We returned home Monday from two-plus weeks of vacationing with about the best weather ever. We were on the dock and in the water every day except one. About the only story worth telling comes from one of my morning walks. I was about 7/8 of the way through my two miles when a flock of crows started making lots of noise right above me – it sounded like it must have been 5 or more! I don’t know about you, but I am not fond of crows, and I never think they are very fond of me, either. So I was feeling a little threatened by their presence. I slowed my stride and tried to find them in the trees above me, but to no avail. Suddenly a wild animal ran across my path, less than ten feet in front of me. I think it was a fox, though it looked a little large for one, with abnormally long legs. I never did see the crows, but now I am wondering if the racket they were making was actually their attempt to warn me of the potential danger. It was a little reminder to me that our God can work in mysterious ways … and is always looking out for our good.
The rest of this week’s reflections come from the ending of a chapter from Timothy Keller’s book “Making Sense of God (Finding God in the Modern World).” The paperback is printed by Penguin Books, with a copyright of 2016. The chapter title is “A Justice That Does Not Create New Oppressors” with the closing caption “A Story that Breaks the Cycle.”
“The Biblical story shows us a God who loves the downtrodden, but it does more than that. In a penetrating insight, Bauckham writes that belief in the story of salvation ‘also breaks the cycle by which the oppressed become oppressors in their turn.’ In the Old Testament the Israelites are constantly warned not to oppress immigrants and racial outsiders ‘because you were foreigners in Egypt’ (Leviticus 19.33-34). The memory of their salvation from slavery not by their own power but by God’s grace was to radically undermine their natural human inclination to domination. But, Bauckham writes, ‘the cross is the event in which the cycle [of the oppressed becoming oppressor] is definitely broken.’
“In Proverbs 14.31 we see that God identifies with the poor. If you oppress the poor, you ‘show contempt for their Maker,’ and if you give to the needy, you ‘honor God.’ But it is only in Jesus that we see how radically and literally God identified with the poor and oppressed. He was born to a poor family; he lived among the marginalized and outcast. His trial was a miscarriage of justice. He died violently, naked and penniless. And so the Son of God himself knew what it was like to be a victim of injustice, to stand up to a corrupt system and be killed by it. And, Christians believe, he did this to make atonement for our sins, to free us from their penalty. Christians know, then, that, in the eyes of God, we were spiritually poor and powerless – we too were aliens and slaves, but God saved us by becoming oppressed for us.
“Yes, of course, believing in universal moral truth can be used to oppress others. But what if that absolute truth is a man who died for his enemies, who did not respond in violence with violence, but forgave them? How could that story, if it is the center of your life, lead you to take up power and dominate others? Remarkably, then, we can conclude that a professed Christian who is not committed to a life of generosity and justice toward the poor and marginalized is, at the very least, a living contradiction of the Gospel of Christ, the Son of God, whose Father ‘executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry’ (Psalm 146.7). Bauckham says, ‘distortion of the biblical story into an ideology of oppression has to suppress the biblical meaning of the cross.’ All of these characteristics of the biblical story make it ‘uniquely unsuited to being an instrument of oppression.’
“The cross breaks the cycle of oppression in one more way. People who are passionate for justice often become self-righteous and cruel when they confront persons whom they perceive as being oppressors. However, believers in Christ are taught to confess that they have wronged God by wronging others who are made in his image. We have not loved and honored our neighbors as we wished to be treated. In other words, every Christian who understands the Gospel admits that he or she has been an oppressor. When we lie, we deprive people of the truth they have a right to. When we break our promises, we deprive people of goods they have a right to. And if we are not poor and we close our hearts to those who are, we deprive them of sustenance they have a right to. Christians know they have the hearts of oppressors, yet have been saved by grace nonetheless. Therefore, even when they confront an oppressor, they may do it with steely and courageous determination, but the gospel teaches to do so also without self-righteousness or bullying. They cannot hate haters, or justify oppressing people they think are oppressors.
“The Gospel of Jesus Christ provides a non-oppressive absolute truth, one that provides a norm outside us as a way to escape the ineffectiveness used to oppress others. Terry Eagleton believes that ‘if religious faith were to be released from the burden of furnishing social orders with a set of rationales for their existence, it might be free to rediscover its true purpose as a critique of all such politic.’ He believes that ‘what it adds to common morality is not some supernatural support, but the grossly inconvenient news that our forms of life must undergo radical dissolution if they are to be reborn as just and compassionate communities. The sign of that dissolution is solidarity with the poor and powerless. It is here that a new configuration of faith, culture, and politics might be born.’” (pp. 209-211)
The quotes: Bauckham – “Reading Scripture as a Coherent Story”; and Eagleton – “Culture and the Death of God.” I think that’s enough reflecting for one day (perhaps, even, too much).