Fighting persecution

Jesus makes all sorts of promises about how difficult it will be to follow him.

It’s easy to look at these people who will oppose us and demonize them.  That’s probably part of our fallen nature: to look at those who stand in our way and ignore their humanity.

There is this whole cast of figures that I’d always looked at in this light.  People from the Ancient Romans, to anti-Christian governments, to people in my life who take issue with my Christianity.

It’s easy to demonize this crowd.  To think that it is somehow a moral failure on their part to stand in the way of Jesus’ mission.

I had this realization this morning: the only moral failure is mine for not presenting who Jesus is.  They might be making mistakes, these other people.  They might be deluded or confused or wrong.  But it’s not a moral issue.  It’s a reality issue.

The fundamental question isn’t: what’s right or wrong?

The fundamental question is: who is Jesus?

Because what counts as right or wrong is determined by who Jesus is.  The way the second question is answered will impact the first.

If somebody has answered that second question in a different way than I have, then they will oppose what I want to do.  This is only natural.  It’s not a measure of their immorality. 

If somebody wanted to spread Buddhism to the world, I would oppose them.  Becuase I disagree with them about the question of who the Buddha was.  Can I expect to be treated any differently?

Furthermore, even among Christians, to whatever extent God is moving in my heart alone, I should expect to have to fight that battle alone.  I might create an overall reputation of trustworthiness or untrustworthiness.  I can hope that my reputation will precede me.  But if I say to someone “I believe that this is what God wants me to do because when I listen very carefully that’s what he seems to be saying” I should only expect them to believe this as far as they trust me and as far as what I’m saying is consistent with what they already know about God.

It seems like God might use us to broaden our own or somebody else’s ideas about who he is or what he is about.  The prophets and (later) Jesus did this over and over again: they never contradicted what God had unvieled before.  But they did cause God’s prior self-revelations to get revisited and re-envisioned.

(Did you ever notice how we want to have our cake and eat it too, with in Chrsitian circles… Out of one side of our mouth we make claims like ‘There are 897 prophecies in the Old Testament that Jesus fufilled’ and out of the other side of our mouth we say ‘Jesus was so different than everyone expected that even the experts in the law didn’t recognize him.’?)

Seeing things this way doesn’t make things easier.  It seems to me that the traditional view, the view I’d always clung to, was that people who would stand in the way of what I’m trying to do in Christ, people who stand in the way of who I’m trying to be in Christ, these people were on the opposite side.  They are my opponents.  I should deal with them as if there is a war and they are the foot soliders of the other side.

OF course there is a war.  But we’re told in scripture the enemy is powers and principalities.  Those who persecute us– even with violence– they are, in fact, doing something which (from their vantage point) is quite reasonable.