not all. Jesus’ life certainly affirms this new way of power and society, but the capstone of his life was not a triumphant march to the halls of power in Jerusalem or Rome, but rather a march of shame to a death that fit his life in Rome’s eyes, a death fit only for slaves – crucifixion. More of that in the next installment.
Why Does God Side with the Outcast? Part III: My People, Their God
By Austin
Last week I continued this series by looking at the fact that God is the sole creator of all things. The conclusion I came to was that we as humans are being fully what we are, and hence fully free, when we are fully dependent on God. There is no contradiction between our freedom and God’s, because God is not a “thing,” and hence there is no paradox between the human and the divine. I mentioned that for post-Enlightenment humanisms this is a problem. Kant called such an idea “heteronomy” (law from outside) and opposed it to “autonomy” (law from the self).
Yet Kant’s autonomy, along with the modern individualism that it gives rise to, has been considered idolatry by the Christian tradition. Why? Because it refuses to acknowledge the second basic conviction of the Judeo-Christian tradition: God is the sole ruler of all things.
A little history. The Israelites began an experiment in the Ancient Near East. Scholars like Norman Gottwald and Paul Hanson have argued that the tribal confederacy represented in the book of Judges was a revolutionary pattern of governance in this world. The laws represented in the Torah were laws that governed a de-centralized, monarch-less group of peoples. This wasn’t democracy, but it was more formalized and orderly than other tribal societies. The three basic convictions of this community, as seen in later prophetic texts as well, was “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Mic 6.8).
This concern for justice did not come about by philosophical thought a la John Locke on the “rights of man,” nor through a post-colonialist desire for nationhood, but through “encounter with the God who delivered slaves from bondage. Israel understood community essentially as a response to God’s gracious act of salvation. Israel was called into existence as a people when it was called forth from bondage to be a nation of priests consecrated to God’s redemptive purposes” (Hanson).
What Hanson is arguing is that the idea of the law was a response to God. And what did this really mean? The act that it responded to was a gracious giving of freedom. More specifically, it was the giving of freedom to a group of slaves in order that they worship God, and create a just community.
These two things – worship and justice – always go hand in hand in the Torah, because the creation of Israel as a people happened in response to a king (Pharaoh) who had set himself up as god. Everything about the Exodus story points out that God is opposing himself to the gods of Egypt, as represented by Pharoah. The basic representation of Pharoah is his power to oppress a people simultaneous with this inability to protect his own, while God’s power is seen in his ability to unleash and then restrain chaos, while simultaneously protecting his own.
The power of Pharoah is emblematic of all political power, which ultimately makes a theological claim for its legitimacy, and its right to inflict violence. The Jewish and Christian belief that God is the sole ruler is the first step to relativizing this political theology, and making all kings and leaders of the world only a penultimate, not an ultimate, authority.
For Israel, and the church, this worked out most essential in the notion that God has a people – and the people have a God. That this God is also the sole creator of all things further intensifies the relativization of all earthly authority. As the history of Israel shows, the community was never fully reconciled to a king, and the anti-monarchial sentiment in parts of Deuteronomy, and the whole of Kings and Chronicles (not to mention the prophets!) shows this relativization in clear colors.
In summary, our status as dependent creatures makes most political sense when we recognize the basic fact that God is the sole ruler of all things. Next we’ll look at these two together when God becomes human, dies, raises, and is exalted - Jesus is this Lord.
Why Does God Side with the Outcast? Part I
By Austin
In light of the recent issues surrounding Arizona and healthcare – the problem of immigration and universal coverage – I thought it might be useful to think a bit more theologically about the grounds for a Christian position on these things. It’s no secret that the God of the really cares about the dispossessed, in the form of the “alien, widow, and orphan.” From the founder of the faith, Abraham (who himself was called to become an immigrant, and became an immigrant in Egypt because of economic conditions where he was, Gen 12.10), to the Law at Sinai, to the fact that the prophets often judged Israel by how they worshiped, and how they dealt with the poor, orphans, widows, and aliens, Yahweh is concerned over and over with the care of the outcast.
The New Testament is just as concerned with this too. A text like James 2.6 (“But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you?”) is shocking to many Christians, as is the fact that most of the earliest Christian community outside Judea were immigrants. In Rome they even had their own ghetto, the Trastevere (where Jews, Christians, and other immigrants lived), across the Tiber – an area that didn’t burn during the famous fire during Nero’s reign, and for which Nero scapegoated the Christians.
In other words, the entire narrative of the Bible makes sense of a verse like this: “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God” (Lev 19.34).
But why, theologically, is this the case? What is it about God that makes this something obvious to the Israelites and early Christians? Why did God choose, at the beginning, to call out Abraham to become an alien? Or, we could put it another way: what does this say about God? Who is this God that appears to really care about justice and the alien?
I want to suggest that the care God shows to the outcast and the dispossessed has something to do with the two fundamental beliefs that Christians have had from the beginning: that God is the sole creator of all things, and that God is the sole ruler of all things. For most Christians, creation is just a doctrine that is the opposite of evolution, and the phrase “Jesus is Lord” means “Lord of my life,” or “my special friend,” or other pietistic platitude. Yet these two doctrines are not what people think. They are powerful confessions that are world-altering. And they are the basis for all our thinking about what the world is, much less who God is.
In the upcoming posts, I hope to show that in the rubbish heap that we’ve made of the world, these two confessions can only be fully explicated in practice by concern for the outsider, the outcast, the poor and the immigrant.
The Politics of In-Between
By Austin,
Lately I’ve been trying to decide for myself what type of politics makes sense for someone committed to the gospel. I’ve not really come up with an answer, but something in Herbert McCabe has pushed my thinking a bit more down the road to an answer.
In one of his essays he coins a very silly word, “sesquiguous,” opposing it to two others, “plonking” and “ambiguous.” Plonking is a great British archaism (now it is “plump for”) which means to come out in decision for. McCabe says it’s “one-dimensional, clear, unarguable and unimportant” (God Matters, 176). This is the phrase “I mean what I say and I say what I mean.” Of course, as we all know, we can only be this clear in situations that don’t matter. No one, when they are attempting to negotiate the complex world we live in, can actually get away with this because this type of thinking doesn’t really get to the heart of the complex world. 
Ambiguous of course means that there are two meanings to a word. This is a typically liberal position, and it is found in the church’s ecumenical documents. It recognizes the complexity of the world and does it’s best to negotiate between these complexities. Unfortunately it ends up merely affirming two different things, instead of coming to a decision. If you’ve ever read the gerrymandering around ideas like “justification” in the Catholic-Protestant ecumenical circles you’ll get a sense of what I mean.
Third, “sesquiguous” means words have one and a half meanings. McCabe puts it like this: “a sesquiguous utterance is one in which the speaker both commits himself to a position and is simultaneously aware of the inadequacy of what he is saying, and of his own position in saying it: it is as I say really a form of irony” (ibid). In other words, it is indeed willing to commit, like the plonking statement, but recognizes its ultimate inadequency, like the ambiguous statement. Irony of course is a nice word for this, if that word by now (McCabe wrote this in 1976) hadn’t come to mean a detached cynicism.
It’s clear that McCabe doesn’t see it that way. He brings up types of thinking about the kingdom of God: politics, theology, and sacraments. What I am really interested in is the first two. He says, “the sesquiguity of charity (with which liberation theology is concerned), and of faith, do not mean that Christians have to be either politically liberals or theologically woolly – that would be a sign not of sesquiguity but of ambiguity, not of irony but of confusion” (ibid, 177).
You can see where these thoughts might lead. Given the complexity of the world, plonking statements don’t work; ambiguous statements are too wishy-washy; but sesquiguous statements allow us to be committed (and in the Bible, the primary commitment politically is to the poor, orphan, and widow), while at the same time never allowing us to be self-satisfied or closed in our commitment. What this means is that we are able to listen better than the hard-core conservative or the hard-core liberal, that we have a humility that does not lessen our resolve, and that we can always consider the policies of the kingdom to be a goal we are working toward. These policies will use the best of current sociological, economic, and political thinking, without being captured by their assumptions, nor blinded by their seeming inevitability.
It’s this last part that concerns me most. Most Christians, liberal or conservative, become captured by an image of what life should be, an image very often not really based on the biblical image of peace. Whether you belive in the free market or socialism, it’s easy to take up their pictures of the world, and read those pictures into the Bible.
A sesquiguous thinking might be a way of thinking that allows one to speak in the political world we are in, while at the same time relativising that world’s belief in itself. A politics in-between the inauguration of the kingdom, and it’s consummation…
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